Why His Game Has Taken 10 Years To Make (Ken Levine) — Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 034

making Indie Games is incredibly difficult it takes a ton of time um it can take years in fact to release your first commercial release if there's anybody who understands this it's Ken LaVine not only is Ken LaVine the creator of the Bioshock series he's also making a game called Judas and Judas it has taken 10 years to make we talk about the future of Game Dev with AI we talk about politics in video games we talk about materialism um why Judas took 10 years to make meditation staying confident as a Game Dev we talk about something called narrative Lego it's really interesting it's basically a solution to well why linear games are difficult to sell these days and then also taking risks whether you're indie or AAA taking risks is a huge factor of being a successful Game Dev man this conversation was amazing you're going to learn a ton the first thing I asked him was all about well is AI going to hurt the game industry but I can see this

video shopping in five years Ken LaVine F you know predicts everything incorrectly but I'm just going off my limited knowledge I have and no I I got you my experience so you can train it on say Shakespeare's writing right and it will you can ask an any question about Shakespeare's writing the problem with creation is we don't know how it happens right so you can train on Shakespeare's writing but you can't train it on Shakespeare the person right because what is the you know I'm a guy who believes sort of in a very materialistic view of the universe and I believe our personality is a function of our mole you know the molecules that make our body and the molecules that we're interacting with in the world including other people right we don't know what causes creation or how it gets created and we may be very similar to large Ty of models we may just be soaking everything up and using all that stuff to complete our own sentences right because we're we're trained on the stuff around us like language how do we learn language which

we learn it from hearing mommy and daddy talk right when we're babies but we don't know how it's made so how how do you write a new Shakespeare play without knowing Shakespeare and how do you know Shakespeare right you know it's very hard to because he's no longer here and he we don't even know what made that [ __ ] come out of his head and if all those experiences you have probably help form it you know most writers say I think it's fairly true I'd feel this way is that especially at some point in your script it starts writing itself and you get ideas and like where the where where where did that come from and that's the part of creation that it has no insight into now maybe it can develop that but right now I'm not seeing it now for things like still images it's pretty powerful because it can you know that that's a single moment in time it doesn't have those you know continuity issues that I talked about before but in the end of the day if you

try to then say well I really want it more like kubricky in or more this it's not really it's it tries so I've yet to find a creative use for it that um that that I've yet to find a creative use for it at in its current state it can't comprehend the Creator it can comprehend the created but it can't comprehend the Creator it's almost like saying it can't comprehend it's God like the thing that that created it it just cannot get into that Dimension no matter how hard tries yeah right because we can't because it's not written down anywhere now maybe if there's a world where and we actually I won't go too into it but there's a concept in the game Judas where characters can be reprinted before we dive into the conversation with Ken I want to say a huge thank you to ovani sound they are the sponsor of this video they are what makes this podcast possible making music and sound effects for your games can be very tough and timec consuming and confusing but ovani

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possible let's Jump Right In um meaning from your a map of your molecular data you can be born again essentially they they track your you know all your data at all times in the sort of storage device and theoretically if you are just your molecules right um it would make a replica of you at that time with all memories all the emotions all your flaws all your strengths intact and but it's still a black box like could doesn't really know it's just saying here's a map let's just recreate the map using very Advanced 3D organic printing um so it's sort of drawing on things we already have now but we don't really have a good way to map us down to the you know Atomic level um and so and they're parts of our body we understand how they work mostly like the heart and they're parts of our body which were completely baffled by like our brain mostly baffle by we have very high level guesses um so what makes the

creation process well it's probably chemicals of some kind right because that's what we are and electricity and all that other stuff but we don't know how to map it so how do you create it without mapping it I'm not sure but I I'm happy to be proven wrong man that's so interesting so it's interesting what you said about in in Judas you could be reprinted and the the question is like if if I was to disintegrate you and then had but I I knew every integral piece of about you down to the DNA down to the chemical structure and I reprinted you would you still be K I don't think you would be I just I don't I think you'd be a duplicate you would not be you it's not like you would suddenly consciously manifest in that new 3D printed body well what do you think well see I don't know like it depends you if there's a metaphysical element then no like but I don't I'm not really I'm not a metaphysical guy right so we can the fiction of Judas which I won't get into

whether there's a metaphysical element or not but right you know sort of if you just viewed it in a entirely material way and again remember I was a drama major so take I I last last chemistry class I I I almost failed was in you know 1982 or something 83 but from my thinking about it from conversations about it if you if you are a function of your material and all your personality and all your hopes and all your dreams and all your memories were in your chemicals and you could take a snapshot of you like wouldn't you be you I mean a clone is just going from DNA right and growing from DNA which is starting from the beginning essentially so you wouldn't have all those things you'd be a baby Etc and you wouldn't have any of those anything that happened in your life you would just be the function of your of your DNA yeah but DNA is code too right so you know life the more we learn about the universe leaving aside

