Stirling Rank: How He Sold 9 Million Copies Of His Game, 8 Years Of Dev, Unity v Unreal | Ep. #050

Imagine knowing nothing about game development, working almost eight years on a single idea, and suddenly finding yourself selling millions of copies, and you're still in your 20s. That's Sterling Rank, the co-creator of Ready or Not, a viral tactical FPS where drug use, trafficking, school shootings, and violence are part of the game's formula. It's part of the hook. In fact, the courage to make something, well, some would say, I don't know, offensively honest. That's what sets this game apart from other tactical shooters. Sterling and I discuss why he's always been drawn to pushing the envelope, even when he started making games in high school. We also discuss why he uses Unreal over Unity, how AI is here to stay and how to use it for your games. We talk about why assets are crucial in the early stages of development when you don't have a lot of money or a big team. And we discuss a lot more in this podcast. And by the way, let's say you have a bunch of assets and code in your project. Did you know that there's an AI development

assistant that can fully understand your project and its codebase and write custom scripts and tools based on that context? It's called Bezi and it's the sponsor of this podcast. Bezi can be considered your development assistant. And with their newly launched feature, agent mode, you can now modify and create code directly in your project all through the Bezi app. It makes repetitive tasks extremely efficient and is great for helping you get past a certain problem if you're stuck or maybe you just need general advice. It makes it very easy to pinpoint and validate all the suggested changes in the context of the code. And Bezi keeps track of all of these changes you make, so it's easy to revert at any time. What's really unique about Bezi is that it has a full understanding of your entire project and makes tailored suggestions by searching your assets, scripts, scene graph, Unity docs, and the web to give you the most accurate assistance as possible. Beyond that, it's great for pinpointing the scripts, components, and scene

interactions causing issues and proposing custom fixes to help you identify performance bottlenecks. The best thing is that Bezi is completely free to try out. So, I definitely recommend you check it out by simply clicking the link in the description. The first big icebreaker here, and I'll sort of pivot to this question, is when I started working on my first first person shooter, well, it's my only one right now, but it was originally about this school and you go in and inside the school is a cult and then you you start, you know, running and gunning inside this school. And my friend was like, "Dude, don't do that. that's that's kind of got school shooter vibes. And I immediately stopped doing it. I was like, "You're right. I gotta stop." Because I got scared. And I was thinking, I wonder if Sterling got any negativity from his friends or family about this game.
Did you get any push back?
No. Uh mom might have given me some push back,
but aside from that, no. And wouldn't it it was more probably for the aren't you

worried that that something's going to happen? Like, you know, you're going to get in trouble. I'm like, it's not it's not illegal to do this kind of stuff you're playing. And then we we kind of the thing about early dev is like we all like amped each other up. We're like, yeah, it doesn't matter. Like this is going to be fine. Like it's a game where you're defending the people who are in these bad situations. You're not actively propagating it. And that kind of helped us sail over a lot of those things that we were worried about. Um, but also like there were plenty of games that came out, maybe not plenty, but there were games that came out back in the day that had schools and and like the cult thing. It reminds me of a game that came on PS2 called Obscure.
Um, way back in the day where you were in a school. It was kind of culty like monsters in a in a school and there was Ghost Hunter as well on PS2. I was a big PS2 guy.
Um, so like school levels are I think an interesting platform to kind of explore stuff. It depends on what you're doing though for sure. Like I think your thing would have been fine. And you should you should make that next.
I think I might, you know, um it'll be like ready or ready or not, but like

cult edition, you know,
cult crusher.
Well, there's an idea for you.
Well, that's cool, man. So you you're this you're the kind of guy that seems to just like power through pressure,
power through the
sometimes
the media like like doing doing what you know in your gut is the right thing to do despite the fact that it might be offensive.
Yeah. I mean like offense we've definitely caved to some stuff I think. Um, but typically, yeah, we just kind of coast over it and it's not the most exciting mindset cuz we're not like actively trying to control a lot of things. There are things you want to make sure that uh you don't you don't things are misconstrued. I think we as a as like a for the game and as a company like we don't have any like kind of evil ulterior motives in what we're what we're showing, but it can be absolutely easy to misconrue it that way. So, I think a lot of the time our our focus is trying to make sure that what we're

doing isn't misinterpreted, I think. Um, which which is very easy, you know, because um, like I said before, when you're reading between the lines on like a negative comment, it's very easy on the inverse to read between the lines on what someone's doing in a game because there's just so many lines to read between.
I know. I know.
Yeah, for sure. It's it's just something you It's just a mindset. I think you got to just just just have a bit of I don't want to say have a thicker skin. And see, that's like the example. It's like sounds like telling people to toughen up over it, but it's something you develop over time. Like you develop a bit of a sense of what you should ignore and what you should retain and and everything in between because I think that's just something, you know, in life, right? It's like how do you you don't take every single thing that someone says about you on board and harbor it and you kind of let things bounce off you a little bit. So, it's just about calibrating that, I Well, this is particularly the the thick skin thing is particularly relevant for for games for game developers.
Yeah.
Because it is an art form and there's like 20 art forms inside of it, you know,
and so there's there's it's personal

and it also is people tend to know who made the game. Like they know Void made this game. They know you made this game.
Yeah. And so you're attached personally to a product
and that's such a hard thing to navigate.
Um, and we could we could shift gears really quick to this this censorship debate going on because
you're you're running a business, right? And you guys want to move into console.
Yeah.
And you've got to figure out a way how do I get onto console while maintaining the integrity of this very violent, very raw game. And so like look, if you were McDonald's, you could do it as McDonald's, but you're not McDonald's. You're Sterling. And Void Interactive is this personal brand. And so it's it's got to be painful for I'm not making a case either way for the censorship. I'm just saying it's got to be painful as the developer and as the studio to be

so like your baby, the thing that you're so personal about that you're creating is is getting some heat
because of a decision you're a business decision you're making. So you have an art form and then you have a business decision and you have to balance that integrity. That's got to be really hard to do.
It is. I mean it's also it's it's a funny one. It depends on kind of what it is that you're sacrificing. I think some people are very strong like of the opinion that nothing should be changed or modified. And I totally get it. You know, I I understand if someone goes, "Hate that negative review. Don't like the fact you're changing this because you you're trying to go on console." You can see the optics of how that might seem like we're just trying to make a bunch of money. Obviously, that's a huge bonus. But also,
if you're making a game and you're on PC and you started this from scratch, like in your bedroom and all this kind of stuff, right? Uh and then you get the opportunity to put it out on a on a on

