UEFN & HaZ Dulull- A New Dawn for Creators | 326

foreign welcome to another episode of Game Dev Unchained the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon Pham and with me a special guest has the law how are you doing you got it right in one you get a nice one there we go so uh awesome this is part of the podcast where I asked our guests which is yourself to introduce yourself to or listeners and viewers out there who you are where you been where you at where are you heading just a little uh short bio before we get started sure hi everyone I'm has the love I'm one of the founders of hasmation a production company that produces animated feature films um episodic series video games um anything that involves storytelling basically that's what we do my

background Richie started in video games so like back in 98 and it kind of shows my age a bit here but like I I started off working in video games like as an intern on like several like racing games end up working for comical codemasters more racing games and the funny thing is I don't even drive a car so there you go um and then eventually decided to go and work in the movie industry because that's Adventure is what I wanted to do um worked on like movies like you know the Dark Knight Hellboy 2 as a visual effects artist and then became a VFX supervisor VFX producer then made a bunch of short films ended up making two feature films on Netflix a show on Disney Plus or fast lane and that's not my production company and now it's kind of weird because I felt like like I started off in video games wanted to leave to make movies and now the lines of blurred and now I'm using video game technology to make movies there you go that's me well you did you definitely been busier than most of us with that extensive uh impressive career right so I was

super excited to talk to you because there has been a couple of convergences uh that you know you've you know uh obviously have been undertaking with your personal career but also you know as an industry we're seeing at first you know with movies and and games kind of sharing tools and knowledge uh with especially unreal five and Beyond you know we see in the Mandalorian using virtual back sets and we've seen more and more shows Marvel movies themselves adopting virtual uh uh sets right um and then we're obviously seeing that spill over into independent uh projects right in a big way right um we're seeing a lot of artists uh you know swapping sides right um using the same technology a lot of you know uh teaching the the visual effects folks you know game tools to

leverage effects tools using their background and knowledge uh to help gain folks to kind of catch up to the next high quality standards right um and then even more interesting enough you know unreal fortnite uh unreal editor fortnite um yeah this thing that they just just dropped the last year and a half right um and I would love to kind of delve deeper into all this with you right um when do you first started to notice this convergence of moving in games starting to happen what were your thoughts yeah for sure I mean it's so interesting because I remember when I was in games and I tried to get a job in visual effects and film right and Batman I was like at that point you know I built a career as a cinematics artist or should I say FMV artist is what they used to call it back in the day um and it was really hard getting a job in in the film industry because there's a level of snobbery oh yeah you know

there's some right oh you guys make games like it's all low poly and you know like 64 by 64 size textures yeah we we're the We're The Rock style we make movies yeah so I remember going into the movie industry I I had to really pick what I wanted to do and I became a a visual effects compositor because I was able to take photography or my my you know my education photography because I love photography and and CG and put that together and that's composite in um was when I worked in games I was a generalist I was like do lighting animation like whatever it takes to get to get stuff into the game right on like especially like PS2 with limited memory and stuff um but now like now it's so interesting because like even in a company like we we hire a lot of people from like the games industry like even like my artists Houdini artists you know blender artists because the quality threshold on these on on these animated films are exactly

the same threshold as the video games cinematics like I mean I remember spending weeks trying to render a sequence like a water sequence or something um for for a movie and now like I'll put on my PlayStation 5 and it's a game done in Unreal Engine 5.2 and it's all in real time I'm walking around in water it's splashing and all kinds of things and I can't even tell the difference between a cinematic and in-game Graphics like you had a really high high-end ones that goes for Gmail or Call of Duty so I mean that really made me think oh my God we're at this point now where um you know we can use whatever tools and we have to remember unreal is free yeah you know so is blender right so it was back in the day when I started off like you know we we had to like like use versions of 3D Studio Max and acquire it in some interesting ways that we wouldn't do now was now we have subscription but also the tools are free so and also knowledge as well there's so much more knowledge today like thank God for YouTube right but like when I started off man it was

forums or you had to start as an intern somewhere and the knowledge wasn't shared that much because it was very nichy um and I think like technology like unreal let's not forget Unity as well Unity played a big part in this as well but like specifically unreal um it's really opened the doors for like any creators that have got a great idea and the drive and tenacity to make stuff it there is no excuse like you don't need huge amounts of money to do stuff like for me it was like I had done two feature films like one called the beyond that ended up going into Netflix uh another one called 2036 original name with the lovely Katie Sackhoff you can see okay can I see Mandalorian as Baker tan um did a movie with her and then I ended up directing a really cool show for Disney plus called Fast Lane which I ended up becoming an exact producer on um but then like getting ready for the next movie the pandemic hits and you're like oh you know that's all live action pot and hold but I was already using Unreal Engine to do pre-visualization you know where you're blocking out sequences on the

computers give an idea what it's going to feel like tonally pace and wise Technical and all that but the previous I was doing like the quality of the previous wasn't like the quality of the previous I did on the Dark Knight like on the Dark Knight it was grayscale is you know sometimes T pose or sometimes animated like this just to get the point across right because it's like a tech Vis as well so it's all usually very rudimentary kind of crude right whereas the previous coming out in Unreal Engine version 4.18 so that's like 2019 2018 I was using it um it had lighting reflection Shadows Ray trays it had all this gorgeous stuff on my MacBook Pro by the way so what I'm showing is the studios in in like in Los Angeles or just Executives or finances yeah as impressive as the previous was they were like scratching their head like what exactly are you watching here has like you say it's previous but we've seen previous and it doesn't look like it this looks like a animated film like

a first pass animated film or something or a video game cinematic and yeah it's until when the pandemic you hit I remember speaking to my business partner Paula prickard and you know Paula comes from a very heavy like she's a veteran post-producer works on tons of movies the last movie was The Expendables four um which which looks really cool and um so she was very much live action but she's got a lot of technology so I remember telling her hey let's make an animated film I remember remember her game we don't have the resources for that like without the enthusiasm but like how we can make an anime in film and I started showing her some of the stuff we were doing she was like wait what that's not on your laptop and that's when both of us like realized you know the cogs and their head starts doing hang on like if we did this for 90 minutes and just just got some context here like our first movie to be honest the first movie that me and Paula first worked on together um as producers who's that my independently Finance movie it's the movie where um again even more content's going back like when I worked in visual effects I

