The Art of Pre-Production

I guess do it oh come on it's the first day of TDC you're not drunk yet all right hi my name is Greg verge I'm honored to be here and talk about a pre-production like I said I'm Greg perch so I've worked in a lot of games of the talk that I'm going to give is really focused mainly on XCOM enemy unknown and XCOM 2 and kind of how we approach pre-production for those so what is pre-production you know this is a term that we all throw around but this is actually the definition of [ __ ] and don't say anything about games right it's a movie term but while you know we have all the same things that a movie has you've got a you know figure out your locations and your characters and

your costumes and casting all that stuff it doesn't have anything about it not being linear doesn't anything about technology all those things that really can kind of crush you or interactivity so something about pre-production that have found everybody I talked to every ad I talked to every studio I talked to everybody does it different right and there's a reason for that every game is a little bit different the team that's working on the game is a little different and you've got to kind of cater to those as you're making your game so when you read a post-mortem about every game right like every time you read one how many times have you read post-mortem so they say you know the team was tired after coming off the last project okay you know they don't have the right people in the project early because the people that are really really good are closing out the project that is finishing not having enough

answers or time right you know not enough time not enough money and then also not defining your requirements to exit pre-production and enter production an idea that that's even a hard date is something that is a whole nother talk right whether or not entering production is an actual date that you enter or if it's a staggered enter and I believe it's a stager gonna like you know characters finish early in the pre-production pipeline you know environments probably all behind that a little bit you know you I can trail behind just like they do when you're when you're hitting rpm it's the same kind of thing as you're getting closer you know they're they're trailing disciplines and the same thing applies for pre-production that's a whole different part so a lot of the mistakes I think that art directors make especially new ones and I know I've done this too you know they don't consider

the presentation like where is the camera going to be for the game how is the player going to experience it right and this is something that I am super passionate about like I believe this is the key of our direction overestimating pretty pictures I think a lot of people get an art direction right and you're like hey that's a really pretty picture up there isn't it it it doesn't solve anything for me other than mood it doesn't really give me any information I can't hand it to modelers they make it because still a little too vague right it doesn't abide by any of the presentation rules it's a great thing and it's got its place absolutely but I think is it's really easy to get enamored by mood paintings and not ask enough questions and misuse your time in pre-production so to that end you know concepts that pretend to provide answers I think everybody has seen these as well like you know you'll do a a picture of a billet you know some people counts of arson make a building right and they're

not thinking about what's the step light where the floor Heights and every time they make a building they make it different right that's not answering any questions that's not helping you get forward that's not helping you build your pipelines it's not helping you establish rules and that's the stuff you focus on in pre-production also focusing on small self-contained items rather than looking at system work right like it's great to develop your character and depending what game you're making we make games are very systems based so like when we look at our characters you know we have isolated ones and ones that are very heavily reliant on systems it's easy to look at them as an example of just hammering one character getting this character perfect but by striving for the perfection you're not thinking about all the other things that are going to actually affect it right avoiding difficult gameplay you know like not even thinking about gameplay is something else you know like how is the game play going to actually

change how the game is presented and therefore how my game is art and then this is one recently that's kind of bugging me a little bit that I've heard about getting pushed to have art Bibles in pre-production you can't possibly do that right like so somebody can argue with me about it but I don't see how you do it you can't make an art Bible until you're out of pre-production and entering production at the end of pre-production then you can address this we're trying to add a big 8 figure out you know what your pipelines are and set limits it is I think impossible so now that you've got a little bit idea what I'm going with this enemy unknown so back in 2007 at Firaxis we had the opportunity to remake XCOM ever heard XCOM from 1994 right the really old one you know by all

accounts arguably one of the best strategy games ever made one of the best games are made so it's absolutely no pressure right so so he's opportunity to work on this title and pitch it as something that we wanted to do so in 2007 as we started this we were in a really different place for the studio the team was pre tired you know we have been on probably one of our hard games that we'd ever worked on and we were coming off of that and and we're sliding into the finish on it sideways and so everybody was tired all the artists were kind of out of steam I had actually been I'd known for probably bout eight months that I was going to XCOM was gonna be mine so while I was kind of helping out on the another