[ __ ] consoles and do like this whole thing. It's it's a really cool experience and maybe that is the sacrifice of integrity for for success or whatever. But ultimately I think we we you know what we said I stand by which is that we managed to find the the absolute bare minimum that we could we could uh release you know without trying to water down what's in the game.
So bare minimum cuts. So like the nudity, the dismemberment, that kind of stuff is like if you it it's still So your theory is is the game has the same exact tone
and it's it's being it's being truthful and honest.
I mean I would say that like the message is the same. Um, and there are certainly the the thing I found the most interesting is that
there are things the community picked up on that they really liked and some stuff that I wasn't even aware that they enjoyed like that they were like this is a really really like crushing moment for me. Um, for example, um, the the girl

tweaking out in the bed, which, you know, you can make the argument that it's meth, you know, the that it's an opiate actually makes you sleepy. So, technically be sleepy, but we're not going to be disingenuous here was, you know, for another reason. But that I didn't know was as like I knew it was important to play. But for me, writing it and then kind of being like this is the space and this was written like we had this ages ago um way back in the day. Uh, it was actually the meant to be the contrast. I dropped this in a comment on Reddit. Uh, I think it got buried, but it was uh the contrast of that room compared to the rest, you know. And we had an animation for the for the little girl. Actually, the animation of her coughing and stuff is in the reveal trailer of the there's a there's a dude on the ground in the hotel and like on the hotel floor bleeding and he's coughing everywhere. It's the exact same animation. We just threw it on cuz we're like, "Fuck, we don't have anything and we got to release this." So it was this whole yeah a lot of these things are just kind of like circumstance. Uh, and then you kind of just ride the wave a little bit and then

someone else comes in like an artist comes and goes, "We should add like a needle here and we should add this and that and some extra details and it becomes a collaborative process to create something and then so when you strip that away um it's at that point you realize like oh this actually was really important to people and
it's yeah it's it's tricky. It's a tricky kind of landscape to navigate and uh so I don't I don't harbor any kind of blame towards people for for doing that. I don't think they should be. I think there's a lot of like kind of noise going on right now about it. Fair enough. That's discussion. It's important to talk about it. But um for us, it's one of those things. It's like there's nothing that we can do right now, you know? And it's not something that we didn't plan for. It's not something that we didn't
It's kind of an in between thing where there's all these moving parts when you're getting towards release. It's not as simple as just pressing a button and it's done. So when you do that and then you have to make these changes, you go, well, what is the easiest way we can do that without throwing out everything or changing everything or completely redoing timelines and marketing uh beats

and making sure that people can, you know, actually schedule time off and all these kinds of things, right? It's not as easy as it's not an indie, it's an indie game, but it's not an indie sized team anymore. It's not five people and we don't go, "Oh, we don't care. We'll do whatever we want." like all that work that these guys have been doing on this side of the team, let's throw that away and just because this came through in the pipe a little bit late, you know, so that because that's just how it works sometimes. You have to roll with the punches.
Yeah. Yeah, I understand it, dude. I I I understand where you're coming from. It's a It is a You know what it reminds me of? Do you remember that moral conundrum or like what would you call it? It's uh dilemmas like ethical dilemmas like you'd hear about in in high school or college where you have the train and you have to decide whether you're going to pull the lever.
That's kind of it's create. I think that's why this this whole censorship censorship thing is
kind of a media firestorm or whatever these past couple weeks
because it is kind of an ethical dilemma. It's like do you sacrifice it's

a it's a really important question. Do you sacrifice anything in order to get on console? My opinion is yeah. I mean, I have. In my games, we s we sacrificed content to get on Apple Arcade. I had to cut stuff. I just didn't make a point of it at the beginning. Nobody knew that I did it,
but I had to cut content. We we changed dialogue. We made splash screens because of requests
and it was to broaden the audience, you know?
Right. Yeah.
And it happens all the time with studios. I would imagine. Right.
Okay. Here's a here's a question for you.
Do you understand where people are coming from?
Mostly I'd say I mostly understand. I think it's something where it's like some of it I I get I get the whole thing. I get the whole thing. There are people who actively comment and talk about stuff. across multiple platforms in every discussion who have serious gripes about the game and they use they're using this as a way to

talk about other things they don't like, right? And it creates more buzz and more attention because they see what they like they see a certain level of greatness in the game that they want to see achieved and it's not being achieved to their standard. Um, and that can be then conveyed to anyone in another like that can be conveyed to people who just want to see um, you know, they want to see the rawness and the nudity in the game or they want to see um, they want to have this moment of like well this really intense impactful moment of of seeing this child tweaking. Um, like they want to like that's their thing. So it's it's got there's a there's a spectrum to it
which so I get all of it. I understand the I understand our most egregious highle feedback of like they're not doing this. Okay, there's some stuff I don't agree with, but like they're not doing this. They they lied to us about this thing. They didn't do this thing, that thing. Um I get it in the sense that you're not working on the game. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

It's like you don't know what you're talking about. Shut up. It's more about they don't know the process in which it took to get us to where we are now. that I understand that there's a massive amount of work that goes on behind the scenes, that there's people managing, people working on this around the clock, focusing on things on a level of priority. Like, there's a million things going on to make a video game.
And there are things that a 19-year-old and a 22-year-old who never made a video game before, they didn't know that saying like, "Oh, well, we should have this thing. like we should have a we should have a a ladder ladder you could place anywhere in the game is gonna we had no idea that that was then going to be something that we would chew on for eight months trying to get working and then realized we shot ourselves in the foot by saying we should do it like these are the things that happened behind the scenes and we're not going to go out in front of everybody and say [ __ ] like we couldn't do any of this we have said things like we can't achieve this this isn't going to work like this is a bit of a challenge we're redoing this we're getting rid of the mission type selection because of this and that

and here's why But you only get that message only goes so far. And then even if it goes all the way. 100% of people receive that message. Um some people just aren't going to accept that. And you know what?
That's fine. That's fine. You don't have to accept it. I don't I I don't mind. I don't mind if they don't accept it. But I'm just glad that there is a truth out there. Now, whether or not they want to accept that truth is another thing. And that's also you're just not you're not going to please everybody in any in anything in life. You're not going to please anyone. every anyone everyone hopingly some people but like
I try I try to make people happy in my life like but I I think just with with with games it's like that it's something with with anything it's like that and it's good to remember that though because you can spend so much damn time trying to explain to everybody and try and get everyone to be on your side. And this is kind of what circles back to talking about at the start is um it's very easy to to get put in a situation where you are trying to be everyone's best friend and you're trying to tell everyone like that's okay. This is what

we're doing and every minute you spend trying to do that is another minute you could have spent trying to create something or work on something cool for the game. So,
you know, that's that's really interesting that you brought that up. It's almost like is is making a game a democratic process? Um
something
is it the community is the community
is it their game or is it your game?
You know, is it is it void's game or is it the community's game? And it's this very difficult conversation because the way that I've always the way that I've always approached making games is it's like no, this is like a it's almost like a director made this game. It's Thomas Brush's blah blah blah.
Yeah.
And I put my stamp on it. Just it's almost like this way of like pissing on the project and saying like I will do what I want.
Yeah.
And nobody will tell me what to do with this project. Whereas the way that the way that this game the way that your game was made, which is was brilliant, was early access and getting the community involved in building a

community because after all, it is a multiplayer game, right?
Oh, yeah. Exactly.
And you need that. So, it is it's just a difficult place to be. I I guess I don't really have an opinion or a hardcore like what like one way or the other, but I do have sympathy. I have sympathy for where you are in this situation cuz it's kind of a rock in a hard place kind of thing. Um so yeah,
I think it's a I think it's a really good question to ask cuz like um or yeah, is it a democratic process? I mean I we've been through all types on on both sides. So companywise, there was a point where we had kind of two creative directions. Um, and that went for a long time, four or five years of having multiple different ideas floating around in a very flat hierarchy style and everyone contributed and kind of did it that way, you know, because oh, Naughty Dog did it or whatever or Valve does it um, and look how many games they make. But I mean, ultimately there are things that um, don't work about that, right?