done a bunch of short films one of them did really well I got a Vimeo staff pick called project Kronos variety Holland reporter covered it and they optioned it it was a time when sci-fi was like the bubble was big you know you had people like you know blancam's District nine you had um Gary Edwards monsters you had you know um Chronicle so Hollywood were looking for like VFX artists turned directors and I was in that bubble it's great you know I rode that bubble was fantastic uh ended up getting Studio deals with Fox and Paramount writing and stuff um but nothing was getting made like I mean just the land of Hollywood nothing gets made very quickly um or maybe it was just timing so I remember they had to renew the um they went to like renew the option for the for project crane I'll say hey here's another like X-Men money like to real to renew the option I'm like what are we doing I'm like I need to make a movie I'm still working as a visual of X producers I was working on a show called poldark at the time it's like um Victorian kind of um period drama um cyan I've taken them taken the rights

back you know amicably and everything um and they say look go off and make the movie you want to make and I end up making the 90 minute version of what the shot was which is a fake documentary I remember doing that and and then I I was getting ready for my next movie the one Kenny stuck with that got green that pretty much quit after the Martian came out by Ridley Scott because at the time no one wanted to make movies about Mars until we just got made it the Martian and Paul was came on as a post-producer I remember her watching the first couple of movies she was like I'd like to give you some notes I'm like yeah sure and she's like the complete opposite of me um but she's very production heavy but also very creative as well which is a very rare thing to find in a producing partner it usually produces like numbers numbers where she's got a good creative streak so we jail really well on that um but yeah Flash Forward now we want to make an animated film all in unreal we we spoke to Epic and epic we're really kind to give us an epic Mega Grant uh two Mega grants to help us um get the film going but just for the people listening epic don't Finance movies so you just

can't go in and say how about a great script it's gonna be an Oscar winning you've got to finance it they financed they gave us a mega Grant because uh we were doing something that was not being done at the time and that was we were trying to create um an animated film 90 minutes 4K with HDR color grading but done in a very anime s style um as opposed to photo which is you know PBR photo based rendering which is what unreal is based on you know we will break in shaders we're creating our own anime shaders we weren't using filters create the look we wanted to do it properly so we got some funding for that so so epic kind of Finance the the process and for us to then share that process to the world which was an amazing thing to do um but we you know we we spent like just about just over two years working on that very small team and again like you know I'm sure you know in animated films like hundreds of people it's kind of army of people right if you look at the credits in spite of us hundreds of people um whereas in hours it was like we started off with just me and my head of

CG andrettitechi who's my longtime collaborator um and then we started bringing other people on and then came five and then like in mid production we were like 12 including motion capture artists I was directing motion capture via Zoom we had this amazing motion capture artist called Gabriella and worked with another called ACE rail you know a lot of it was remote um and it just shows you that oh my God we we can just use tools like Unreal Engine get to support the community as you're sharing stuff to make a fully fled feature film I mean you know it's it's very violent the movie obviously when you see the trailer but we made a movie during pandemic and everyone was paid it's all financed properly and I think a lot of that is down to embracing technology yeah I mean the the same things that you're seeing um we're we're seeing the same side on on the game side you know uh what used to take a larger team to do uh you know a smaller team can can competitively look very similar it's

hard to kind of differentiate what a solo developer did versus you know the Gap has been closing with bigger AAA titles with 500 plus people because the technology and tools are are there for for for for us to take advantage um the cool thing is that seeing that you know hearing your story about seeing the convergence happening recognizing you know how real time is awesome uh in terms of workflow um you know I have a very little experience uh you know I worked at digital domain for a little while right okay okay um but it was the very first recognition that you know starting to use it for for like trailers because trailers before was the same way it goes to a visual effects house for games and they do their treatment and then slowly the in-game cinematics became basically in-game cinematics you know uh just you know uh taking a few uh Liberties here and there but still running in real time uh with inside the

engine versus uh using uh other things pre-rendered yeah yes so that that all that definitely helped push this idea of like hey we can cheap quality pretty fast now yeah um and it's been exciting to kind of see that and what's more exciting is giving um because I'm sure you you know maybe one of the reasons why he left in the industry for a while well you know the stability was a problem um right for I think the PlayStation 2 3 area is like every other Studio was closing or something that's exactly what happened dude I I moved up North I'm in London I'm a London based guy and I end up living in Manchester right because like all the studios are up north and like the UK was thriving back then with like small developers end up working for a small developable virtual crafts I remember going there spending like four months there and and then I think EA came in and bought a couple of studios and it was the whole thing that happened and I was in one of those small Studios got shut down I'm like oh my God it's

like me and my partner's got a house there and everything so we end up slowly making our way back down to London's like stopping by at code Masters like which is like you know in the middle of the UK and the Midlands and working there for a bit and then end up like going to back to London and working for a company called kuju entertainment at the time I think Nicole headstrong games now they did a game called battalion for Nintendo uh I think it was Gamecube if I remember correctly so I end up doing that yeah yeah I mean it's it's a it's going a little better but like what's what's cool yeah it's gotten way better since then um you know the birth of the Apple iPhone helped you know as other Industries kind of helped grow grow the game industry of the movies in effects this convergence have helped artists be able to migrate to different yes professionally using the same tools so overall very beneficial as an artist it's the best time to wanting to do something or wanting to work for someone

um and no one's really stopping you so what what's super exciting is what I'm starting to see too is and we can talk more about this the Unreal Engine fortnite honestly man I didn't know anything much about I was like oh great yeah they're starting the modding Community again but like you know there's like this you know it's one of those things that I myself need to dig you know deeper into and you're you're the first one that's you know talking about it because you know they made an announcement of a lot of EX Riot or explicit geyser forming a studio specifically for developing yeah it's a really it's a really good I mean I was at GDC this year when I did that announcement and I remember you know there was a long cue to getting to the Epic um the Epic sort of like location where this thing was happening yeah but it's like this separate building outside it's a long massive key so me and a friend of mine um said oh we're just going to join this queue um it was like a good 45 minute wait at least and we got in there