project I was I was dealing time and and planning right so I would talk to designer about half an hour day and we kind of figure out what we wanted to do and just talk through what we thought XCOM would be that time was invaluable I can't say how good that was for me to get my head on straight and try to filter out all the white noise from everybody in the studio and everybody around me that may have hopefully try to be helpful made suggestions about what the game should look like or how it should be because it was just us kind of talking didn't really have a lot of that stress but when that got done we had ten artists in one designer lead no programmers programs are all on fire finishing another game everybody knows how that works right so we had this opportunity to kind of look at pre-production from a different perspective we've never gone into pre-production which is part in a

designer right but the important part of that too was like we had to make sure we got the right people on early so luckily a lot of artists had finished and I was able to get my team together the way I wanted it which ironically my team was actually the team I ride I was architect on Sid Meier's railroads where I actually built this team and so that same team now came with me so it made it really easy for me to know who I wanted where because I had a you know two and a half years three years of working with these people but uh we also didn't have any design any defined requirements for how we're going to have production either we had no I yeah where this was going to take us we had a block of time to work with and we weren't really sure how that was going to work out but on top of that the biggest thing we had we didn't have an engine we had no idea what we're going

to make this in we had we had a homebrew engine that was designed for making sieve games right but we were talking about doing something very different and we also didn't have any contemporary games to compare to I mean the game we were looking at was a game from 1994 you know that's a pretty big pretty big jump and so those are two big issues that really had us had us confused about how we want to go at first so our approach this is a one of the earliest screenshots of us kind of figuring out pre-production we decided that we were going to actually make a gameplay simulation and so the first thing I did was I went out and I made sure I had the right concept people like I actually went out and found found the concept artists whose work is littered through here Pierre McGowan but uh you know he did an amazing job but the thing was

we're trying to figure out like you couldn't just put anybody in this job the person that filled the concept role is the heart of your project right so they have to be perfect for what they're doing you'd be more selective about the concept artists than anybody else on the team in that sense we wanted to simulate gameplay right like that was super important to us we didn't want this to turn into a sizzle sizzle reel we didn't want it to turn into a trailer and multiple times it there were people to suggest us going that route and so we really held our guns we wanted to fake the UI we wanted to make it feel like you were experienced in the game and so to that end we jumped onto the using pre studio max our for us since we didn't have an engine that was what we knew the most and we felt like that give gave us the agility to move around and iterate quickly figure out what didn't work fast get rid of it change the cameras rerender it really removed any technology

limitation we had the whole idea was what do we want it to be and not how do we work within a box right other than the gameplay and then we questioned everything you know with an ex-con game why is the camera here is it because that's the best answer or because that was the best answer in 1994 right and so we started questioning what was good what was bad deconstructing it there are a lot of really good decision that we kept a lot of decisions we thought we could improve on because technology had advanced so much in the 17-year gap whatever it was and then we set project goals and this is something that you know at when I first did that I wasn't so sure write project goals yeah they seemed kind of contrived and weird and they weren't tangible things typically when I've heard about these things and so for us you know we set out as a team ten artists sitting in a room first day

that they're in the room read on the wall we wanted to get Best in Show at e3 not just strategy we want to get Best in Show we wanted to surprise the publisher I was another one and then we want to get game of year again not strategy and we wanted to go for take a turn based strategy game on consoles sounds crazy and get game endear but these are the goals we set up with day one so getting today one talking about finishing that other project right this is how typically developing cycle works right you ship the game and for every up there's down and that down is the problem it down kills you because reinf lating a team is so much harder than just maintaining the key so again you know you start the project you finish it everybody's completely exhausted nobody's done laundry you got to repair all your relationship with your family call your mom and dad see your wife once

them all but but so then you've got this bottom out where the project starts not not how you want to start a project for us this is where we want to be so again I'm kind of loosely helping out on another project as we're doing this and I'm thinking about how can I keep my guys from bottoming out I want them today one be excited about what they're doing so I started planning for the team you know again identify the key positions and the people that I needed I got the 10 guys that I needed to make this thing no more no less these are the 10 guys I need I needed a concept artist I needed a modeler I needed a character artist and he did a couple animators need an effects guy right should have had a tech artist we didn't have one time but so we we went after those people that we needed we made sure I had them collected collected concepts in the 8 month period right I was constantly working I went we got an outsourced budget let me go start