there's things that just don't line up because I think humans ultimately are like quite hierarchical not entirely but like there's always kind of these anything does what whatever whatever has the most gravity will attract everything else you know um so the creative or the person who's in charge of managing the project will have the most pull but that doesn't mean that they are the be all end all there are instances of that too I think it's up to I think to not ramble too much because I'm known to ramble It's up to the team. It's up to the team and it's up to whoever's in charge to make those decisions. Are you a communityled project? Are you like one where you listen everybody and you incorporate all their changes? Um, where you factor those in and you kind of work it work them in, massage them into your your your product. Um, and then to what degree do you do that? And do you let them know that you're doing that is another question. And all these other things. And then on the internal side, do you have someone who's just like a Kajjima Kajjima type? Walk around with a

little pen and they mark things off and like, oh, okay, I know that that has to be done and you directing the audio and the animation and everything. I assume that there's still teams under him. He's not just doing everything himself, but you could be that type or you could be someone a standard traditional one where you have the leadership and then the which is kind of what we do. We have the direction director team at the top. You got I guess you got me somewhere here and then you've got the leaders and everyone kind of contributes in their own way. Not everyone has direct contribution. Um but we work in that sense and it's been the most beneficial for us. But you have to find that. You have to find what you're comfortable with. Um and if you give it, you know, the Thomas Brush stamp of approval and you say this is my game. I will do what I want with it. That's fine. You know, that's where you start getting into the whole
it's if it's your art piece, it's your story. It's what you're telling. Um, and if the community likes that, great. Because that's the difference is you've made something that people enjoy and they like it. Just because a bunch of people like it doesn't necessarily mean

it's theirs. It's now, did they bring it to that point of success? Should we be should people be grateful for their communities? Absolutely. But does that mean that they then should come in and make these decisions and kind of call the shots on things like that? Not necessarily. So there's like a it's a it's not a fine line. It's a very blurred line, but it's it's a common thing for game for for people who play video games to to do. They they inherit a sense of ownership about games um because they love the game and I think that's a testament to the people making it and it's also something they should be paying attention to. So, as you can see, I'm not taking a side on it should be this or it should be that or it should be,
you know, it's it's not
honor everything or throw everything away,
right? It's everywhere because it's again it's very hard to know without a specific example what it is that you would what side you take, what stance you take on it. Right.
That's right. And it's it's kind of similar to Ready or Not where it's like you started out, let's and let's go back to when you were young, you know, you started young and you were you had this

idea for this this pretty much do whatever you want with this game, right?
Make whatever you want. And then as you build this company, it just gets bigger and it and it becomes something that has to be managed. And that's tough. That's that's just so I just want to, you know, wrap that that talking point up or that conversation up with just I I sympathize with you
and that's a difficult line to walk. But let's move back to how you started all this. You know, right now you've got a thick skin. Right now you're
managing 70 people. Um you're leading a team. Crazy. It's massive. It's massive what you've created. But let's go back to the very beginning and you're super young. So I'm super impressed by you.
How did you start making games, man? How did you start knowing like to the point where you knew nothing?
I was
Tell me your story. I
was making like little YouTube videos when I was a kid. I started I think I started like 10 years old.
Um and they're still on YouTube to this day, but no one ever find them.
Maybe.
Oh, we're going to put one in this edit.

Actually, I can say I'll I'll send you one. You can see it. Uh
please do. Yeah, I'll chuck it in. Um, actually, I will say it to you. It's I had like I was big into VFX. Like I wanted to get an FX and I and we had a um plane uh we had a bunch of stuff. I wanted to make a tank and put it in in like a video. I was using like 3ds Max and these things and like rendering it in some rendering program and putting it in After Effects and motion tracking it and things and I wanted to do it because I was inspired by like the likes of like Freddy W and
uh the corridor digital guys which now corridoral crew and Freddy W doesn't exist anymore and the guy worked with Freddy W Brandon Larch makes bone works which is really funny. I'm just like a kind of cool. Yeah. So there's these weird parallels between worlds which is kind of cool but um Those guys inspired me to get into visual effects and like getting into modeling and how to model it things. So I started modeling tanks and I started getting into like the art side of things and
yeah I was yeah I was like in eighth 8th

grade whatever school
yeah so I got into that and
started directing my friends and things and it's also where I learned to be less of a dick when telling people what to do. That was horrible at the points like high school my friends would just not talk to me cuz I was such a b I was such a bully and every time I want to hang out it would be to make a movie. So it was very selfish. Um, but you know, we all kind of bonded through just like hanging out doing something different, which was fun. And then eventually, you know, I met up with some other guys who wanted to make movies too and we'd always make films together um with better equipment and things like that. So, at some point we were there was a film shoot that we did. Movie was terrible, but it was uh I was probably 16 and there was like a I was directing or co-director directing I think I was directing. We organized like a team of like 30 people to come down who were like actors for different YouTubers and things and like shooting these scenes that we were doing and we did like sets and like little props and it was really cool. It's like a real classic way of making movies and like I don't think about it much and appreciate it. But that was very early and like having a

vision and trying to trying to share that. Don't know why a bunch of people who were like some were like 40-year-olds. I don't know why they were listening to a 16-year-old. I'm glad they humored me. Um a lot of those guys are super they were great people. really really well with people.
You know what that says is that people are born people like you are born with the ability to convince other people that they know what they're doing.
I guess so. But I
I think you have that about you like
and and you're just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you do. Like I from what I can gather, you're just convincing. You're convincing. You're confident. You know that that confidence can get a 50-year-old to follow a 16-year-old. No, I think I'm a fool and it just happens to be that I have a bit of a bit of charisma so that it works.
Is there a difference between a confident person and a fool, you know?
It's not. It was not. It's not. Um, but yeah, we did that and and eventually I was like, you know, it was a it was like Yeah, I'm not going to say what it is cuz someone will find it, but basically uh I was modeling like creatures and things like that. So, I get it into I got into sculpting and ZBrush and things

like that, right?
Yeah. Um, and eventually that took me into making human beings. And then that kind of gra gravitated in like ladies in high school to like doing a bunch of artwork with faces and things. And it was good fun. And then I finished high school and I wanted to get into making games cuz at this point I'd just been doing character modeling. I lost interest in the visual effects side. Thank God because the industry is terrible. So I
Yeah. So um
I wouldn't want to be there either. Um
no it's I I have I do not envy the people in the visual effects industry. They're fantastic what they do, but I just don't this the conditions are shitty.
Really quick side note here. It's like a little quick question for you. Yes or no? Does it pay off to be a generalist or a like a a what do you call it? Someone who specifically does one art form in the game.
A specialist
in the in the industry. I think right now right now specialist.
Specializ.
Okay. Okay.
Right now if you're making your own game is the way to go.
Yeah. If you're leading team, if you're