and you know Tim Sweeney comes on and talks about the future of like the metaverse and and where you know epic's going which is awesome and then the minute like they they announced and they showed like uefn it was like it was like Steve Jobs had come on stage with the new iPhone or something like that you couldn't you couldn't even you can't get that from a video like I was dead everyone including myself like holy [ __ ] this is a game changer like you know like we can create content in fortnite that already has 500 million plus user base already so there's an audience base but our content gets to be seen and played on consoles like PlayStation 5 the Xbox the the switch um the Android phones obviously not the Apple phones and um and let everyone you can see everyone in that room had Cog spinning in their head their eyes like holy [ __ ] we can we can do stuff

um and I remember like speaking to some of the Epic guys um at GBC they're like man the minute this thing launched I'll serve and crashed because everyone registered um and I think that really is you know true democratization I mean unreal already has democratized creators like the process of creating something on a commercial level already right instead done it with games they've done it with movies now with virtual production and animated films but the whole thing of like you know making a game is one thing getting your game out to the audience is oh as you know it's a whole nother battle and I think uefn bridges that Gap massively yeah I mean that that whole uh I mean it's a separate there's so many different like sub Industries within the game industry right now that's happening and uh not a lot of conversations between which is funny the mobile crowd is completely it's like going to high school right there's different niches that's happening and like the Creator content

you know the Roblox the the Minecraft you know yeah yeah and now uefn it's like this whole different crowd right uh that that exists within this this realm and it's exciting but like I said I'm getting the delayed effect of what you got from the analysis because I wasn't in that room right I said the news that I'm hearing I'm hearing pepper in and then recently that that you know announcement of a studio form just for that I was like what's going on I needed I need to look more into this right so um it's exciting like you said again another Avenue for creators to do something creative always a good thing um and I would love to kind of hear your personal experience with that right now like uh it's yeah I mean I'm gonna tell you now like the announcement was amazing but to get content made like you know on a professional commercial level that isn't like you know respectfully

that isn't like a bunch of kids have made some modded levels because you gotta think right you the whole thing fortnite has been well known for the fact that it's it's players can create stuff you know user generated content right just like Roblox and so on and as if you look at all the maps on there they all look the same because they're all created in what you call um fortnite Creator mode which is basically used in existing assets and skins and so on to build stuff and they're fun they're good they're so much fun to play when you can see why there's a 500 million plus user base on that but now you know it's open doors for creators that can create original content that can create worlds whether you're a game designer environment artist visual effects artists filmmaker and you can create worlds and you're using Unreal already you can migrate your environment your assets into uefn now of course there are a few um there are a few restrictions the big restriction is you cannot change a player character which kind of makes sense because obviously epic makes their money on skins and so on and that's an

economy right there um and everything else you can change the other thing also is you are limited to 400 Meg so you can't just go and throw in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of millions of polygons in there using like very expensive Mega scans in terms of resources to make your thing look gorgeous because there is a 400 Meg limit and there's a reason why this quadrant make limit is so that everyone can download it on their consoles or switch and play and you know it makes it fit it's a fair cap for everyone um so there's limitations on that but you know for me that just felt like going back to my PST days where I had to like take a vehicle have a texture which is 64 by 64. tile it and make it look really good running in very limited video memory and now I mean fortnite I mean fortnite is still way better than what I had back then on the PS2 but still like 400 Meg forces you to optimize yourself and it just makes me think like when you're making low budget movies you know you don't have the big the big expensive budgets

to build a set you find a location you make you make it work in that location right yeah um and I think that's what I think this is what uefn for me as a as a creative excites me and you know when I bring my team on there and my team's very small to do uefn project we can focus on the most important thing in a game which is the gameplay right yes we have the gorgeous environments but the cool thing is like all of the pains are usually associated in game development you know we're doing a we're doing a project called Max bionic men which is part of the idea Xbox program and that's all in Unreal Engine 5 5.2 and um we want to create a combat system we have to create a combat system we have to physically create one we want to create a really cool AI system you got to build that stuff got to figure out your collisions all of that stuff and yes it's easier and unreal because back in the day you had to buy um middleware tools like render Ware back in the day which was used on gameplay burnout or you the highest programmers to code that tools for you and a lot of your investment in making

game development back then was building the tools building the engine and saying you got this amazing engine and you can have a Slater games and the Publishers invest you in that investing in the tools and in the engine that your company owns sending a visual effects in a place like digital domain ilm had their own proprietary tools back then to do fur water and so on and now you know you can just use that stores and Autodesk right um so but you still have to do a lot of work still in Unreal Engine now in uefn your your physics is sorted your game mechanics in terms of like you know loading the weapons all that all that is done for you all you have to do is be really smart and create a very good experience for the audience and remember it's like it's solo gameplay multi-game multiplayer gameplay the audience base what they're like you know teenagers to 25 30 year olds maybe um but also be really smart with how you optimize your levels you know things like while partitioning right that's a Unreal Engine five thing that's also now

in uefm so now you can do World partitioning which means you can create expansive Landscapes but they load up much quicker right as opposed to like doing lods the manual way the level of detail and manual the very manual way I remember back in the day like building five versions of the LOD of a car or something was now unreal does that really well and uefend does it so uefn is like Unreal Engine Five Point one um light version right so it looks like unreal it works like unreal but there are certain things they they rip out so like the Niagara particle system like in in Unreal Engine five it's extremely complex you have it's much more notaries and so on you try to migrate a particle system from unreal into uefn it's mostly going to break because a lot of things it doesn't recognize it you'll just you just have red errors everywhere um so you have to build your particles from scratch um the big thing also with uefn is that you can use existing fortnite assets and

they will they're all built in a very modular way and the cool thing is like if you want a wall from one of the buildings in one of the Epic fortnite maps you can use it you can just drag that wall and then that's got Collision that's got it's destructible but you are limited where you can't change a texture for example you can change the colors can't change the textures so what we end up doing is putting our own logo on a on a geometry plane and kind of putting it quite close to it so it doesn't flick or anything yeah um so you have to think really smart how to do fins we've got cinematics running in in our uefn experience and you've got to figure out like how long should that cinematic go for the other thing also is when you're doing cinematic in Unreal Engine like a a console game yeah you use something called sequencer and it's really well managed in uefn everything has to be loaded in the game level and your sequencer then references that from the game level was in traditional Unreal Engine you can drag stuff into sequencer and it lives in sequences that means