collecting concepts I actually hired our concept guy as a contractor before I could get a position approved for him in the studio so I was paying him to make concepts and I was outsourcing to another guy just so I could get my feet on the ground before the team hit the ground I don't know if anybody's had that problem we're like your team just start the day that you start it's like hey go make pre-production right um I'm betting a lot of people had that right somebody not just me come on so I was constantly building my team right in this whole process one of the more controversial things I did was actually isolated my team in a room like I booked the conference room I went out and got brand-new computers for everybody right they walked in day one everybody had a new computer with a concept ready to go and that was super important it was a fresh start

by isolating guys in a room there were so many reasons to do that from us from a management level right like you know I had 10 artists I had no programmers I wanted these guys to believe that they can make anything I want to empower that it created a little bit of a mystique to the team because I kept everyone out not only were they in that room together no one thought we were working on and it's crazy and it wasn't me trying to be a jerk it was me I needed this filter out the white noise right I didn't want anybody you know critiquing a sectoid before I had figured out what a soldier looked like to and what the terrain looked like and I just didn't want that and then on top of it I didn't want anybody also kind of hammering my team on it either when I'm not around and not anybody that you know just happens in development everyone's a part of it so people start talking so we kind of filtered that out and then the biggest thing though was I the rest of

the studio as my litmus test for whether or not this game was going to be cool when they saw it it was going to be the first time anybody had seen it and that was a huge role for us that we they they played a stiff apartment process and then the other thing about being in the room together was that it established this critique tone like we had guys that were super extroverted and guys that were super introverted and they were sitting right next to each other and over a period of the four months that we work on this because we day one Zen was four months they you watch the guys who were introverted just kind of start coming out of their shell and they'd start talking about their work and the honesty in the discussion about what the work was a they all felt empowered to talk about to each other about their work because they were all in a room together they couldn't avoid it but you also started to see the team chemistry change right that guys who were in in individual offices before and would just

hide in there we're now unable to do that and so they were communicating back and forth in a way that was completely new you know you read all that stuff about in management books about level four communication right like honesty we truly achieve that what these guys had no problem talking to each other about what was right long and that was enormous when starting a project and so that feeds into achieving buy-in they all felt empowered right everybody could affect change and you know and on top of that I was trying to provide concepts that challenge their skills challenge them to step to the next level and every time I did it they met it and crushed it the achieving buy-in is the easy part the main maintaining by anything is the hard part right and this is what gets hard about making games but even during pre-production you had to find these little points to kind of buoy the team keep them believing in what you're doing because if any one guy in this process as I've thought about this now you know

10 years of looking back on it if any one guy in this group of people in that room doesn't believe in what I'm doing it doesn't happen so this is the room believe it or not and this is one of those kind of booing moments we're actually if you notice there's old XCOM in the background the original game and guys are learning about the game they're playing because we're remaking cuz again a lot of these guys never played it because they were too young and so we're learning about the old game while we're making a new game and trying to make sure that was freshener of his mind and you can see the lead designers in there he's stand-in there you know looking at what the guys are doing talking to them about how the game works which was a great experience that room got so hot was ridiculous there was no air conditioning and it was winter and all those computers and monitors it was ridiculous so some of

the questions that we had you know what was was the theme of the game what's the setting of the game how do we would have designed goals how do those affect our you know where is the camera what do we have to communicate where is all that stuff going to be what is important to the designer and then what are the visual opportunities so again can we drop a camera down can we create your immersion points can you even push those further do they interrupt the gameplay how fast they have to be we were able to change these things on the fly if run the run cycle was too long speed it up because we're working in a platform that was very easy for us and then setting up our pipelines working large to small what's your largest creature which our smallest creature make sure you include them because there they're your bookends and then looking at the terrain looking at the buildings working in asking the right questions about what's important what's going to need to be solved and attacking it from

that perspective so our first answers this is the first concept from XCOM again we're trying to establish our mood we're trying to figure out what's the tone of this game again we wanted to use a lot of things that had a context of people but then we wouldn't give them a twist and so you can see this farmhouse is recognizable to everyone right resonates with everybody but you got these weird soldiers in the foreground and get this crazy orange light in the background coming out of one of the windows we wanted to have that unsettling kind of feel this was also we did two of these and we move all right and this is before I had the team we did two of them move on this is the little gray this is sexually everybody knows what one of these looks like but redesigning one is actually kind of hard because everybody doesn't know what they look like so doing a new take when it was tough but this is our smallest character in the game and this is our largest this was the sector pod this is the early incarnation of it he's 30 feet