things like quantum mechanics the more it seems that we are um that you know we are a function of some kind of programming like DNA is is literally programming y yep it's so strange it's it to me it always felt like you know uh using code and making games it felt I've always said this on my channel it feels like you're playing God um it's this strong strong desire in me I'll just speak for me I have this strong desire to create worlds and have those worlds reflect me like they reflect exactly who I am deep down inside the reflected inside of unity or in in your case unreal and a big question I have for you is you're you're you're you're hesitant to say this is like you say I'm I'm a drama major I'm a drama major yet your games are so uh so philosophical um and you confidently you

confidently shout out your philosophical beliefs for that specific game right so let's say infinite uh talking about you know American nationalism and religion right and combining those two you confidently shout out this is the theme and this is what I'm saying as loud as you can do you find it easier and more Justified to say something through your art than through something like social media or through this podcast yeah I tend not to present politically on those things for a bunch of reasons one is who gives a [ __ ] right you know what I think because anybody can sit down and type out you know 256 characters or whatever it is characters or um I much I like reading it though sometimes I have to shut it off because it's you know sometimes a little too real um and I find that I'm but I'm super lucky because I am my job I'm given a forum in which to think about these things in a very

broad way right I can I don't I can't I'm not just writing a 180w post I get years to sit around and stew and talk to very smart people who work with me and we we have long conversations about you know these societies and the people and how did how did it happen right how to get there and then you sort of figure out well okay well what would happen as close as we can get to reality and and try to make it feel real even if it's all of our games you know like they're Fantastical in their setting but the people we try to make as real as possible so I don't I'm feel I'm lucky and I if I have a political thought I can express it through the game now it's much more complicated to express a political thought in the game than it is on Twitter because you've gotta you know who's the character who's saying it you have to model them and you have to rig them and you have to hire an actor and you have to do all these things but it's a much more you get to reach a lot more people and you get to

say a much more comprehensive thing because like in all the games you say I I think you said it we speak confidently but to some degree like none of those games are about saying American America is bad you know I love America I think that say America's great great country however like and has some great philosophical underpinnings primarily about individual liberty and about balance of power you know separating the powers but it can turn into a belief system that unquestioning belief system like anything else you know same with objectivism I I've read Rand and I found a lot of really interesting things there but I also you know see what can happen when people stop paying attention to reality and they keep their nose in the in the in the in the ideology so I've always been very interested because I've studied you know and this is mostly after I got out of college I I was kind of not particularly well read in college I was not a great student um I was mostly putting on plays and like trying to meet girls you know that was my um

college experience um with mixed success on both fronts but um the but I started reading a lot after college and I just got very interested in topics I started in history and then I don't know how I came across Rand I just did at some point I don't know why and then um read that and thought that was really interesting but also you know that became a a Sandbox intellectual sandbox to play around with those ideas and what happened if you took real people you know rather than the sort of she tends to write these Paragons um either you know C villains or Paragons but I think she's quite a good writer um for for I mean the Fountain Head is a great like pot boiler of a novel but you know I want to play around the ideas and see what happened if you really let them loose and they had a contend with reality that's the problem with all ideology right it right bumps into reality at some point is it a is it is it an art director's job to put what he

believes into an artistic um frame or is it his job to put an idea even if he doesn't believe it into an artistic frame and and really the question is for you like your games is it what is it your beliefs systems that go into the game or is it simply I just want to explore this I want to explore that well a couple things well AR director so I'm a creative director not an art director an art director is the person like who would drive the visual look of the product which I work with the art director but um the as a writer say I believe the job is to inhabit the character as much as you can and see the world through their eyes so when I wrote Andrew Ryan for instance I wanted to take all of his trauma and all of his life experience and understand how he got to the place he got to and I wanted to um there's a term I love called steel Manning you know which is if you have an opponent in

your argument I often do this with my friends who'll be arguing about something and and I'll say hey steal man my position or I'll try to steal man his position which mean make the best argument for a position even if you really disagree with a position try to make the best argument it's a great way to tell if the person you're arguing with really understands what you're getting at um because if you can't contend with the best argument of your opponent's position you're not really debating them I also think debate is great practice for young people too because it often makes you you don't get to choose what side you're on in the debate right so you know with in with Bioshock I had to make an argument for you know through Ryan I made an argument for objectivism or the type of pseudo objectivism we use through um comto I had to make an argument for you know American exceptionalism and and white nationalism which is a very strange place to be right because I'm I'm not a white nationalist um um and I I probably a lot of white naturist are probably not

big fans of mine right um but it's but you have to live through your characters and not judge them so you can present them honestly because if you're just doing a blowup doll of them you're not really telling the whole story you're more writing propaganda than you are writing you know I I'd rather write questions than answers right right and let the audience participate in figuring out what's right I love that and I I feel like there's something of that that's lost in in the movies right now games right now where it's it it just doesn't feel nuance and it doesn't feel like there's room for for exploring ideas that are questionable like I I wonder would do you think we can cut this out if you want would do you think that BioShock Infinite would be a game that would be allowed right now like if you especially that first sequence where you pick up the baseball right would would your publisher say hey bro you got to take that out by the way if you're like