trying to crack into a job like in AAA or in indie, especially in indie, specialize and pick something cool that you want to do forever because that's how you get.
Isn't it risky though? Devil's advocate and then we can story. But yes, isn't it risky when AI can come in and say, "Actually, you know what? I'll specialize for you."
Oh, dude. I mean, don't even get me started on AI. I mean, if it go keeps going the way it's going, it won't even matter like how many units you push in a game and whatever it is because the econ the world economy is going to just completely shift probably collapse probably soon. So, so enjoy enjoy enjoy capitalism while guys because we're about to hit the hit the tech
make games. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. But, uh, no, no, I would say doom and gloom aside. I'm not a soothsayer. I don't have a crystal ball somewhere I can look at, but I would say like pick pick something that you're going to that's interesting that maybe can't be replaced by AI super easily or get really good at using AI um with what you're doing. You know, if you're a

concept artist, it doesn't mean you're out of a job.
Doesn't mean that people are going to expect you to create 50 pieces of work in a week instead of five. Maybe. But there there's going to be then then you just you know we still deal with human beings. Learn to negotiate. Talk about what it is what you can do and cannot do. Don't be a don't be a slave to the people telling you what to do as well. Learn to say no. You know what I mean? So if you do that and you work with AI, then you're good to go.
Yeah. I think
so you kind of you you back to your story, you know, you learned how to sculpt and do these specialized things.
Yeah. So I did all that the manual way, the traditional way, whatever. And uh eventually uh started doing work for some some people online. I made an art station when it art station just came out. I was on Polycount for a while too. Um getting feedback and doing all that kind of stuff. Uh
and that was great cuz it was hard. You have to deal with like really harsh criticism. I remember this the first thing I posted was like a spaceman and he had like it was like a Pixar style one cuz I couldn't do faces properly. And I said this is really I said in the

thing I was like this is a real anything goes approach. And the top the first comment I got which I still remember to this day
I love you still remember this
anything goes nothing works sorry and I was like oh [ __ ] like I was like trying to come up with excuses for why it sucked and this guy saw right through he's like that sucked like no
you know it's really funny dude your story reminds me a lot of a lot of mine not the whole like viral success part of it but the
in high school I I directed films and I I still direct films You could find some of my short films on YouTube and they've done really well actually. They've
they've gotten some good views and
I wonder if I seen any of them. I probably
You might have. I made one called The Unlocking and I think it's like 600,000 views right now.
Oh, wow. [ __ ] All right.
It did really well actually. So, I have another horror movie I'm working on right now. But I say all that not to talk about myself, but
to say that I in high school, even college, I mean, honestly, even now, I

just want to do everything, you I just want to do everything. I want to make movies and I want to make games and I want to do YouTube.
I'm curious, did you feel that way in high school and college of just like you just love to play with all creative toys?
Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. I I think that was it. It was I think it was more of an linear progression out of it like in a way, but it was always to create things. I always played video games, you know, obvious since I was very young. So, I think it was always just I think it was always going that direction. And one of the first movies movies one of the first YouTube videos I made was literally like a first person thing with my hand and I'd put like tissue paper on a metal all bloody and I was like five shock I was like was like shooting
I was always trying to do video games just in movies. I think it was kind of naturally just heading that direction but I always used whatever you could to tell a story. Um and then it was just through a very rocky process of elimination before you got to a point where you were like okay I
I kind of have an idea of what this is and what I want to do. Um,
you decided to go the game route. That's

kind of the the decision you made.
Yeah, I started working with some guys. Uh, first job I ever got was with my friend Shannon Shannon Quindanell, who was a uh he um was a What was he doing at the time? He's making a comic book I think. Um, but and then he ran a I think he still runs a studio, an animation studio. Really nice guy. I used to play Arma Armor 3 with him in a clan. And um he had me make some some 3D art. I was using like marvelous design and all these things to create folds and it was just like so they could sketch over it. So I did that and then from there I posted that on art station and then I got my next job which was for um I'm name dropping right now but for Nick Nicholas Dard uh Dart
uh from Leatherneck SIM it was called Leatherneck at the time. Now it's heat blur. They did the F14D and a bunch of other stuff for DCS. They did a bunch of DCS modules.
Really really good quality stuff.
Sweet. Um and he gave me a bunch of work and that kind of like kept me that started to introd introduce me to the industry and
um
this was freelance.
This is freelance. Yeah. And then I

ended up working at uh I got a bunch of other jobs like I don't have to go through my entire resume.
How did people find you though? That's important for people right now.
Just Art Station. I was just doing Art Station at this point. I think I did post on Polycat when I had finished work and that at this point they were getting put on like the showcase and I know Polycan's as important as it is back then now but back then you got in the showcase expect some offers to come in for jobs and I start I worked yeah I worked with um
uh I worked on Boss with Boss Key on Law Breakers which flopped but the art was really cool uh worked on days of war uh which was good fun. It's actually how I met uh Alex, our technical animation lead and our and Mark lead sorry technical animator and Mark our art director and uh also our creative guy worked on our a former creative director worked on it too. So there's a bunch of things there that we all kind of um we we all I met a bunch of contacts through that. Yeah. So it was a lot of these kinds of things. Um and then before you knew it I had a bit of experience industry. I knew the basics at this

point. You'd hope I knew how to model things quick. I knew that like making characters was an important part of the making a game. And that's when I was like, let's make a game. I reached out to Ryan who I met through Day Z. And um when I was 16, I met him in Day Z. And he was like 18 or or 17.
Um not creepy, just guys hanging out, different time, you know. Uh and
and depending who you ask, like he would have shot us. We're on a on a hospital like looting where I shot him. Anyways, uh we made friends instead of killing each other and we always stay in contact and he started showing me mods he was making for for Day Z. And I was big into mods too. I worked on Operation Trevor uh which was a Halo armor mod for Arma 3 played as like the Marines.
Um and I worked on a little bit of Stalker Wormwood which came out ages ago. Um which is like an old Stalker mod. So I did a bunch of stuff like that. I was in interested and he didn't know anything about art but he knew a lot a little bit about programming and that was kind of where we started and we started working on this project um with

also another another guy who worked on the team. So yeah it was a it was a uh it was a interesting trajectory to get to that point you know. Well, the things I can glean from that I I like to try and put things into frameworks for people listening because if it's not obvious, people listening right now, they they would dream to do what you're doing. Um,
right.
You start you got that negative comment and you remember it, you know, on that station, you know, that one comment and and I would say 90% of the people listening right now, that will stop them.
You know, they they'll just be like, you know what, I do suck. And then they're done.
Yeah. and you just kept pushing, you know, you kept publicly showing, I don't know the best way to say it, your nakedness, like your inability to make the perfect piece of art, you know,
for sure.
Um, I mean, it's it's it is a naked feeling to post your stuff, especially, you know, when you're young in the industry and you don't know what you're doing and you're just putting stuff out there. I mean, I did the same thing back