tall the sectoid is four and we had to get them both on the screen I remember us sliding them around in max can you still play the game the designer can you still play the game from this perspective and from there we had started attacking the presentation like I was saying where is the camera can you play the game from here we looked at all these little vignettes and then started moving the camera around what happens when you go in buildings does it get does the camera push in does get more claustrophobic can we pitch the camera a little differently this little study of 9 drawings was huge for us and then we took that we translated it right we this is actually built to standards that we were going to model with like we were trying to figure out what those were and then we sent it back into concept - this is our farmhouse hit it how does this work so like I said up up little room we're in this is the first day you can see the data on the wall my chicken scratch on there and these are our goals and I'll get to these goals in a minute

but but it was important we identified all this stuff what our where our immersion points what are the goals for each section of this little gameplay movie that we're going to make and if you look at it these are the storyboards which actually really pretty closely to the previous movie reign although read images are actually at the immersion points these are the points where we felt we have visual opportunities to drop the camera down where could we push it where can we make a typically non immersive game really immersive and enhance the game design rather than take it away so that leads the previous movie and this is what we made [Music] [Music]

[Music] okay definitely car situation [Music] [Music] we got gooks second floor [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

what are you doing I'm up [Music] Rehana

[Music] [Music] so I think one of the important things about that video is that we were really trying to capture kind of how you feel about your characters and that little like narrative story that happens in the game when you play when you play and it's about your soldiers and so each time we do one of these things that is our thrust it wasn't really the intention but it kind of works out that way and there's there's there's something

really satisfying about that and so that will come up later and mention that a bit but what we miss and we were planning this so everything you just saw in that all those goals on the board we got really close to those but a couple things we missed and this is important too we didn't think about how the floor was going to transition the only point in that movie that that's utter magic but we were not adhering to the rules is when the floor transition happens if you notice we faded to black we got to that we don't know how we're going to handle this because it's a text solution as well and it was just ten artists in a room and so we took a note of that we knew we didn't have an answer for it and we continued to move on we could have gotten bogged down there we didn't but it was also important to have found that question then and not find it out eight months later and so the one of the things we didn't didn't really know how we were going to solve was the interior fog of war between buildings how that

inside the building side of the rooms work right or exterior fog of war we at the end which kind of like we put fog of war in there but we didn't if you notice it doesn't reveal again we knew we didn't have an answer for these we made notes of them and the next thing we did was that drawing which is pretty close to how our building hiding works now even even in x2 it's pretty much the same thing this was immediately as soon as we finished that the concept went right in we know we have a problem here how do we want to solve this and then we sent it over the graph graphics programmers this we want to make and then fog of war we played around with some stuff we at this point it was actually a physical thing and that had some gameplay issues so until more traditional fog of war but again we didn't want to be black we wanted it that color we wanted it to be didn't want the screen to get all the life being sucked out of it by the by the blackness of it and so we're trying to

get a fog of war that was complementary to complementary to the light environment and even though it didn't end up looking like this this is kind of the final result ended up being more like that so back to our goals that we had on the wall the things that we worked on the very first day everything up there we hit in blue the red thing we knew we probably couldn't do we're trying to figure out how we could maybe get multiple shadows and then affects the destructible interior and exterior we we had in the movie but they weren't necessarily gank a play compliant we knew we still had to solve those but we did pretty good considering that was our initial list and so this came out of it as well like I said we needed to not just draw a picture of a farmhouse what were the step lights going to be but where the railings going to be what were the walls going to be what were the how were the walls going to work on the grid

you know is there a grid you know what is the wall height going to be door heights window openings all that and the funniest thing about this is that this document was made about ten years ago and these metrics are pretty much the same metric we use next time to and have just been kind of enhanced a little bit more now but these are the same exact measurements for the most part so one of the things that came out of the previz if you notice I was playing more concerned with the presentation than necessarily the aesthetics I feel like we were kind of in the ballpark 'el in aesthetics but my primary goal was was the presentation and this was the concept of the soldiers when we rolled into that but again once we made it readability came into play and we're like you know can you really read things does it hold up in both cameras right and so that set us down a row where we wanted to try to mess with the