me and you always dreamt of making an indie game as a full-time job I have a free webinar below that goes into exactly how to make six figures with just a demo I was just like you for years I thought I had to make a game in its entirety before getting a paycheck but there's actually three ways to make six figures before even finishing your game I've done this multiple times so check it out below if you do want to go full-time Indie and thanks for watching I think it would be allowed at take two because T2 is an exceptional company and I'm very grateful to work there because they well I mean for instance our first BioShock the first game we did for them you included you would essentially murder the little sisters if you had a choice right and at the time there was a bunch of people who wanted to get that game cancelled and including people we had an argue in the studio sorry with the publisher to include that element because without that element I don't think that game is BioShock um and we had somebody in the publisher who really believed in us and he he supported us but they that was a steal that almost got taken out by the time we did

infinite people they trusted me more but again it was a very different political time um but certainly we had people who were very unhappy with some aspects of infinite um and um outside of the publisher um because they didn't agree with some of the political belief system I find people tend to like it when their opponents politicals belief systems get beat up on but if their beliefs get beat up on they get and they'll cheer the thing on and yeah truth is look I'm infallible sorry I'm infallible I'm fiable yes make you should just clip it out Ken sayable I'm I'm very fallible and but I I can promise you I make an effort to not just stereotype anybody yeah just let them live and breathe and try to see the world through their eyes even people who end up doing terrible things I'm fascinated how you get from from the baby in the crib to the monster yep what

happened I mean that's that's one of my favorite books it's my third time going through it is rise and fall of the Third Reich and just trying to figure out like I still can't wrap my head around it I cannot wrap my head around what happened like how it all spiraled out of control and obviously there's the reasons but it's like it's so distant so you go okay well that's that time that wouldn't happen now you know and clearly that's not true it's like we're still human beings right we still we still have the DNA that was in 19 the 1930s and 40s um so it's really really difficult to wrap my head around these crazy movements you know what I mean but you see but we've live in a time of intense political partisanship so you can see how people get like political violence right you see a crowd who's very EXC you see various crowds they tend to be on the extreme ends of of both sides of political Spectrum I don't even like

saying both sides because it there aren't sides anymore two sides it's a collage dude it's a collage but people out towards the extremes tend to be big fans of political violence you know whether and they'll make excuses for it and um I think we're living in probably the mo um people don't know but like when I was a kid in the S when I was I was born in the late 60s and grew up in the 70s and 80s but there was bombings almost every day in the early 1970s by groups like the weather under ground and um and The simes Liberation Army um you know if you know the Patty Hurst story but there was oh it's very strange we don't really learn about it but there was a um there was a lot of sort of extremist leftist groups in the 70s that were doing like almost daily bombings they tended to be not targeted of people but they they could be they were kidnappings there were bombings there were there were murders and it was I think what happens is you get political movements like if

you look at the 1960s you get a lot of political activism and then some people you know most of are the Vietnam War some people when the Vietnam war ends they you know they go home right and they say okay we've you know J mission accomplished we we we've ended the war but some people don't go home and they have and they get more and more extreme and this is again this is not contained to any political affiliation it can be any political affiliation and yeah there there's a great book I'm reading now called days of Rage about the bombings that happened then and the violence that happened then that was very much a lot of similar language to um to you know stuff you see today but it's no nobody's got the trademark on this unfortunately it's it's pretty broad man I mean that that makes me sort of shift to my next big question which is your your games are it's almost like you're I'm reading like uh I don't know you remind me of like Doki or something where it's like I'm I'm reading this huge or I'm playing

this huge exploration of a philosophical idea manifest in a in a fictional World um and I go well no wonder he's taken nine years to make Judas um and has it been nine years I think almost 10 almost 10 but but five five years are really sort of like reproduction and figure out how we're going to make the game because we we're using a very different methodology yeah a very different methodology we've ever done before so there's a lot of R&D with a very small team for the first five years or so okay so my question is this um there's a lot of questions but the first one I want to get into why it took 10 years but the first one is how do you feel like are you are you just exhausted dude like I I I yes and no like I love I like to finish the game you know as soon as we can because it's a long time and mostly for the sake of the publisher

because you know every day costs money also for the sake of the people on the team because there some people have been very loyal and have stuck with me you know throughout this thing and it's you know so we're we're working hard every day to get it to Market and we're in you know we're in full production and it's and it's and we're we're getting stuff done and we're getting we're getting towards that you know towards that goal um I enjoy working on the game but I am really also interested in what the next challenge is but it's hard for me to get my head too far out of what I'm doing yeah because the way I I work is I just say okay what's the next problem let's go solve it let's the next problem let's go solve it and that can energize me a lot um so and I and I look every day I recognize how fortunate I am because I wake up and I get to go work on exactly the game I want to work on and exactly the field I want to be in doing exactly the type of mechanics and storytelling I want to be doing and I'm surrounded by the people I want to be work I want to be working with and if that's not a blessing I don't know what is um so so yeah but I I I I