when your cinematic is running it's it's only running the assets that are built into the sequencer which is the timeline in unreal in uefn it all loads up it all loads up so you've got to be really smart and you really have to think like truly a game developers making content for Speed and efficiency because you don't want any latency you don't want people waiting 20 minutes for your map to load you know that's a turn off already so you have to have all this stuff in your mind um and yeah just like those companies that are Now setting up a division for fortnite we're starting to do the same because there's a lot of there's a lot of commercial Avenues in there where you know certain brands may want to have their have their brands gamified right we can do all of that um because we come from unreal and we're game designers so I can it's no surprise in hearing other Studios setting up a Division I mean I think it's last month Nike announced this thing that they did where they created the Night World inside Van Real fortnite uh uefn of course makes perfect sense I you know

there's a lot of business Avenue so you know we don't like as a game developer as you know like sometimes you have to do service work right to pay the bills get the lights on so that you can keep making the game that you want to make because now there's another Avenue we can do branded content we can create experiences for other movies that want to be shown as part of their marketing launch in fortnite and bring all the skills as filmmakers all the skills as game designers and do it in a very low resource wise because it's all in UEFA we just need good designers good Unreal Engine artists yeah you're you're kind of opening and blowing my mind with this stuff I mean you know a lot I think you know listeners people who are you know how we are we kind of tunnel vision into the project that we're in we hear news we hear up days is cool um but like we haven't haven't done the exercise of thinking past Beyond you know surface level and you know just you mentioning like yeah there's a lot of Brandon incorporation service needs

right now to kind of put themselves as kind of like I mean we're like ready player one now right like there's the people who want like their little bungee jumping virtual space uh represented in fortnite which totally makes sense I mean fortnite was and it still is one of the biggest thing ever um we're seeing you know my my knowledge of that was like probably what most people have they they do these cross collaborations every season right yeah this is how they're building the metaverse they have the Mandalorian they have Spider-Man in here you know this adventure you know I mean that is that is a true manifest right here dude like I mean last year we got involved in a web free project again you know we don't we don't deal with blockchain crypto we don't do any of that you know we're mainly you know creatives and we were asked by this great company um x-manner to be involved in creating their metaver as well and we did we brought it all in on Rail and the interesting thing is origin they called us up to produce the trailer because they've raised um a substantial amount of money based on a pitch deck but it didn't have anything

to show like anything functional so we had we did a trailer to kind of visualize X mana's um Vision which is a great vision it's really great like the people working there people like um Steve stain and so on and Randy Middleton they're like great people they've got a great vision they didn't really have anything yet it takes a while to build stuff you know especially you're dealing with the metaverse there's a lot of server infrastructure and so on so we ended up doing this really cool trailer that kind of shows the vision of what their metaverse will be like which is an Esports company um they came back and go oh my God we freaking love this can you do 10 more we're like oh we could it's great business like if we keep making our games but then question why are we why would you want 10 more videos because oh we want to show gamification for a retail gamification for this this and that and just everything to do gamification right I'm like okay that makes sense but like why if I understand web free is immersive interaction and so on whereas web 2 is video images and web one it's just text right so why are we using web 2 to pitch

web free why don't you pitch web free in web free which is an interactive piece you're like how do we do that I'm like well if I should say that because that trailer that you so love we actually made it all in Unreal Engine obviously it blew their mind like wait what is is the game engine the thing that you used to make fortnite to make our trailer that looks like pre-rendered at a render man or something I'm like yeah so what we end up did was for for like a month or so we took we migrated everything that was done in the trailer into a game project all in unreal all in the same thing it's just a different project setup plug the controller in and shared screen and say hey look here you go I'm walking around here ran you're a metaverse like here you go they're like oh Mike they're our minds are like but obviously to me my colleagues are like dude it's just walking around an environment right you know come on but they're tech people like in terms of like Silicon Valley and so on and do where it blew their mind so we ended up like financing a lot of our company and and growing the the games division like

you don't remember like when we set up a has animation me and Paula's intention was to make movies the pandemic hit we're not making animated films great we're still storytellers still making movies for the you know for the streamer Cinema we never imagined having a games Division and all of a sudden we're working in web free which is essentially we're making an a big MMO right that's essentially what we're doing we're making these web free project it's a big massive MMO so we have to hire like you know server Engineers we have to hire like developers and game developers that understand the world of MMOs and you know massive worlds and understanding how to create procedural World building all of that stuff and we're like realize oh my God we actually have a games company then we decided to make our own game and now all of a sudden that's a big part of our company is making video games and that's because we we took the opportunity that was presented us via web free and didn't look at it as like crypto blockchain we just looked at us like we're making a big MMO in fact I told my

guys you know because obviously I have to pitch this to my team to convince right and like guys we're gonna make an MMO I never once told a like they're obviously gonna know now but I never once told him like we're gonna make a web free project and it's gonna be drawn by blockchain technology and so as amazing as it is and I still think it's really cool have it you know that that Vision whether it's being executed now it's a whole different thing but my guys are not going to be interested in that and staff retention you know retaining your team it's just another side of a battle running a production companies how do you retain the team how do you keep them excited yes you can give them loads more money for sure but most artists it's mostly about the projects I want to work on they want stuff that looks good on their on their portfolio they want to learn they want to grow as artists and I can't sit here working on web free so I just told everyone we're making a massive we're making the MMO they're like oh my God it's freaking cool and it's only later on when the press releases came out oh it's a web free project who cares we had a great fun working at Mo so a lot of that is

yeah that's how we end up going into the world of games but in terms of like making an actual console game remember I mentioned we made our animated feature films Rift all in unreal well there was a sequence in there that involved a car chase um you might see in the Trader's best car chase and I'm like my God you know where animators but we're not like Pixar level animators right now to animate a good car with suspension it's gonna take a lot of time get all the wheels moving and make it feel like there's weight to the car so what we end up doing is stuck in Xbox controller and switch it to Game Mode and we started driving a car around just to get an idea what the physics would be like and then we're like oh let's put a camera oh let's record that let's bake the frames into sequencer like this was that was fun not only did we get a really cool sequence that was fun and we're like let's like block out some time over the weekend and just do like a like a game jam session so I didn't know it was San rabello one of our um one of our amazing environment artists he's also sort of like a part-time Game Dev so he came on