proportions and this is where the minister thing really came in and the guy on the right is is the proportions that we end up shipping in the game for the soldiers but we got much more broad much more chunky and we did this for rehabilitation you know we wanted to read in both cameras and trying to balance those two things out another thing you know our first pot reveal the first time you seen a lien was in the movie this is what ships in the game we wanted to set up set up the missions this was a big big thing for us we went establish some tone before you went in started blowing things up right you know we had you know the dropship come in and every in every mission and guys exiting in and you had a feel for the flavor of the map this is the gameplay camera in in the movie and this is what we ship with so we'd established all these cameras were going to be and

those that was pretty much stuck the significant cameras stuck and then some of the intangible results the things that we ended up getting out of that movie that we really weren't planning on a huge morale increase for the team and I'm not just talking about the 10 guys in that room and I'm not just talking about the X company the whole studio the morale increase in the studio was crazy they didn't we'd never put together anything like this you know it was a it was a it was our art Bible for a long time it was our Constitution this was how we wanted the game to look anytime anybody didn't have something says look we said go with the movie house that was work go look at the movie and in fact we would check the movie like okay this how supposed to be right and we double check it if they ended up being a recruiting tool for us we went for so long without being announced that it was hard but when we bring people into saying this is the game we're making it was it was easy to then hire people and then it also ended up being an

internal marketing tool not just with us but the publisher it ended up being what we pitched to get the game to get Daiki so we made a prototype after that and it was missing that soldier story stuff that I was talking about it was missing some of the immersion didn't have the feel of that previz movie so again we went back to what we could do fast what could we be agile about what can we move quickly on and we ended up making another previz movie and this time it's an engine again at this point we're over we've got our got our style set we've got our characters worked out we understand our proportions we've got all these tools in the toolbox right now and so no more max we're using Unreal 3 at this point and so we made another movie leave out

[Music] [Music]

[Music] animator said have a little fondant on there but so one of the really interesting thing about that we you know

we at this point we're really pushing it we're we're really pushing the boundaries rush cams death cams pod reveals how are those going to be and you know going into it you know if I was going to get thirty percent I would have been happy I think we ended up getting a little more than that and the reaction from the further misstep was great and they saw they're like yeah we can do a lot of this but a lot of that stuff did permeate into the game and it was really useful and I think brought back a little bit of immersion that we're trying to find again you see pot reveals how they look you know what the game looks like when you're shooting the targeting cameras again more of the pot of eels and more of the gameplay so then that leaves the sex com2 and this was a really different start for us a lot of different things happening in this game the we turned the premise one it's when it's won its head it was no longer a defensive game that was an attacking game and that was a

pretty big deal and you were now resistant and it was twenty years in the future oh and by the way you lost the last game which was a bit of a twist and so you know the difference in a sequel the theme and tone had changed completely the desire the push the visual mechanics proved out in the first game we really wanted to push those and you need to be converted we went to real-time lighting with the physically based rendering and the design changes were we're huge and again when I tried to make a previous I'm trying to actually encapsulate some of those things that are the most difficult fully procedural Maps and new gameplay mechanics one of the things here too that's probably worth mentioning is like the procedural maps part of it I was working on that while the team was working on enemy a pin and and in retrospect that I was probably I got so wrapped up in that that I lost a little bit of my my

footing on preparing for the team so one of the things I'll probably a little different but what we knew the team was largely intact again our team has been together for 10 12 years at this point for the most part we understood the gamer making out we didn't have to go what is the contemporary equivalent the visual mechanics were you needed Potterville you needed whatever you needed you could you knew how the game was going to work right and you understood the presentation you know if you had a new armor type you knew how to reveal for it all the communication pipelines remain the same and we really understood now having made the first game we dissected it and what we really needed to do to make a procedural version of it so approach again we went to simulated gameplay an agile attempt again this time we're in Engine but