also love making games but for many reasons I would like to you know we're trying to get it done as soon as we possibly can and we're very focused on that goal how does this compare to the creation of Bioshock I was reading some article from seven years ago and seven years ago they tended to it was like seven I don't know maybe it was six years but it seemed like the the media was able to take things out of context and get away with it um a little bit more than they can now but the article was basically saying how it was a nightmare and people were stressed and you were stressed and blah blah blah blah blah oh yeah well is that true is that true that your life at that time was a lot more uh stressful than let's say right now even though this one's taken much longer and it seems way more complicated it's way more complicated but again you know you you level up and at the time Bioshock was complicated for the size of the team we had theer we have we had never made a console game we had never shipped a console game before um we were a studio in you know part of

the studio is in Australia part of it was here there wasn't great communication techn we didn't have zoom and everything back then we didn't have you know um um slack you know all that all these tools we have now that are very helpful for remote development we didn't have um the publisher you know why should they have had a ton of confidence in us we had never had hit before right so there was a lot of pressure um from everywhere and we were fairly Junior team and it was a big complicated project and it was you know look games are hard man anybody tells you we had a great time making this game every day was Heaven is either probably making a game that isn't great because they're not if you don't have a few times in the product you're just like oh my god what the [ __ ] are we doing you're probably not taking enough chances I think that's one of the most fun things like I look back on Judith and there are problems that we worked on for years and then you see them working in the game

and it's so validating for the team um we've also in the last year really locked out because um we've we've been able to find a lot of talent like we we hired a whole bunch of people from Arcane when that studio closed which we were massive fans of that studio so we have like 10 or 11 people from Arcane now and you know our our Aesthetics are so aligned um and we've been to F we have such a great team that um but even with the best team even with the best project man you you know you're looking at bug counts and you got a milestone and you're trying to triage bugs out it's a long can there's many parts of gain development that are very long and very tedious and very stressful and that that doesn't change I've changed a lot in the interim because having had those successes behind me I I've learned to trust some of my instincts more and I've also this is going to be sound lame you know medit has been very helpful because it allows you to sort of make

distinguish from the thing you think you're feeling and what's really happening and so you know where my ability to stay un just to keep myself emotionally stable in stressful situations has improved substantially as I've gotten older that's interesting um I we we had a me and my team had a I have a small team of I had a small team of like four or five people working on my game which is inspired by your work by the way um but uh it was one of the most stressful Summers of my life in 2024 and um oh this summer this last summer this this summer in this year was brutal and the game industry we'll talk I would love to talk about the game industry and its Health but uh and we will but um I bring all this up just to say that I found myself freaking out and stressing out whether it's the publisher my publisher is 3D Realms um which they're they're owned by saber um you know freaking out about the publisher what they think about the project are they happy are they not happy money blah

blah blah and I found myself just constantly stressed you know and it it was it was so funny because all I needed to do all I needed to do was just to take a day off and then it's kind of like meditation where it's like your brain stops the for Loop going and then you just say oh and you back up and you look at it and you go it's just a game like everything's fine we're okay and it's actually pretty good you know you just to take the time and the distance away from it so is that kind of what meditation does for you it sort of backs you away from the stress of it yeah I mean without boring people with like meditation too much with my meditation talk it's was pretty it is a way to look at so say you're feeling super stressed out one of the things that I learned in meditation is to physicalize emotions so what stress oh I'm my forehead is like this right I'm gring my teeth and you look at those as physical manifestations and once you start examining those physic manifestations they they

often resolve and because that's what they are right there is no meta Narrative of life it's not like Ken you're like I used to get stressed out and I get the stress feeling and I get this buzzing in my head and it would be like oh my God how and I get stuck with that feeling for days and days until one day I'd wake up and it' be gone now through meditation I find I can examine those feelings and and dissolve them a bit but you're still left with the same problems right but it's just the emotional layer you put on top of those problems can be not eliminated but substantially reduced um through practices like that and I also you know I run every day and so there's a bunch of things I do but yeah it is a massive stressing like we had a I remember we had a um a very very bad thing happened a few months ago that would have a major impact on the game and I got the message in the middle I heard my phone be in the medit in the middle of meditation and I looked at it and I saw that text from somebody worked for me and um I was and then I went back to meditation like okay

this is where you would normally freak out why don't you just assume you're going to figure it out and trust that and go back to your meditation yeah and lo and behold that's what happened and lo and behold we figured it out yep yep they the problems tend to be I I found so for me it's like so I'm religious I'm Christian so I I'll pray and it's it's a similar thing right totally similar it's just like the ability to to basically look at your problems relative to the Scale of the Universe I mean like for me it's like really like really this one little M stone that I had an issue with with my publisher like really that's that's going to be causing me to be Snappy with my children or frustrated with my wife like is that really going to be something that is going to ruin my summer and so it's pulling back and and seeing things relative to the size that they actually are now I found that I don't know if you approach things this way but I found that when there's an