I'm 35, so the thing that we did when we were in high school is we post stuff to Newgrounds.
Oh, nice. Yes.
Yeah. Newgrounds and and and um uh Armor Games, which was one of my first publishers, and Congregate.
Really?
Yeah. Yeah. So, that's that's what I would do is I'd post all my stuff there.
Nice. Yeah.
And, you know, like there's something to be said about having, like you said, a thick skin and a backbone and the courage to be stupid, like to be not really smart in front of everybody, you know. Um, so that's what I can glean from what you said, which is you just kept posting content and you eventually got people to say, "You know what? I'm going to hire you."
I did the same thing for my 3D artist for my game, Twisted Tower. I worked with him for uh like two months just I found him on the Unity asset store and he had done some cool guns.
Nice.
And um he just posted that he he told me his they weren't he wasn't making a ton of money from them, but I found those

and then I reached out to him and I said, "I really like these. can you do can you be my 3D artist? And so he worked with me for two and a half years, I think it was, on Twisted Tower. So, it's just posting content and almost using it as bait to get work, I guess, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. No, man. That's that's sick. I love that.
So, you finally started working on this game and it's been a seven eight year almost eight years. Is that true?
That's got to be. Yeah. When was the reveal trailer? 2017. It's been a while. Yeah. And we've been working on the project for at least a year and a half before that. I think
it's funny. It's Yeah, it's my entire life has been this this single project and uh it has I mean I just finished working on the going to only pass the creative road map for what we need to do and I'm like damn I'm going to be for a while which is great don't get me wrong but like I'm like [ __ ] this isn't even close to being done.
Um
you know I want to have want to tell more stories.
That's right. You know you were building all this in Unreal.

Mhm. Um, so can you talk to me a little bit about Unreal? Do you have any
I use Unity and I'm making a first person shooter
and it has been a pain in the butt. Like Unity is so clunky.
Yeah.
When it comes to lighting and shadows and asset streaming and culling, it's an optimization nightmare. So I could say that about Unity. What are your thoughts on Unreal? Like why did you choose Unreal?
Well, I worked on a bunch of projects that were using Unreal already. Um that was the first thing. The second thing was a use C++ which uh Ryan was familiar with using. Um and uh so like everyone who was there early on was very familiar with Unreal. And best thing of all was it cost no money to to use at the time even now. Um we could we run Unreal for like two or whatever it was and we were just like you know just enjoying the hell out of it. uh like I think we were just very familiar with it and we didn't have to pay you know we didn't have to pay for

anything at the time we had no no cash at all we hadn't even put up we didn't put up the supporter thing we hadn't even found
Julio hadn't joined the team yet like a lot of stuff like that right so it was be as sort of cost effective as possible because I have $10 in my bank and I have no money so we can't pay for it
you know
do you guys owe per the amount of copies you've sold don't you owe Unreal a certain percentage now.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. Um,
do you find that to be reasonable?
I think so. I think like given what they provide you, it depends on who you ask, right? Like there's that guy on YouTube, another guy on YouTube who's been, you know, making the rounds. Is that what's his name? He's like a tech I don't know if he's a tech technical artist or just a programmer, but he's he's an he's definitely an engineer of some kind. He's very clever. It's that guy who's been trying to deep I don't know. He's been deep diving Unreal on how much it sucks or whatever and how unoptimized it is. Um, and how nanites like useless and things they think I'm very watering it down.
Do we agree? Okay,

I've tried nanite. I mean, I've seen the horror stories and I want to stay away for now. I understand that this stuff can be like
pushed out before it's ready. I don't know. Um, it's probably
You're not making an open world game. It's it's close quarters indoors, so you can take advantage of occlusion calling.
You don't have to render things at far distances. Right.
Precisely. Yeah. I um Yeah. Whoever that guy is, I forgot his name, but he's been making the rounds about whether or not it's like is is this good. Is this compare it to Decimate Engine or compare it to like old engines from like 20 years ago and how much better it looked and they have multiple shadows casting. I get it. Um, but what I like about Unreal is that it's accessible. And the thing that they didn't have back then, and this is why a lot of game companies, maybe not game companies, but a lot of indies move to Unreal and and whatnot, is there isn't really much else on the market. Um, what are you going to use Source? You going to go and like buy a license from Valve? you're going to make a mod and hope to god that Valve comes and freaking goes actually yeah here you go like there aren't that many options for you now there are there's there's go

dot go do go do engine thing looks great I've seen some cool games there's a bunch of cool games you can yeah you can do like you could have done back in the day like flash games like Newgrounds like you're talking about which were like the pinnacle of gaming in my opinion but then
you don't have anything else you have Unity you got to pay for and there are issues with Unity but it is still like a solid engine and it's great for certain types of games. It's great for any Tarov is FPS and it's on Unity. You know what I mean? Like you can achieve whatever you want with any engine. Um I just think it's like I get it. I get that people like that are trying to dispel things about the engine and there are problems with the engine. Absolutely. Things that don't make any sense and they should be fixed. Um
but unless you can get a license for like Snowdrop or like Yeah, like Desimo or anything else like the Horizon one, I think. I think Horizon also did.
Tell me about those. What What are those? Snowdrop's the one that was used for the Division uh which is the Division one and two snowdrop engine which was like you can look online for like tech tech demos of how it works and like people talking about how great it

is and things whether or not that's true is a different story you know you know that uh they might have been chained to their desks at Ubisoft you never know
um but like it looks great uh visually it's very impressive uh and the Division holds up it's a [ __ ] awesome looking game
well you know for clarity unity you don't have to pay for Right. Okay. Yeah. So, I don't want to misrepresent it. That's a good point.
However, back then, you had to.
Yes. You You don't I don't have to pay anything for Unity. Um to get rid of the splash screen, you do have to pay.
Well, fair enough.
And then they they got they had this weird Everybody knows about this, but the the weird you had to pay royalties based on I can't even remember. It's so distant. Um they had they had some kind of algorithm that could determine how many copies you sold. So basically it's embedded into your build a a ticker that checks how many games you've sold. So they're like kind of watching, you know.
Oh my gosh.
So that that ended up going away. My

problems with Unity are it's the optimization. It's been such a pain in the butt
um for my for my first person shooter. It's just been such a pain in the butt. And the lighting doesn't look as good. It it just I don't know why. It just doesn't look good. Um, it looks looks like a 2005 game. That's kind of what it looks like, you know.
Are you trying to make it look realistic as well? Like, is that a big
uh I don't know. You know, I'm My game Twisted Tower is stylized. It has a Bioshock. It looks like Bioshock. Um,
but the the lighting, it doesn't look as creamy. I don't know the right word. I don't know the right word.
It doesn't look as creamy. And it might just because of real-time global illumination, you know, it just doesn't it doesn't work out of the box.
Yes.
Um whereas Unreal, the real-time global illumination does, which is it's called Lumen, I think. Right.
Yeah.
Um so Lumen,
it's it's mainly the optimization stuff like the the game, my brother, he he has a PC that he built