unlike before we're now in the midst of rebuilding the renderer and the material system so that was that was interesting we also didn't isolate the team we didn't feel the need to we also didn't have everybody working on it all together it kind of went through chunks so when through phases in it while we were developing the game and providing content for the rest of the team we were busy making the previz in conjunction with that which was quite a bit different and a bit harder and then all the assets we made were game usable so the little goals we really want to improve the fidelity of the geometry the animation everything we wanted to turn everything up there were there were points in enemy within that I wanted to make Richard and so we attack those we wanted to improve the cameras overwatch death cams just the camera in general

with alien turn and then we also added new mechanics like Mele concealment mechanic was new how are we going to represent a mode where you were kind of invisible to the enemy calling reinforcements something new making the environment environment reactive like habit speak you have it react to your presence again your resistance force and it's a futuristic world and then skirting around things with waypoints and then we with establish look appeal and we needed to use the game engine as the renderer this time so this is the first time I think we've ever shown this this is a the previous movie from X come to the cooperation is appreciated turn around

[Music] reach on the move we rotate moving to position eyes on target [Music] weapons free : Aki ronimal get down there repositioning on up they

got me locked down I'm alright here goes done go go go without an erotic Kovach take him out hopped out and survived or box I'll take a fire

movement ahead they're bringing in reinforcements we've got something new down here oh thanks counterfeiters rather enjoy that fear the wrinkles Roger tracks I've got eyes on the target God is down

dammit No Surrender Roger [Music] so a lot of the stuff in there ended up making its way into the game of melee those the beginnings our concealment system reinforcements all sorts of stuff which was great

we definitely were able to establish the tone of the game we clearly improve the fidelity of the game we actually were able to take a look at our animation pipeline and streamline the number of animations we needed we were doing all that while we were building this you know it also gave us a real chance to actually work with engineering on the lighting the lighting is clearly in completeness in this version and it's something we were we were able to work with them while we were doing it in person the game cameras again we got our start on the building kit that would allow us to make procedural world and character customization was was definitely a thought at this point that was really expanding so this is a on the Left that's the game the previous movie and on the right is his game ended up looking up looking like and again this is uh the overwatch cameras this story - this is very interesting we we had the

over watching the game right and is something that the lead engineer and I had talked a bit about and we had talked a bit about as a team you know making that a lot more immersive and feeling more tense and so he had been working on some stuff and then III we put in a double overwatch right where you would seamlessly move from shooting from one to the next if you had two characters never watch the first one fire and then it would the camera would seamlessly interpolate over to the next and so we talked a little bit about it we threw it in and III as this we're gonna this is how we want to look like we think we've got this going to work and he walks in he's like oh yeah by the way that thing you wanted to do yeah like it's on my machine if you want to see it and it was better than anything we fabricated which is pretty amazing so in closing I think that you know as you're working pre-production you know you have to think about your team you

have to cater your pre-production to your team identify the right questions like what are the things that are going to impact you that are going to give you answers real answers that you can use down the road because you avoid them you're going to get them at some point anyway so you may as well try to front-load them as much as possible work large to small you know questions with that without answer is like the floor transition they were still really important questions presentation is the key I think I've kind of talked a lot about that and pushing the boundaries new challenge convention like can we do this making that first movie like it challenged everything in our studio like where was was our engine going to be you know that opened up us actually moving unreal because we put forth this is what we wanted to look like now how do we get there and again tailor your pre-production for your game and your team like really think about how all those things come together to provide the pre-production want to enter production and that's it

so anybody have any questions if you I hope that was helpful I've got like 10 years of this all collapse down into 45 minutes if any are questions if you guys want to go to the mic we have a few time few minutes also have presents to get you guys to come out of hiding if you don't have XCOM first question few asking questions can come pick a pick a game so okay hey Greg thanks so much for the awesome presentation my question was actually about your interaction with design because settling and a lot of art stuff requires a lot of design stuff to be figured out the design go through a separate kind of free process that they did or did you guys kind of do it organically and how does that sort of chicken and egg thing work for you so especially with with any unknown that was organic again it was us