issue when there's an issue with with my games or the design or something and it's not working like we did testing over the summer in May and June and it was brutal which it always is I think is y um and you know I was just panicked dude like it was like so depressing and I started thinking about problems like this in especially in the indie game world or just the Game Dev world I started looking at them as um I'm lucky to have them meaning it's like isn't it so cool that I get to exercise my talent with this pain it's kind of like working out or running right yeah and you get to exercise through it and become and and level up and upgrade whereas most people working jobs they hate they're not going through that you know what I mean um I mean the fact that you care about your job makes you incredibly lucky I mean in

terms of like you know scaling it towards other problems in the world they're still your problems right so you still have to deal with them and that doesn't make them trivial because you know they're yours even though people you know your problems are way less than somebody you know stuck in a trench in UK in Ukraine right but you still got to solve the problems and you still got to go home and you know not take them home to your family as much as you can right you know and try to be at least 60 70% better about that than you than maybe when you started right because you're never going to be 100% um but testing you know you mentioned testing testing is so painful but it's your as a developer it's your best friend in the world just putting the product in front of people seeing how it differs from what you thought it was because it will but we find we've been testing a game for about three years now um and at the beginning it was just you know this is a piece of garbage [ __ ] right there were some things I liked but basically and it was not surprising we were putting out in front of people the first time sure we just test and test

and test I don't just mean with QA we bring in friends and family we even bring in outside groups to test it you know people are under NDA and test it and we just learn and the game keeps getting better through that testing but you need a fix skin um one of the thing I think is most dangerous to Young developers given we're talking about you know development oriented podcasts here I see a lot of developers who get in fights with their audience on Twitter and it's literally the worst possible thing you can do not just for PR reasons was because if the audience is telling you something telling them they're wrong is really a waste of time because the end of the day you know think about reverse it you're a consumer and you buy a package of Oreos and instead of and none of and they don't have any filling right and you're like well I want the filling and the and the guy at the AO company says well you're wrong The Filling sucks um and that doesn't mean you're G to make the game they want like like like or the game they're going to tell you to make because you don't generally the users are not going to tell you what going to make make they're good they are going to tell you if you look at consistent feedback of 89% of all the

users hate this feature either the features got issues right and that you can look at because you can go dive deeper or it's maybe not a feature that the audience really wants but at the end of the day our job is communicating our ideas to an audience yeah and the other thing you should never say to an audience is you don't know what you're talking about I have had 40 years I have 25 years of experience because that's another fallacy um at the end of the day they might be right even though you have all that background and experience that doesn't mean they are right it doesn't mean they know what to do it just means that testing and your audience is one of your it's it's it's it's we wouldn't have jobs if not for audience you know it's so interesting though because there are instances where the audience was wrong and I'm a very I I I I'm a very self-defeating person so I don't have trouble like hearing feedback cuz when I hear feed back I go well of course they're right my game sucks you know

that's usually where I go but I look at I look at books like The Great Gatsby and it just did it just flopped on launch it just didn't work and it took decades in the generation dying out basically before it became this huge like Le it was like it's it's like this Legend now it's part of American Mythos same with Wizard of Oz same with 1984 these were not successes at launch so the question is like when how how do you listen to an audience right when do you like do you listen early and often because they always say test early and often but it sounds like you guys didn't test early and often I'm never going to go say hey do you guys want to play a game set on a spaceship with a character called this and no no you when you have playable builds you go out and you have to limit you have to ask people to focus on the areas that you think are somewhat representative of your intentions right

and you can only say so you can only give them so many known issues because a user eventually would just shut down like one of my jobs is playing the game in a broken State and giving user you know good and user feedback which is something I I I really put a lot of effort into to try to be the gamer when I play the game our games but yeah look I've made many of us have made games that were either before their time or just weren't right for the audience like System Shock to our first game is now as regard as a classic it was sold almost nothing at the time but by the time it got to Bioshock I think I understood what was missing from that and Technology had caught up which is the visual World building we just didn't have the tools at the time to the kind of or the team size or the time to the kind of world environment building that I think Bioshock is known for and I think that was the missing piece of of that of System Shock too um and that's what made it sort of a mass Market product because we were able to communicate a lot more effective visually if you had listened to the audience and made the changes necessary

to ensure that this game really blew up on launch let's say you put in all the stuff like all the sugar and and the the the frosting that everybody wanted and You released it and it did amazing the thing is is you listen to your audience but you wouldn't have that that cult classic that System Shock is right now it'd be different and so I've always struggled with that like how do you know how do you know if the audience is right or if you should trust your gut you know what I mean like you're like Bioshock and and infinite and and Judas they have this really it's it's like this strong identity that it's it's not they're not what am I trying to say they're not like the average of what culture wants you didn't take hey culture wants this so we're going to put it into this game they're their own unique worlds that clearly came from a singular mind or at least the impetus