board and this is a great way of discovering people's skill sets within your team because not everyone speaks up right and he was like yeah um I I can probably put together some blueprints to get that work and I'm like you sure like yeah you do environments are you sure he goes yeah fine he did the most amazing work I mean just just some context he's our lead game designer now today and this is the guy that was hired as a junior asset artist so again like whether that is down to the the amazingness of real-time technology being so accessible you know people like myself and Paul are able to like encourage our team to grow as opposed to like working in a visual if that's something like when I used to work it was so compartmentalized that that's your lane stay in your lane that's the tools that's the license of your unique license if your composer my license or Houdini that's what you're going to stick with if you want to go do something else during your own Spare Time whereas use something like unreal which is so generally friendly because you know you could be great at lighting greater particles but also you can put together a really cool sequence and own that entire sequence if you want because it's all real time you're not waiting

for things to be rendered on a farm or you're not waiting to bake stuff into memory to play it's all real time right so we end up like putting together like a little demo and we put it on Steam like Early Access now of course we all know early access is fantastic but also has a lot of trolls on there so a lot of people like we're like oh it's a great game but this doesn't work this sucks but the point was we were able to get our game on Steam and get people to play and we get QA for free right like you can't do that of a movie right I mean imagine making a movie hey I'm gonna test this movie you guys and it gets ripped to shreds that's it you're done No One's Gonna touch your movie was in games that whole Early Access thing was coming new to us I mean for me obviously the last time I worked in games was a long time ago that wasn't really early access until like you know like 10 years ago or something but like steam really made that happen it was it was amazing but then something really extraordinary happened Microsoft reached out and said hey if you thought about applying to the Microsoft app ID the idea Xbox program which is a program that supports

independent developers gives them development kits give them give them engineering support and so on thinking that and get the game onto onto the Xbox hopefully fingers cross onto the game pass and so on and we got in based on that demo we're like and I remember like yeah yeah okay yeah it's fine but dude like two boxes came in we opened them and their XBox development kits and I came from a world where Dev kits were like a luxury to have the hardest thing back then was to get a PS2 dev kit let alone try to get Nintendo dev kit and now we've got Xbox Dev kits all that oh [ __ ] like I guess we're making a console game uh we had a lot of paperwork saying everything and that's again I think because of the world of real time it's so it's so low risk to experiment outside of your lane to figure out like hey what is this like whereas you know if unreal had a massive license for you there was a huge setup cost involved in unreal that I don't think

myself Paula and the team would be making video games today no I mean I think um there's so many crazy thing that's happened the last few years just to kind of go back to metaverse meta versus kind of like this weird polluted word now like I know like people who are actually making metal versus and they're like no it's like what they call it they called it something else uh like doing everything they can to avoid the word but you know the the the the the the the idea of it right everybody is still very open to it they want to do that they want to be a part of it and like you said like we've been doing MMOs forever uh but it's also interesting to see like how people outside the game industry that don't know the nomenclature you know the culture right or discovering this all at once you know we're talking about like 20 30 years of build up that we're getting used to normal maps and stuff like this right and they're like what is this technology where does it come from uh and a lot of that is because yeah the recent years we finally

caught up in graphical Fidelity that uh like you said you know the the the the the snobbiness that I think we've all experience you know I felt it when I was at DD these visual effects walking in like rock stars hang on nerd all right we're doing the same stuff right but yeah it's definitely the the the I don't think it's 100 cross-pollination yet but I think it's definitely lowered in terms of you know uh and heightened Respect In terms like well there's a lot of things we can teach you know uh each other yeah um and kind of get it to the next level um we're talking but we're I mean obviously the cross-pollination with the teams right like artists can jump between like you know iPhones from Ubisoft to come and work on your movie that person who's collecting movies can that's great but also there's another side as well which is the the producing side the business side right and like you know back then like we're thinking way back to like the first Mario movie that came out with Bob Hoskins right

um and it wasn't received very well and video game IP adaptation back then was like frowned upon oh God no it's cheesy either Street Fighter came I kind of enjoyed it but it didn't do too well in the box office and so on and then Tomb Raider came in it kind of did its thing but it's but now like you know there are studios in the US that are just focused predominantly on acquiring video game IP you know I've got some good friends of mine that works for dj2 entertainment and you know they produce Sonic the Hedgehog and I remember speaking to them like you know the guys um Dimitri Johnson who who runs it with his business partners and they're like yeah it took a long time to convince Diaz to you know Hollywood Studios to make Sonic the Hedgehog yeah they had the rights and everything and now you know Mario came out like a few months ago did really well right exactly did really well like Nintendo sells have jacked right back up as well which is amazing and for us like our next Last of Us

yeah yeah and dude like Last of Us were directed by Neil druckman the guy did he created Last of Us yeah I mean for the longest time we're talking about hideo Kojima trying to do MGS and he's like all right you can stay in the writer room right but you know nowhere near the set but now we have like game directors in the chair yes it's definitely changed yeah and he's like you know an exec on the show and he's very much influenced it's definitely changed and I think that's where the lines have learned now like you know there is we're gonna get to a point where there is not gonna be any difference like you know and that's the thing about our next movie got green lit like three months ago based and it's a bit it's an animated show based on a video game called Mutant Ninja zero and we did the pitch I remember in 2020 um I was getting a lot of coverage for all the stuff I was doing in unreals doing like shorts and stuff epic Spotlight story all that great jazz and um and the studio or a company in in the US called Pathfinder reached out to me

wheeler and Fred melberg who now runs coming cool heroic signatures and they own IP like Conan the Barbarian means of Madness and tons of great Scandinavian based IP they're like look at the directors to pitch on Project TV live action TV shows whatever you want and they send you a copy of the game I remember getting the game near zero putting it in the PlayStation um PlayStation 4. and um and it's like Sony PlayStation and the next logo comes up made in unreal I'm like what if I rang up the game developers who are called bearded ladies um published by funcom what if I call those guys up and say can you give me all your Unreal Engine assets because I want to put together a teaser trailer I mean back then you had to like rip Clips to create Sizzle trailers you had to invest in very expensive content art I'm like what the hell would I do that like these game developers spent like five plus years I mean creating some amazing world which is also based on a board game why would I go and redesign the characters I'm like I want to play