and it's a solid PC. And I was like, "Hey, can you test my game?" And he tested and he's like, "It's running at 20 FPS." And I have no idea why. And it was because of real-time shadows. And so I'm sitting here going, "Okay, so I've got to be," and I don't know if this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know if this is true with Unreal, but with Unity, you got to basically disable shadows except for like every once in a while have like one light cast shadows.
No, that's true.
That's that's the same with
Is it true with Unreal?
Oh, yeah. The minute you have more than one shadow casting light, say goodbye to your frame rates. Like your GPU just starts dying. Um, it's like you can there are that's the that's the like one of the points, right? You can find engines and you can write engines that can handle that. Um, but it's just tricky to do. You can look just depends on what you where your lights are and also how far they're visible, what they're shading. I'm I'm testing my tech art knowledge here
and I'm sure Allan will watch this and he'll be like what a tech lead. He's going to watch this and be like, "You're so wrong. Like this is incorrect." And I'm like, "Fuck." But like it's about

the shadows being cast. uh and like so so what what you're what you're impacting the amount the quality of the shadows distance the shadows are visible how many lights in one scene are shadow casting because that's more random GPU
uh and how many are overlapping and there's probably a few other things too also like the type of light if it's a point light
goes everywhere it's omnidirectional
that's four spotlights
it's shitload right one spotlight you're good to go and then a light that doesn't cast a shadow but it's just illuminating then that's obviously like
it's not free but it's it's in the same past like a decal almost free. I I dude I found that when I disabled like I had let's say 300 lights in one scene
and I disabled all the lights and I looked at my stats. The frame rate was not impacted at all.
Yeah.
It was so weird. I was like, "Wait, so I can have so baked lighting. I I learned baked lighting for four or five months. I learned how to do all of it."
And it's a pain in the butt to learn.
It sucks.
Um
yeah, I learned it all and then I realized, you know what, I don't need

this. Uh I don't need to bake lights. The problem was shadows. It was always shadows. So, I had uh chat GPT or I'm sorry, Grock. I had Grock. Who did I use? No, I used I used Claude. I had Claude write a an editor tool that disabled all shadow casters
from every single object in the game. So, it ran through my whole project hierarchy.
And this is what's funny is I I just wonder like why why isn't it that Unity tells us this? I don't know. Or just says like, "Hey, warning. you've got more than a hundred objects in this in the scene that are casting shadows. Um, you need to turn off the the casting shadows. U, but then I also had to go through all my point lights and turn off the shadow casting from those. And I have to go through every level and just fine-tune and find like two or three lights that I really care about and those are my shadow casters. Is that true with y'all
in a sense? Yeah. Like you for us it's like dep you can only have so many in a space and a lot of our levels are like on top of each other, right? There's a lot of verticality.
Yeah. So they will still trigger lights

that aren't even in a visible area. There's probably ways to program that in so that it turns them off and it's something that would be really cool to explore because I'm sure there are smarter ways of doing lighting.
But yeah, that that's still a problem for us too. You kind of have to pick your pick your battles. Pick the areas where the light is going to have the most impact and then go from there because yeah, you can have a shadowcaster, you can have a non-shadow caster and they can still have the same effect. Do they draw your eye somewhere? Are they just used for a visual cue? like does it just look cool, good for screenshots? Like there are different reasons why you might do it. Um and then the hardware too. It might be something where you go you optimize it for certain like you optimize it for a baseline hardware and then you go you can add extra lights and that becomes layers that get selected and turned on depending on how it works. I don't know how it works in Unity but uh yeah that that's absolutely an issue. Don't worry, dynamic lighting is a pain in the ass. Uh that's why
but there are custom solutions. I think Unity has a couple really good ones like that you can get off the store, but it's it's stressing my knowledge there.

Dude, let's let's shift gears to talk about AI because
Oh, yeah.
Not AI in terms of your amazing AI uh generated image.
Yeah. I saw your podcast where you were like you talked about AI and they were talking about the agents.
Yes.
Um and you were like, "Wait, wait." Um, but I'm talking about generative AI.
Um,
good questions.
So, so I have found that I'm curious if the Unity asset store is slowly going to become irrelevant because so many assets are editor tools. And like for example, a light color that calls out lights based on the distance from the character controller. You can go and buy buy those for 20 bucks, which I've done. But I can also use Copilot in Visual Studio and have Copilot, which is I'm using the Cloud model. I'll just say, "Write me an editor tool that calls the lights."
Right. Yeah.
And it happens in 10 seconds. And I've

found that I have now I have like 20 editor tools that were made by Claude and they're incredible. Curious, do you have any thoughts on that? And and and do you guys use that? Oh, do we use a agents in our well in our engineering? I think I don't think we do. I don't want to dis I don't want to discredit the hard work of our engineers. They do a lot of like work. I'm sure I'm sure that there's like a component where it's like writing and it like autofixes as you're writing so you save time. That's a great use of AI. Um having basic tools written is also a great use of an AI. Um I don't think we do. I think we probably will use more of it, but I don't think it'll be something because here's the thing, right? is like from the from the business facing side down there's always going to be drive to be like we want to use more AI we want to make sure that we can release work with greater efficiency and like with high quality not to say that you can't get high quality with engineers but like you know we want to or like there's this this concept about

AI being perfect
y
which is also just not true like it's not perfect at least not right now uh and I'm sure that when uh when they you know when AI takes over the world And it's strapping tiny little explosives to drones and they're flying them into rooms. I'm going to be one of the first to go cuz I said that you know the whole Rocco's bass thing as well. Basil thing. Anyways, who knows? But to me and and it's a great question to posit. It's a good philosophical question. Provided that AI is of course, you know, like acts like a human being is vindictive. That's another question, you know, but um
I'm not an expert on that. Don't even know what I'm talking about. But when it comes to using it for for the stuff business side, you're going to want it. Like people want to push for that because there's like a level of quality that you can achieve with AI that that you believe is it's a level of confidence. It's a baseline level of confidence. It doesn't need to sleep. It doesn't need it doesn't need to take breaks. Can do this and that. Like great. But it's not true AI. It's generative, right? Like it hallucinates. It can make mistakes. And if you have someone who has no experience with

engineering, programming, coding, they're not going to be able to debug that, solve it. So, it's the equivalent of like going to a store and and self-checking out all your stuff and then you have someone there who's kind of watching it. The difference being that person just watches it. They don't know how to fix the machine on an intricate level. I think that there's an importance to have someone who can the same teams that you have learned how to use use AI, work with AI so they can be more efficient because no one likes sitting there debugging stuff. No, I'm sure there's people who have like get their get their kicks out of debugging code, but if you can create more efficient code, you can do it faster than you can create because at the end of the day, we're all creatives in our own capacity. So, I think um yeah, I think that I think that it's our stance on AI is that it's I think it's good to use. It just depends on how you use it and then how gratuitously like we've we've gone benign is naturally gravitating towards talking about AI art. But like we like we've gone that whole route right of um using AI art. Uh I've used it well