was and that's a much riskier approach than just creating some like a pop culture Game Y you know and so it seems like you've got a very courageous bone where you say this is what I this is what I think the game is this is what it's going to be I'm not going to listen to too much feedback I'm going to go with my gut is that true so quite often you get a piece of feedback and the trickiest thing is like do they really not like this or is it just not needs more time in the oven right and the problem is you never really know if it needs more time in the oven because you can leave in the oven forever maybe it'll never get cooked right maybe the oven's not working um and that's a really hard thing to do like little sisters and Elizabeth little sisters from Bioshock and Elizabeth are two things that the team really wanted to cut for a long time because they weren't working very well and I knew those were things that if we didn't have them the game wouldn't be the game that I wanted to make and so then it's like

okay well what's in the way of this connecting with people because there was never like I If the entire audience hates something and the team hates it it's very hard to say well you're all wrong you can say I don't think it's I think it needs more time in the oven and I think it needs add a few ingredients or take a couple ingredients out and that can be tricky because then sometimes you work on something Judith there was something we worked on for a very long time which turned out it was just never going to get cooked and we took it out and we we we modified it substantially because and part of it was it just didn't fit in the game at all it just wasn't I don't know looking back on it this is all on me this is all on me and the team very supported me and they really try to make it work and at some point I just had to say you know what guys this is on me this is what specifically was it Ken I'm sorry what specifically is the thing you I can't talk about it okay it was a fairly um unimportant feature that had put a lot took a lot of work that was just distracting from the flow of the

game and all and all the user testers were telling us and all the team was telling me and I was like no no no no you guys just don't see and then one day after enough evidence like oh my God now this is I you get to know yourself and you can see how you can make mistakes and some sometimes I'm right about these things sometimes I'm wrong um and like with the with the little sister and the and the and the um the big daddies and with um Elizabeth and bios I knew I was right cuz I knew that was a central the identity of the game and this was not at all Central the identity of the game and it was just taking up a mass on time the players didn't want to spend time in that feature and um and we required them to in the process because the way the game is structured and and and and we we simplified it massively and all of a sudden the game people massively improved H so your gut was wrong in that instance yes and you never know like when you interrogate yourself you never know so you build up people you trust around you you build up an understanding of how to deal and my team right now

they all go to the we do these play test sessions with an outside group and it's new Gamers and we're sort of watching them over Zoom playing the game and being interviewed about the thing and and they don't know we're there so they'll say their most honest Impressions they'll leave there's no kindness you know they spare us no kindness or sorry they give us no kindness which is great because they don't give a [ __ ] right when the consumer when the consumer's going to the store with their $70 they don't give a [ __ ] right about what how hard it was to make or anything we're asking them for a substantial amount of money and that's a heavy responsibility yeah because and their time as well right and um so um I like hearing those unvarnished opinions because that's what the consumer will give you when the product comes out and that's their right so but you never know there's there's no magic formula it's just you know check yourself as much as you can but

also try to develop an eye of a gamer as much as you can and see things that the gamer sees them and not how the developer sees them how how is it possible that you I'm going to assume you check yourself because you're recommending that we do it um how is it possible that Ken LaVine can check himself when he's proven that he's a genius well at least with Bioshock and BioShock Infinite and working on System Shock like you've you've proven that your gut is very very uh that trustworthy and then and then you've got you've got you know all these Awards and you've got what was it 100 million copies sold of Bioshock I can't remember what it was um maybe it wasn't maybe it was was that it was it was you know 10 20 10 mil yeah I mean between all the franch it's it's it's a lot of units more than I ever thought we could sure so point being how is it that you can check yourself

like is it hard is it hard not to be cocky like I feel like I would be cocky it's it I've actually found the opposite problem it's hard not to get stuck in a paralytic Loop of of self-questioning and so I've learned to trust myself but verify so if I have a problem like okay you've had I I go back and think about all the horrible problems I've had in very gain development over their time and I'm like well you survived it you figured it out Ken didn't you so you'll probably figure this one out that doesn't mean the thing I have in my head right then is correct it means that I trust a process way more than I trust myself and my process includes the team the process includes the people we test with the QA team and um you know then we you know we brought in journalists to look at it too because I want to make sure that you know that we they were looking at and getting their opinion they were lining up with

our thoughts too because eventually you're you're trying to say is the thing am I have the same sense of this game as the audience is going to have and with our games because they're so particular there's not a really clear path you don't have a direct competitor to say you know like Marvel Rivals come out and have a very clear competitor and like OverWatch right and they could sort of they know the audience super well you know we have our previous games but Judith functions in radically different ways in many cases than the previous games so you don't really know but yeah I mean I wish I had a really clean answer but you can say look the the the history of art is filled with people getting high on their own Supply yeah but it's also filled with people that if they don't believe in themselves the game is the you need people like confidence they like confidence in people they like confidence in the products that the game is not pretending to be something else right we afraid to be what it is the people smell that and they they turn away yeah do you um do you have moments where you kind of panic about your reputation like and I'm

speaking from my own personal ego okay so I'm not putting it on you I'm just saying that's how I am so like I think about my reputation I think about whether it's YouTube or games do you do you think about okay we're going to launch this game and everyone's G to see it's a a Ken LaVine game and they're going to have expectations they're going to expect this and they're going to expect that and then they're going to think I'm pretentious or they're going to think I'm just stuck in my own world or my own Loop and I can't like do you ever worry about that stuff does that make you freak out a little bit I mean I worry that the people will like it because you know we are we are making a product for an audience the end of the day but I also know that worrying like another methodology I picked up over the years is um like the meditation I was doing first thing one of the first things guy says it's a very non- touchy feel daily meditation and he's like for the next 10