in that world to tell a story so I reached out to him told him what I was doing they thought I was nuts are like I don't think you know how game assets work but there you go here's a Google Drive download it all and yeah I was a bit naive back then you know it's all modular based so you had to like use scripts to put them together not like in visual effects where you just have a complete character and skeleton skins and everything but we did it and we we put together a three minute test sequence involving a character from muting at zero pitched it back to them and you know my pictures like you know guardians of galaxy meets Mad Max Fury you know it's super fun action bunch of Misfits trying to find identity in this world and that kind of thing and they're like we love it you're the director for the show Absolutely question that's a little testing when she did in unrealth what would it be like if we did sort of like a two and a half minute Sizzle teaser trailer here's a bit of budget and we did a dream pandemic was like anything will [ __ ] be great and so we took it and we did it and IGN ended up releasing the sizzle trailer which we watch on IGN on the website and and already it got a lot of traction

because it had a big follow-in the board games had a following so it's a really interesting way as a producer to test something out by just you know taking a video game IP taking game assets creating something of it and just testing the testing the market with it um yeah I know Deadpool did a similar thing you know when when like the guys um trying to get Deadpool off the ground they allegedly leaked the the opening sequence or something and that was fantastic it encouraged 20th Century Fox to finance the film so I think again you know gaming the world of gaming technology and and just the world how games are made it's heavily influenced in film because back then the game studios used to look at films go oh we should make our cutscenes looking like this we should you know our scripts and our dialogue should reference film and reference cinema at all time and now I'm seeing a lot of Cinema referencing video games for example um you've seen John mcfort you've seen the last genre movie yeah okay so there's a sequence I remember like it's like it goes completely top down and you're just in

the whole thing the whole sequence is John Wick blasting his bad guys going from one room to another but it's all done top down dude there's a game called Hong Kong Massacre it's freaking identical yeah it's identical and this morning on LinkedIn um one of the visual effects supervisors in the film um from Radio FX posted that thing I said yeah it was heavily influenced by Heartland Hotline Miami I think it was and I'm like no it's it's clearly a Hong Kong mascot he was like oh my God yes so it just shows you how much influence Now video games have like not just creatively conceptually but also from a business point of view because now like you know Blum House you know the horror um company you know from Insidious and so on they've got a video games on that was announced Bad Robot JJ Abrams company got a video game on sky dance and so on and it's becoming part of the Hollywood entertainment culture Now video games whereas back in the day it wasn't right right I mean definitely the success or is speaking for itself that that helping that's helping push this

narrative right it's like yeah yes yeah I was a part of this bandwidth for a long time I think the first time at least in movies well there's plenty right obviously the adaptations for a while um you know uh taking it out of getting creators hands and putting in Hollywood and trying to make that work you know some hits some misses not Mega hits that we're having now we're critically acclaimed that we're having now it took a while uh I think it was the first time when I watched District nine you know when he first had the weapon sequence and it was like oh this is half-life off-life yeah but a lot of it is because we're just growing up and into these positions you know everyone's a gamer now essentially uh put in these positions and we're seeing that influence kind of spreading very naturally um in in these positions that we never thought we'd be in right um but yeah it's funny you know growing up it was kind of like looked down upon as you know what kind of this nerdy Niche thing

but now everybody from the president to the athletes you know everyone's playing games uh and it's very much part of the culture just fortnite being a big you know push it's into that to make it popular but but even careers right I remember like when I told my parents I wanted to like work in video games yeah like my parents are like from a an island called Mauritius but they have very heavily like South Asian influence so it's like video games are you freaking kidding me like do you not want a house right and now like my brother's got kids and my brother's like hey you should play fortnite because yeah yeah it's definitely uh more respected now for sure um yeah for for a while for sure it's like oh you know it's like telling someone you're dying or something it's like no it's a real legitimate you know now people are making legitimate money you know uh obviously in video games are all respected uh streamers are making what was that 100 million dollars oh God

yeah for those two-year exclusive deals uh and that's more than athletes uh yeah so like everyone Esports as well oh yeah so every Avenue of the industry is is blossoming into amazing things um but you know we're talking about unreal fortnite earlier it is at the you know at the beginning I thought I was like oh yeah bring a monitoring Community back but like I'm starting to see more of like beyond that I was like oh I need to start paying attention to this because it's a whole economy thing as well right I think like yeah like epic are giving more back to the creators um as opposed to like taking a huge cuts or something yeah I think something like 80 20 or something like favorite like creators which one heard of um but of course like to you know in order to monetize your content you still have to go through all of the legal checks and everything's like I think it

took us like um just over a month for epic to validate us make sure like our taxes are in the right place that we're an official company and so on and I think is fantastic I think it's great and that gave me even more confidence that this is going to work on a commercial level because they're doing all of these checks like you know we've just done a new build today and now we have to upload it to a private server and epic are not going to validate it to make sure that there isn't pornography or any hateful stuff in there um before it gets officially released and you know the official release of mutopia by the way is like next week on the 28th 28th of July the official launch so we have to work our way back and say okay yeah you've got to you gotta be very smart and like how much testing you do multiplayer testing put it on the server build test it on the PlayStation so we know our play tests layers we have um our developers you know Ryan Fleming Sandra Bello um Ernesto and you know that's kind of like our team and Miles who helps out on animation um and we're testing like once tested on switch one tested on PC one on Xbox One

and PS5 and it's such a great way of testing and like we don't even need a q a department we QA ourselves right and once you test that you'll find like the PlayStation version the sky doesn't appear but the PC one is fine you're like oh so again you have to troubleshoot that and also just FYI uefn is amazing but it's also a beta software okay it's ongoing development so things are going to break and things may not make sense when they break you can't go in and rewrite code or rewrite the engine because it's Fortnight right so you there's a lot of working around to make it to make things happen the way you want it to be and again it just reminds me of back in their low budget filmmaking like oh we didn't get that location we wanted because we didn't have enough money okay let's find another way of getting that shot yeah there's definitely um there's a lot of things that you went over earlier that was very um because I always feel like you know creatively people are at their best with

limitations all right yeah I feel like things you know uh a lot of impressive things can come out of that uh the industry at least you know for a little while you know I think mobile helped a bit but then suddenly mobile is like these corporations now and not like these two main teams but it started out you know there's still restrictions right you're talking about you know download size being restricted well your entire project has to be the size of your project has to be 400 Max that includes the upload code everything yes and there's a beauty to that because you know I I do feel like for for a while there was this pending problem of 100 Gig you know downloads uh to try you know war zone or any game everything is 60 gigs downloads now um and uh it's very taxing obviously to your hard drive but also it really does push people away to like trying things uh and as a developer there's this