unabashedly used it on uh on on Photoshop using the Photoshop Firefly one for our like level screen just look terrible. That's my fault everyone. I did that because we had no time and I wanted it to be 3D diuramas but they just wouldn't run. They were running at 2 FPS.
Wait, so did you get in trouble for this?
I people just say it looks like [ __ ] and I'm like I agree it does look terrible and we should change it and we will but like again it's like all this other work and then this kind of fits underneath.
That's right.
Um
that's right.
But like that that kind of stuff is is is just part and parcel of experimentation. So, we've used AI plenty like we'll um our concept artists sometimes use it but a lot of times kit bashing still our actual uh boots on the ground 3D modelers don't necessarily I almost said actual artists like 2D artists aren't artists our 3D
I know what you're saying the 3D ones like the people who are like implementing like they're using AI they're using 3D models we outsourced to partners as well who were 3D modeling and like it t and trust me I wish they I

wish we could do it with like regular art it would be obviously a lot cheaper and you can make more work. you could do stuff like that if you can create the intention that AI should be created because it doesn't necessarily have that but yeah so we use a lot of we we use it but um certainly since we've kind of went full tilt like oh this is sick like you can use this AI software to create this art and we should just do it everywhere we've since done it less we've been smarter about it like yes use it
but like just just be clever about how you use it not to be sneaky but because you don't want it to look like a AR has a presence. It looks too clean. It looks too perfect. It's like there's no there's no artistic intention behind the work. And that's my biggest problem with with writing with AI and with doing this stuff. Like all these stories we told with the the officers that's all handwritten. We wrote like 100,000 words or some [ __ ] of just like stories for these guys. Some of it's not even in the game, like the death stories, how they die. Uh, it's it's [ __ ] that we do

manually because it's like needs to have it needs to feel like someone wrote this,
you know? It's so true. I I compare it to like a new a new house or a new car smell. Um, when I see AI art, I get the smell of it being too clean, you know, or it's too it's too uh
I don't know. It's it's just a clean it's too perfect in a way.
Um, and you know it. And it's funny like younger generations um like I'm a millennial. I would assume you're Gen Z.
No, I'm I'm a millennial too. I'm right on the edge.
Are you a millennial? You're 28. Okay. So, you're right at the cusp, I think.
Right on the edge.
Um Gen Z, dude. And like Gen Alpha, like my kids, they're going to be able to spot AI anything immediately. Even like AI written stuff, they just know. They could just sense it. It's this weird sense that people can tell. And what what happened with me was I I used AI art for all the posters in my game. Like we had posters of like old 1950s vintage

Oh yeah.
ad reads because the game is based in 1950.
It was so simple. Like it just made all these gorgeous 1950s posters. And it was probably a little bit like you guys where it's like you get excited and you're like, "Okay, this is cool." And then all of a sudden I was like, "I'm going to stop this. I'm going to slow down." And so I ended up replacing anything that was AI art in the game. I replaced with Yeah. with kit bashing is is I I've never heard that term. Um
Yeah. Is that what you call it?
Grab a bunch of different artworks and kind of splice them.
Yeah.
So that's what I ended up doing. Did a lot of I would take screenshots of characters in the game and then I would bring them into the poster and do typography and stuff. And um it was probably just driven by this sense that one, number one, it's going to piss people off.
I I think number two,
it did start to feel really clean and or too perfect. You know, it didn't match the style of the game.
How much of it is yours? You know what I mean? How much of that how much of that game that story that you put your stamp

on?
Yeah.
Is your game?
I mean, it's it's a team of contractors, but yes, it's got
Yeah, for sure. you know, but everybody's now it's so like dude, let's talk about assets if you don't mind, but like
and I don't have an opinion either way. I tell I tell my audience, use assets, use assets, use assets. But in Twisted Tower, I would say 90% of that game is handmade models.
Nice.
Everything. And now the textures we get from like textures.com, we're not going to paint all those, but
or take photos of the same thing that someone else has already taken a photo of.
Correct. Correct. So, how's what's your asset use process like? Do you guys use assets?
We, you know, we we did a lot early on. Um, and when I say did, I mean we would go, "Oh, this is like a cool pack. Like, it's like chairs. It's a table." But we never strictly used assets. Like even in the very early Reut like uh previews, a lot of stuff was handmade. And it was quite like we were like, "It needs to be a really high standard. Like, we need to make sure it's super detailed and it

looks like this." Like the hotel, the original hotel, well the second original hotel, um that was all like handmade, like handmade bow art style like iron work, brass, like these
very high detail marble tiles everywhere.
Architecturally perfect. Wasn't done by me. It was done by um by Stuart um who worked on the project. Fantastic artist, great visionary as well. Um he he he worked on those and uh those were just sublime because they were handmade and they and it was somebody who had an understanding of what it took to make something that looks so good. And I think I think like yeah, most of our stuff wasn't wasn't uh handmade uh wasn't uh asset store packs or whatever, but we definitely did use it. you know, like a pipe set like of things that would run across the ceiling or like switches uh on the ground, which we did make some mistakes cuz some of those like European switches because we didn't check when we when we bought the assets,

you know, like it' be like a US plug, but then there'd be like a Euro switch, you're like the [ __ ] So, like we would do [ __ ] like that. Um, and it sometimes cause mistakes, but it saved time. And like when you're making a game with when you want a lot of detail, I I don't think anyone should be like, whoa, it's it's a asset flip. Like asset flip is a very specific thing.
Correct. It's yeah, you're literally grabbing like an existing level that someone's made and you have no intention behind it. You're just slapping it in there. You know what I mean? And you're just and and sometimes that's even okay because you might have a really cool game like core game loop and you're not an artist. You just need to make need an environment to sell your vision so that you can get to that stage. There's a million permutations of what that might require like like when using an asset store. But yeah, we use it all. We used it all the time, but we always had plans like in place for like using or for getting like assets made by a team, you know, be it from um some of our partners like Studio 801, who was a big part of us for the longest time. Ukrainians, you know, through the whole war and everything like that. We worked with

them before working with them now. Like those guys are great.
What's their name again?
Studio 801. Yeah.
801. Okay.
Oh, I'll take it.
Great guy. Like he's a real man's man. I like Arthur. Um, but like there's the Yeah,
he likes guns like you like guns.
Uh, yeah. I guess in a sense I think he's he's just fun to talk about. Uh, talk talk about talk to. So like I Yeah, like we work with those guys for a long time. We built these really strong relationships with their outsource vendors and we experimented a little bit with some other ones and yeah, we're working with some other vendors too right now and they're great as well. But um, so like at what at what point is it your own work? You know, you outsource it and then it gets made by someone else. That's still your work. It's still something you want to do. You just don't have time to make everything yourself in studio.
That's right.
So, there's things like that.
Is there value in So, are you saying that you've slowly shifted to custom assets?
Uh, yeah. I mean, we've always had custom assets. It's just how many? And now,
is it more so now?
Yeah. I mean, we still have a bunch of old um asset store pack assets that we use. Uh, sometimes I'll like be like,