in one design and the lead designer right so we would talk to him I [ __ ] him for eight months leading up to us actually getting the team and as we were collecting stuff it was this you know we'd spent half our day just like well what do we think we're going to do here what about this situation what about that you know what we want to sexually TIFF we do how big is it you know like even those kind of questions and so as we got into the previous we would he would come down and would be like literally ten moves o'clock it up can we play from here do you think we can play from here yes or no oh it's too close to us back the camera out let's tilt it down and it was a it was a much more organic situation and it worked great I mean it was one of the best you know working situations I've ever had that sounds awesome so but did you guys ever end up in a situation after the the pre-production where design had to change stuff and you had to yea revisit er that's where we went and mended made that combat to movie right so yeah they would you know they were in a situation where they one of the relook at things and then we you

know our our answer is usually to previz something and so we jumped in and worked again with and kind of like can we do this can we not do that it's really one of things I've found is I think this is great working with the designers because we're able to visualize what they think is going to be happening before it happens and so if it doesn't work when we try to visualize it a lot I think we can head off their questions too which is why I try to always work in you know what are some of the more difficult melee and you want to concealment mode you want reinforcements come in how do we approach that so that was yeah that was that's kind of how it work yeah we do that frequently cool thank you yeah oh good I was gone so you had mentioned that at the beginning of the pre-production you gave everybody like a new computer to get them kind of fresh start that fresh feel so when you start to approach a sequel yep um I think you tend to take basically take the codebase from the first game and move it over which of course brings along all the frustrations

from the codebase from the original game over to the sequel yeah how do you approach that situation and kind of still getting that kind of fresh start without bringing over the scars of the earlier development so I think I did that wrong one too you know I didn't wipe we didn't wipe the asset library even though we were switching renders because we wanted to l DS to have assets to work with and that was bit messy and caused a lot of problems for us I think the that clean start is something that I underestimated into that I that I think I did really well on and one and then I you know I got the two and I was I was knee-deep in procedural and I wasn't I think I could have been better about that like you know how do you separate that and clean out all the old stuff get a fresh start is it a you know making sure everybody has something to work with day one you know that that's huge if you can keep guys from deflating it is so much more

work to pull guys up after they've kind of deflated than it is if you can kind of just catch them before they get that far and give them something to be excited about I mean it's your job as an ad to kind of be a cheerleader to a degree right so yeah that was kind of how it worked thank you yeah hi Graham yeah yeah whatever you don't have yes okay how critical do you think it is to have an art director at the very beginnings of pre-production it was really interesting to see your approach because you had no programmers the studio that I'm coming from we we typically are very design oriented so we try out a lot of fermentation with game design and we actually don't have a whole lot of artists early on and so essentially to see how the studios do it different ways but if you are starting pre-production without an art director is that an okay option and in your opinion and if given the experience with that okay so is it okay to start pre-production without an

art director it I guess it depends on the game and the team how senior the team is and the understanding of the game you're making but I you know I I think having our truck is a really good idea you know we're were we come we come from a yeah come from a design driven studio as well right like and and for us this was a departure this was the first time that any of us have worked this way in the studio firing it's super important to have an art director early I mean there's there it's finding those questions and and deciding what those questions are and having the vision and to kind of think about what is going to cost us money later it's easy to underestimate that but I think it's it's absolutely crucial and again I think it's having the right art director as well you know does that rule sometimes present itself or is that very clearly defined on on day one typically from your experience what do you mean like like day one when you start

pre-production do you say okay this person is the art director but that project or is it typically a several senior level people and one of them tends to so do we have a rule do we have an art director when we start yet like we like we know like I knew for eight months I was going to be the art director next column so we try to we try to have that worked out because again you've got to get your communication with amongst your management team worked out and then you know kind of figure out the leads I think you can delay leads for a little while like there's points where like I'm not necessarily in a rush or if our team structure is really flat and again as long as we will all work together like it's pretty level it you know we can delay that sometimes I don't necessarily rush into that but you know you can delay that sometimes so I think it's really important how to keep people in the right roles and that includes our cracker let's go thank you hey thanks for the talk if you had 20% of the pre-pro budget that you have what would you cut what would you prioritize well had 20% of the pre probe budget that I have would I cut that's a man

that is a tough question like my producers in the room or something did he feed you that question he's in the bath right there no well III guess I would cut the stuff that is more isolated like again I'm always going to focus on what is the presentation what's the gameplay change like what are the things we need to solve so like again we kind of know character customization I could I could cut that I could you know do we have to tell the little player vignette that kind of works its way through these things I make that we make maybe you know I mean I I'm kind of looking at now we're just doing chunks right like what do I have to do the connected thing maybe you could actually break it up into little mini mini previous and that would probably work and that would probably cut your budget a bit what was your turnaround time on a mini previous when those pre-visit uh you're about four months total start each one