minutes next 20 minutes every on the meditation is you're not going to solve any of your problems so you need to just check them at the door and learning to check very to focus your mind so you're checking things that are that you can't solve right now is a very good skill set so you try to stay focused on the problem you have even at night like when I got that message I told you about that was really a huge problem for us I was like well I'm not going to solve this tonight so why think about it tonight and I trained myself to do that substantially and similarly I remember when I started and I got to be a little well-known I would read every Thread about me on the internet um because I wanted everybody to like me and then at some point you realize that it's not there's you can't maintain friendships with every single person on the internet so I you know I I I I don't mind hearing I don't mind at all hearing feedback but you're just look you're gonna some people are gonna like you and some people aren't going to like you and you just try to be the best person the best boss the best designer

writer you can be and you take feedback in very honestly and you make sure you try to create an environment where feedback is welcome I think that's really important um you know I have a direct line to every person in my company we don't have a hierarchal structure where people can't just reach out to me directly you know we have an open door policy and and we s and you can't just have an open door policy you have to really schedule a time with people and check in with them and see how you're doing as much as you can and I have people also who are that's their full-time job to the company is just interacting and and and looking for where the problems are forming and looking where people are unhappy or frustrated yeah but no you could worry forever about your reputation like I don't I I could not at this point you know people are going to say stuff on about me on Twitter that's that's totally fine because it has to be fine right don't wor don't worry about the things you can't change worry about the things you can change you know don't worry about the problems you don't need to solve today worry about the problems you need to solve right now I've always

wondered what it feels like to be one of the sort of Legendary game devs that the internet the early 2000s when the internet started to blow up what it felt like to be carried by that wave and the Press starts to write articles about you um do you feel like you you said your team is there's an open door or they're able to give you feedback would you be scared of you if you are your employee or your team member making games is hard and I imagine coming in a pitch something to me is can be challenging because I ask a million questions and I would if I sense a problem in a presentation I will dive into that problem and really try to see May a the first I asked two basic questions which I've really been helpful well I find them helpful which is so like say somebody's pitching a story element right or they show me something in the game or I and I don't like it I

don't like the story the first thing I ask is what story are you're trying to tell and so that's to make sure like he's that I understand the story he's trying to tell because the thing on page just may not be a good version of telling that story right so it the story may be really solid but the execution isn't good so I want to make sure before I say I don't like this I try to I try to say what story you trying to tell so they can say to me oh I'm trying to tell every story about fireman who gets afraid of fire then he overcomes his fear what whatever it is right and but on paper it's like this is about a guy having a fight with his wife and I don't see anything about that right see and so I'll say well this doesn't really tell that story or I'll say well I'm not sure that's an interesting story maybe and why are you trying to tell this story versus say that story the other thing is if somebody comes up with an idea especially late in a project I'll often say well what problem you trying to solve because if you're not especially later in development if you're not trying to fix a problem that exists in the game you're probably doing the wrong thing right you're just adding features

forever and so if they're not trying to solve a specific problem that often comes out or if they don't especially if they don't know the answer to those questions then that's where you probably people get most um anxious because it the meeting you know usually what I do is say okay let's you know let's let's stop you know let's stop pursuing this for now and talk about the story right let's talk about the problem um or hey I don't think this solves any problems the game has and we don't have you know unlimited time in the schedule so let's not do this and I look I think it's hard you go in and you want to pitch something and you want the boss to get excited right and you want them to be like oh my God you're a genius and the truth is that's rare it's rare to go to me and it's certainly rare with an audience right it's there's almost never a thing where I go out to the audience with our first take and they're like oh my God you guys are genius even Bioshock one we we this I think I've told the story a bunch of times but we tested that thing a few months for ship and the test was a

disaster yeah and we had to figure out what wasn't connecting with the audience and it turns out it was fairly it wasn't deep surgery it was some minor surgery and then we fixed it I found that to be true as well with with my game over the summer it it seemed so cancerous like it felt like it was just the whole game was the problem yes but it was the setup it was the first five minutes of the game um teaching it was the setup right setting up the story the character motivations the setting um the problem to solve for the story and also how the loop works you know um and and I can't imagine that can I say I love what you said about the game feeling cancerous that you think the whole thing is doomed and you realize it's not the cancer hasn't spread there's one part of it that's just got to chop off or you got to fix or you gotta refocus and sometimes that and sounds like you had good results from that process we did we did and um the the the well it's not scary for me