tremendous pressure to fill you know to the best quality always right and that you know ads time resources can cause problems delay stress right and basically a lot of products don't see the light of day because of the crippling effect right but like what you were mentioning with under fortnite it allows people to just be creative everyone has an equal loving level field of success which is great and uh it focuses on the gameplay uh and you know if anything it helps you kind of test and fail fast so that yes you don't have to like stick with something that that isn't working which is also another entry-level way of a lot of young developers to grow the industry right we've been seeing this industry growing and it helps with you know obviously players but also game developers yeah and it is a very

important step to kind of get like students and and people who are who are who are scared to enter right now because all the AI stuff to to like hey you know what I have an idea I was wondering when to bring up AI man I was wondering when's it gonna bring out Wednesday you know I we've we've had a lot of conversation AI it's like the biggest thing um I I feel like I have a an essence of where you stand with that you know being a creative trying to like get things done right um and I think it's kind of uh honestly is a direction that that that's that's where it's heading you either get on it or off right um yeah I mean it's there's definitely that of course I mean any creator that says I am not going to look at AI is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because it's not going to go away right it's here I think the big thing is ethical use of AI is a big thing and you know and this is where artists can really you know like mature artists that have been industry for a long time and also Young Artists can really like wear the creative hat but

also where the ethical hat which is like you know we all know how my Journey works right Journey's amazing I have it on my phone I use it all the time to come up with like really cool like Concepts but I'm not gonna put that on a Marketplace and sell it for like 100 bucks because like the process on what mid Journey does cleverly by the way is going online and ripping all those images and kind of mash them together you got something right yeah um but at the same time like the thing that I try to remind myself and also remind everyone is the reason we have great stories is because it's that human touch you know when you watch Lawrence of Arabia or you watch a Christopher Nolan movie or you watch any movie that is so like Schindler's List Right that it's like so emotional or Pixar's Up right which is a really good example like like if you don't cry in that opening scene you're not human kind of vibrate or you'd have a tear that's that's not that's a human that's that's human story told by humans and I feel like people forget that very easily

and you know they also forget like you know if you stay at the end of the credits there's a lot of people working on stuff so I think AI is going to help us as a tool just like Photoshop does just like Unreal Engine does but it should not and will not if if we all use it smartly we'll take over how Creations are made or how stories are told you know it's just another tool and that's how but unfortunately there are there are people that are using AI that don't that haven't had the hardship of being an artist or being a Creator or or you know seeing how or being around people that make stuff you know they haven't been right they had to see oh great a bunch of prompts what's the big thing though why are you raising so much money why they're hiring all these people just do some sex problems they have that mentality and in their mind they think that's how music is going to be generated that's how that's how lyrics are going to be written and that's how scripts are going to be created that's how games are going to be made and it's it's a scary thought because like you know what we do as as game developers

storytellers filmmakers you know when we're doing a podcast like what we're doing right now is we're hoping that we're going to inspire people Inspire the next generation of creators and if they're going to be bombarded with like hey don't don't learn unreal don't even think about art man you just type that stuff up and it generates it for you now what's our industry going to be like you know yeah I just think uh we're just gonna go what was it idiocracy like people are I'm with you like you're I think we're pretty much aligned with there the funny thing is like who are these people who are fine with making you know going to the make art button and feeling No Remorse for it funny enough those are the people who are like investing in projects in the consumer I mean that's a lot of people you know that's there's a lot of people that feel this way and you know there's very little niche group of creators that we're gonna have to leverage these tools somehow and make people uh uh feel uh

and and inspired like you said um the funny thing is we're seeing that with you know I was listening to you know AI music being like always popping right now on YouTube and then you know they had Frank Sinatra doing gangster paradise right yeah yeah I had that yeah yeah right of course it was obviously you know missing the inflection point you know Frank Sinatra with the pauses well and people were like jumping on it I was like guys you're making fun of like and this is my feeling with air and criticism of it right you guys are making fun of an infant right now yeah you're making fun of a six month one-year-old imagine when this matures 10 years from now like the potential of this it's just gonna get crazy like the I am so impressed how ready it was day one yeah because you know as creators as anybody had that have put in the work from day one and

seeing all the way to year 10 you know having any type of career anybody with that inside can see oh yeah 10 years down the line what is this what does this mean right but I do understand and still see obviously value of people that have ideas to implement and use these things to tell a story I mean it in the end it's forcing creatives to be more creative all right how do you face competition when literally like unreal Fortnight the tools put you at the same level all right and my concern is yes the ethical you know the same way that blizzard is ethic I feel like they're ethically using it so they're training on their own stuff that they own right yes their own data sets their own data set to kind of come up with very fast because the tool the technology is useful all right which is what we're doing we're doing we're creating our own data sets and we use an Amazon web server for that and um

you know and I feel good about it because every every input that I'm putting in every output like we you know we can get mashups of stuff that I would never thought of like and we're getting older so we get slower right so we do need AI to help us speed things up but use your own content that's what I say yeah yeah and so what I don't agree with is people who's like no this technology is trash we should that's never gonna happen right because it's like basically we had this conversation many times I mean we're complaining about outsourcers years ago right like we should always be in our country right next to us is like come on man it's it's happening dude it's happening to the point where China is using us as Outsourcing you know how many times you know as a service provider like Chinese companies are like hey can't we we can't get this Duncan yes it's like whoa what is going on hey man look one of the biggest 10 cents one of the biggest Chinese companies and they own parts of Epic they own like legendary Warner Brothers I mean you know it's actually working for them you know yeah exactly so like dude look what's going

on right on and uh at the end of the day you you know you're just gonna have to get better at being knowledgeable about things and having something to say I mean just yeah you just gotta you just you just gotta have to adapt like like we can imagine like what it was like back in like I know the early 90s when when people were saying hey we're not going to be reading newspapers and magazines anymore we're going to be we're not going to be watching stuff on the TV every week we're going to be watching content on our phones I'm going to be reading websites which has the latest news people like don't be stupid that's ridiculous the Press industry like don't be ridiculous that's stupid and now every magazine every press you know whether it's a guardian or or you know The Insider and so on have a news present online um and I think AI is going to be like that as well where everyone at the moment's like oh that's [ __ ] ridiculous or the ones go oh that's cool that will that will be shortcuts we don't need to hire people we can do all that stuff and people are going to abuse