"Please don't use this because it's just it's everywhere." But a microwave, like, "Do we need to make a microwave when one exists?" It's things like that. Now, the the different levels require different things, right? A lot of our assets are are custom made. Um, and you can see those on Art Station. You can go to like Yeah, you can go to the different outsource studios that you find in the credits. Go to their art station or you just search on art station and it'll come up with all that work because there's a lot there's a lot of of there's a lot of money being pumped into that. There's a lot of work that's coming out of that, a lot of hours being put into making assets. And then on our side internally, we have people making stuff. as we've grown our environment team um our art team you know props prop artists have come and gone and then we have a good number now and they're doing some really cool work so we do it all like we get everything but I would say majority of the work is is definitely bespoke now it seems but our asset library is so big it's kind sometimes hard to tell like what is is and isn't and sometimes we'll modify asset store stuff often times we'll modify you know like the coffee machine and the vending

machines aren't the ones from the from the asset pack. We'll change the textures on them. We might even re we might even pull out that low poly, make a make a new high poly out of it and re-ake it because it's a [ __ ] bake because there's a lot of asset store stuff which is inconsistent. They don't know how to bake normals which is the worst. It's like it's it's hard to do. I get it. But like come on. Like I used to do that. I did that for ages. I had to bake so many normals till they were perfect. Like it was
and that's something I'm terrible at. I actually did a video about Substance Painter. I was teaching about substance painter and some of the comments were like this dude doesn't know what he's doing and I think it was because of the normal baking um
with you on you know
it is so look you know is it is it um is this true with animation as well because I I I tweeted out a cut scene that I was working on
and I'm really proud of this cut scene. It's got moving mouths and and and characters animating and being expressive and I'm just using iClone 8 and Character Creator from Real Illusion. It's so easy to do. I mean,

you're using pre-made animations and you're you're you're blending them together, right? Um, and somebody somebody tweeted back at me and they said, "Wow, like I can't even get a walk animation done." And I was like,
"Well, don't you don't do that. You just use pre-recorded mocap stuff."
Yeah.
And then you blend it and mix it into your own thing. Is that true for you guys?
Yeah. Uh, no. I mean, it depends. It's like some anim most mocap is not perfect. You need to modify it. It depends. There's a lie with mocap because it's like you want to get the original capture and the original performance. And if it's not exactly what you want, you can modify it. But the more you modify it, the more it feels like it's its own uh like it kind of starts morphing it from a mocap into a key frame. You know what I mean? Um so there is a line for sure and that creates a stylized curve too. Like how stylized is your game going to be? Because is it if it's pure mocap like Hitman Hitman like one had mocap in it

and it's like so weird because the art is just just looks just it's old you know soap uncanny vibe
it's very uncanny yeah exactly um so you can do that or you can kind of stylize the [ __ ] out of it if you want or you can just completely key frame it yeah most of our animations capab like we'll we just we get raw capture we clean it up we make sure the starts and ends
and loops and all that everything
so you guys are doing the mocap yourselves Yeah. Yeah. Um we've had help. We definitely had help in the past, but uh most of the mocap has been like handmade. Uh
that's amazing.
Yeah. I mean, some of the first moap we did was me and Alex. Uh and we were just like we went I went I went to his house. He's in Germany. I went to his place. Um cuz I was going up there for at the time I was balancing two jobs. So I went up there to Finland to work and then I went to Germany after I visited my cousin and I visited him two separate occasions. And um we ended up going to a studio and we did like a whole week of just like working on animations and shooting them

and we we rented a bunch of cameras and all this kind of stuff and got it working and then we took it out and found some people online. I met a person on Facebook and they did the cleanup and then we were good to go. You know, we did some extra chopping and changing and that was it. So it's very like
you know a lot of grub work and a lot of um like gorilla style work, you know what I mean? like you're just you're in you. You're trying to just get it done, get the work done
uh with whatever you can.
Would you say and then we'll wrap up here. Would you say that the uh
that your team is a lot of contractors?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Or is it it is it mainly employees or is it mainly contractors?
It's mainly contractors. Yeah, it's uh
Okay, that's I found that to be the most effective way.
It's great. I mean like it's it's flexible for them. It's useful for you as a company as well because you don't have to necessarily like keep work schedules and work hours. We're a fully distributed company. We're all over the world. So, it's it is absolutely the

best way, you know, and you compensate them fairly and you just that's it. It's simple, you know. Uh employee and don't get me wrong, we have employees too, but like it's just the it's just the how you want to do it. If we wanted to go the full employee route, it would be very hard. you would have to like manage and and monitor everyone's work schedules like very strictly and make sure they're doing XYZ and they're following compliance in each country and things like that and it's a lot. Um, but yeah, no, we we we use we use contractors a lot. Um, and it's it just seems to work really nicely. It can be a bit tricky depending on where who who the person is, I think, and like
yeah,
if they use they have to be trustworthy, you know, you just have to trust that they're going to get it done and
Yeah. Well, yeah, for sure.
There's a level of trust that you just kind of have as well, I think. Like we trust every like we have a um we have this baseline level of trust for everyone who joins and you kind of Yeah, you're right. You have to you have to be like, "All right, you're going to get the work done. They get the work done. Doesn't matter how they do it or where they do it or when. That's fine with

us." You know what I mean? And
yeah, we don't I haven't haven't got many complaints about the contractor side of things. I haven't checked out Gloss Duel recently, but I'm sure it'll be I'm sure it'll be fine.
Well, cool, man. Dude, this was so insightful. Thank you so much for your time. You're welcome.
Um, yeah, dude. Is there uh Hey, is there anything in the description? Like a link in the description for You want me to leave a link in the description for it?
Oh jeez. Uh, not my YouTube videos, that's for sure. Uh, how about probably should I I'm going to get I'm going to get punched by the marketing guys when I say probably should put the console uh console links to the store or whatever in there or even the YouTube video. I think release
we'll release one by the time this is out. So yeah, that'll probably be good. I think we' probably be fine.
Console launch is coming up here.
Yeah, it's uh What time is it? It comes out in like five hours, six hours, I think. Bro, what? Why are you doing this podcast? What is wrong with you?

I don't know. I got I got to say, but I don't have any meetings right now. I got up at 5 a.m. I worked out and then I had the meeting and I'm buzz. That's it.
Well, dude, even I'm even more appreciative of your time. That's awesome. Thank you. Also, if you're looking to streamline your development workflow, don't forget to check out Bezi and their brand new feature, agent mode. It makes it very easy to create or modify code directly in your projects at your approval and provides tailored suggestions specifically to your project. It's completely free to get started and you can do so by simply clicking the link in the description.