even the one where we're building the game with it it takes about four months from start efficient finish with about ten or twelve of us on the team we start with a 2d animatic generally in most cases and then we run from there and we stick to pretty well and make that storyboard that was drawing on a whiteboard that terrible chicken scratch that's the only art by the way in the presentation that was mine my team is very talented but that was one of those things where yeah we started the 2d storyboard and we run from there and it sticks pretty close generally and our timing is really close to our 2d storyboards - even with Maki Nui so yep thanks yeah from your games you want good hi so when you're fleshing out pre-production you have this general idea of the design of the game how do you lock that down maybe help prevent feature creep and I know there's a lot of cool ideas that you come up with during the development process if you're trying to build a presentation

or either the producers or an event like III and you have a cool idea what what kind of personal criteria do you have to say okay we will let this in we will work on this so we can get it in for e3 because it's really cool or no we shouldn't try and overwork ourselves and work backwards by trying to implement this mmm so how do I decide what to work into a presentation not so much that but like just preventing future creep like in a large large-scale sense so when I start these again it's a dialogue with the designer and what do we want to do what are his goals and then I try to work each one of those into into the previous that I'm that I'm working on and once we kind of set that it's it's pretty well set now as we're in discovery and the whole point of it being this agile process that we kind of pick our platform on if it as you see

things we may give things challenge things that make them rethink it and vice versa as you see things might become more clear and so you know but that's usually established for early that's the big ticket things we're going to try to hit and at that point the numbers game like we want we don't want to like overextend too far into our into our pre-production budget so again we try to contain these things in a certain amount of time so yeah we try to establish those those questions early with the designer and and it usually doesn't create much it's if anything extreme lines it for him and us we can kind of figure out catch the catch the pitfalls early so at the end of seeing something that's like oh this would be a cool direction but you're like it's it's getting away from our core design concept to go we're just now you'd be cool but we're not going to do it because what we think will generally rethink it and bits of collaboration its conversation between us and design and tech really and as we as long as we work together it's a pretty open conversation thank you

this is a question for you more or less than pre-production and so be free to ask the VC to say if you'd like me to talk to you afterwards but I'm going into the college aspect of learning this all this stuff but my true passion relies in team and project management how can anyone like me get to a position like you are in today learn a lot about the different systems like understand each discipline like I'm not an expert in anyone my background is really in environments and systems I'm an illustrator and I had a painter and so for me you know I would consider myself actually more of an environment arse but I've I've done all of it enough to be dangerous at all of it to be honest so get a get a broad understanding of it like that's key that's the first place you can understand what people are talking about

when they talk about in the needs and how to ask the right questions and then like I said in the previous talk you know like get the right leaves like get strong leaves and the people that you're in places where you're weak you know I I like animation a lot but my animation lead is fantastic and you know we have a partnership where he he works on stuff and I only hit him when something's wrong so you would you approach a job with oh I'm a I'm a team manager did it or would you approach them or start Indy and then work your way up with a portfolio uh probably start in me maybe it depends we talked afterwards yeah thank you much one last question right Emily okay I can catch up with me afterwards if anybody wants to talk so what was the challenges perceived was going from one engine to another specifically in reference to

real-time lighting and a PVR pipeline oh man and I'm nightmare I mean like it was just so different like and it's funny because it's like TVR seems so easy and makes complete sense but the actual execution of it is a little finicky sometimes and so that was a big big thing the PVR part was hard and plus we were actually developing like they were engineering it as I'm making so it was hard to see be like what was right was wrong or what was just being rendered wrong and then the you know deferred lighting you know going from basic lighting the deferred was you know it was essential for what we were trying to make but but there were definitely like I think you things you lose in that process for sure but but I mean I think that there's ways to work around all that stuff but did you know building a rocket ship is you're flying to the moon is always hard but it was also good because we're also I think were able to identify things as we were

moving you know in a parallel road with the engineers so that was that was applause thank you yes no problem thanks everybody [Applause] [Music]