it right just like of course I mean you know the first video that came out on the internet was a porn video right and that kind of revolutionized video compression technology I'm just gonna say it did it had to be something that was like taboo and like whoa and I think AI is that as well like there's so much good stuff you can do with it but of course the first thing that's going to come out is going to be people like trying to use it for other stuff like whether it's malicious or or whether it's like yeah an executive thinking oh I don't need to hire people I can do this with one person yeah and a really great AI model so um yeah I think there's gonna I think but the good thing is we have the power of the internet now people are voicing ethical things none of you saw that art station right this was like early this year where that you know people are Banning and you know a very good friend of mine Alvaro Garcia he's like a really heavy voice about you know Ai and he's he's a game developer so of course he uses AI every day to do NPCs and and mechanics but even he's very voice um

very heavy voice about that and yeah but no I don't I do not want to be supporting AI generated images I want to support artists that I was you know Blood Sweat and Tears to make that image that has so much emotion and so on so and that's because we live in a world of in the internet we live in a world of social media where people can voice this stuff whereas imagine if AI you know gen AI came out in so like mid 90s and we didn't really have all this access to like people's voices on Twitter and so on we're like okay I guess that's that's creative now you know so I think we have a lot to thank for today yeah I mean sorry we're having conversations which is the most having conversations yes yeah and I think through this conversation we're going to find a solution that is law abiding that works that are going to hold people accountable that are trying to make there's always people trying to look for the next Gold Rush you know name the last three years there's a new thing every year that people are like trying to make so yeah I know right nft you know there's a quick buck that you know

those people are just in and out right so what's lasting or like you know us having this conversation what we do with this now yeah you've seen the meme right online the meme showing like a bunch of traffic uh Motorway traffic and it's like this is all the crypto guys and it's slowly moving to the different layers but it is funny the last three years and you know metaverse was thrown into that too you know as part of that mix it's like suddenly everybody the funny thing is nft would have fixed the AI thing right now that's the funny thing it's a good point yeah but suddenly you know one year later it doesn't matter AI is free for everybody it's like anything digital is cool uh well we hit that hour mark I'm like that went fast man went super fast you know hopefully that was a good thing but uh I do want to say uh this is the part where I shut up and hand the mic over to

you to kind of uh share with the good people how they connect with you how to find you you know find more info Point them in that whatever Direction all right well first up Brandon thanks for like you know getting me on this show like like I said earlier on like I'm a huge fan of your show anyway so for me it's like an honor to be here talking to you about this stuff like just having a chat um if people want to find uh the stuff that has animation does let me and my team do you know you can go to hasimation.com it says h-a-z so I say Z for the Americans and Zed for the English h-a-z i-m-a-t-i-o-n hasmation.com and you'll see some of the stuff we're doing um I post a lot on Instagram I'm a big fan of sharing behind the scenes it's the perks of being a producer you can um so you can find one has dazzles h-a-z-d-a-z-l-e I do not come up the name and that's another podcast on how I got that made um and and on LinkedIn like you know any anyone that's in the industry or not industry wants to like connect to me professionally I'm on LinkedIn as you can find Miss hazdalol Hazel d-u-l-u-dl

and um yeah just feel free to connect with me I love seeing what other people are doing so if you're a filmmaker a game developer I want to see what you guys are doing and lastly you know keep an eye out for our Unreal Engine fortnite game moontopia which is based on an original Ip that we developed it originally was TV show we paused it because yeah we end up working on other projects and then when uefn came out like what could we do in uefn we don't have time to create original Ip from the ground up but we've spent a year working on this animated TV show called moontopia which is about a bunch of um space tourists that crash on the moon and they have to make their way back to another spaceship because there's a monster so we're like this would be a great fortnite game especially multiplayer so we migrated all our Unreal Engine assets and they're spent about we'll say about since April's April May June lies about three and a half months working on this and it comes out on July the 28th so look out on LinkedIn Instagram we're going to do a lot of posts um you know promoting it and it's free to play look out for the island code and

I just want to get your feedback so yeah or perfect man uh all links in description everything you talk about will be where you're you know normally will find them in the episode uh again man very inspiring stuff thanks for coming on and educating us keeping us uh while you know giving us uh some some insight on your pioneering uh you know escapades here uh it's really cool man it's really cool to kind of hear like these different Avenues it's one of the reasons why I constantly want to talk to people you know try to be everywhere at once but not really but this is super inspiring it was really awesome and and I'm I'm loving hearing the convergence every day uh you know all we're all the same you know um and we don't have to hide anymore okay we're actually kind of cool now yes uh but thank you for coming on the show and thank you see you guys next week hey

hello everybody Brandon here I want to talk to you today about something very special we've been on this wild ride together haven't we from my early days as a senior employee feeling a bit lost all the way to Leading multiple Studios transitioning to smaller Indie teens into the mobile industry and now running my own game studio for the last six years throughout this time you've been here listening and learning along with me sharing this never-ending journey of Discovery this year I'm kind of on this quest of meeting serial Studio Founders discussing Acquisitions or exploring what it takes to grow Studio to over 100 Developers I've always tried to find an exciting topic to delve into and every year is a little different the focus is a little different because that's where I am in my career currently and I want to be able to share what I'm learning with you guys so I've always been to dedicate to asking the tough questions bringing you insightful answers from industry leaders and experts and now I want to share with you how I'm applying these answers to my own Journey this is why I'm excited to announce that for just 1.99 per month

you can now subscribe to our exclusive content series these bonus episodes will give you a deeper look into my personal experiences and how I'm putting into practice what our esteemed guests are preaching it's more of a personal side of the journey that I hope will show you that we're all in this together and we're all continuously learning whether you're a game developer Studio founder or just a passionate gamer there's something in it for everyone by subscribing not only will you gain access to this exclusive content but you also be supporting the ongoing production of the regular programming it helps keeps the lights on and ensures that I can continue bringing you top quality content and insight into the world of game development the links to the Subscribe are in the description your support means the world to me and helps me keep doing what I love sharing this journey with you so show some love hit that subscribe button and let's continue this adventure together thank you all for your continued support and as always stay tuned for more exciting content until next time this is

Brandon signing off foreign [Music]