it it's scary when I think about narrative Lego I want to shift I do want to shift gears and talk about Lego in just narrative Lego just a sec but like for me I'm making a linear game like it's like classic like halflife Bioshock just super linear right and it's kind of like making a movie where it's here are the here are the Beats like here are the story beats and guide the player to the story beats and I can control generally how long they get to each beat right and in order to solve a let's say a a gameplay problem or a story problem you just got to focus on that one little beat and so I went in to the first 15 minutes of the game and I fixed that just the introduction of the character and put in a little cut scene and you know really quick it was like two weeks and suddenly the first hour of the game is so much more fun but that brings me to Judas because to solve it in Judas to solve a a storybeat problem I don't

even know where to begin be can we just talk about narrative Lego and like what and it sounds like I should say narrative narrative Legos but I learned from you it should be narrative Lego I learned from other people because actually my spe called it Lego so a lot of people got upset with me we have some huge Lego fans on the team right so to solve a problem to solve a storybeat problem where it's like the story isn't emotional enough or it doesn't make sense how do you do that with with something like Judith and feel free to give some background about narrative Lego yeah well for the purpose of narrative because narrative Lego is a bunch of things is the whole basically for you people should watch my talk if you could include like a link to it um sure it'll be below yeah and again this was 10 years ago so some things have changed but essentially the approach of and I W I won't bore people too long lengthy description the talk is probably a better place to get it it's basically a modular approach to building games where you are able to take a bunch of content um pair it down to the what's

the smallest unit of content that Mak sense so like for in a piece of furniture a painting a line of dialogue a quest object a monster all these things could be you know and to put them into essentially a tool we have which I kind of the metaphor finally came to me the other day because I used to write I used to write when I I was old enough that I used a manual typewriter for my first writing and most you probably never have and most people probably never have but if you want to put something a paragraph in the middle of a typewritten document guess what you're going to have to either literally cut things out and past them and move them around or you're gonna have to retype basically from the be almost from the beginning and so your ability to edit dynamically back then was so limited where now you copy paste move paragraphs around blah blah blah blah blah and what for narrative what this tool allows us to in instead of hard you know when you build a a linear narrative game like Bioshock like you

you hardwire things into places right and moving them is a massive task sort of like typing you have to like like we we cut a level from infinite and and it be more work to cut the level than to than to finish the level because we had to there was so much surgery yeah but with with our tool now if I want a beat to get moved around or and because our beats are so dynamic they get fired off they can be fired off arbitrary set of conditions if the player has tool X if the other character has done thing y if this monster has appeared Z but whatever arbitrary conditions you want move this element play this element now or play it later or wait until these four elements of play plus the player has done X Y and Z and it basically allows you to treat it like a word process like narrative like a word processor um and move chunks around very easily at runtime for for the player so we can respond at a very low level to what they do so now

when I I write a scene I may play it I'm like you know this scene really should not happen a it needs more setup right so let's have it happen later and add two beats for setup and those beats can happen at fairly arbitrary points in the gameplay you're in a level you're finding some monsters and the game says okay I'm setting up a beat for five scenes from now you know in film they they have this term setup and payoff which is critical for storytelling I I think you mentioned modern like TV and movies now I think a lot of the problem with modern TV movies is the character suddenly has the tool they need at the moment they need and they never bother to set it up earlier right yeah you know um you know most obvious example set up the snakes in Indiana in in in Raiders of the Lost AR right they said right at the beginning he's afraid of snakes and they later on he's in a pit full of snakes and he has to deal with it set up and pay off set up and pay off and this and it it's critical you have to put the thing in the place so it doesn't feel convenient when it finally happens like right you know and we can move our setup and payoff like if we find we haven't

set something up well enough we can add a setup beat and or a second set a beat if we need it and make sure the other thing happens the payoff happens later and move things around so our ability to edit the narrative and respond to changes is it's like going from typewriting to word processing right I don't even know though like what is that tool in unreal you're using Unreal right we we built it on we it's yeah I mean it's a bunch of systems basically built on top of unreal it's so it's it's conditional it's conditional statements of code and then it brings in chunky elements yes whether it's like it's like a cut scene or a certain character appears with a dialogue a scripted event a room with certain types of Furnishings or you know hey bringing a table that has this type of object in it you know and so that object is sitting on a table like for instance if there's a a beat we need like we we have a concept called reing so like a character will come in and say

point at an object and say hey and tell a story about that object they and they'll point at it all that ring is arbitrary right it the character doesn't really know what it's pointing at it just knows to point at at a location and so we can say hey it's time for Hope to show up and talk about um story concept X right so make a poster appear that has a a visual setup for that story because other she's just talking right so bring in a visual poster that we that we we've created a poster it's not none of this is algorithmically generated right it's basically a tag a massively complicated tagging and summoning tool where you tag all these objects to appropriately and then the game can at runtime bring in what it needs at that time to a very granular level so I need I need to set up the story element bring in Hope and bring in that poster and the player doesn't see her well wait a little while and then do it again if the player hasn't seen it so you don't miss it the

first time potentially and that's working under the hood okay so is all of this I I'm interested in the impetus for this idea I I've heard you mentioned Shadows of moror being right isn't that wasn't that helpful um and it's the inspiration now is your system inspiration inspirationally how it was built we don't have all the same mechanics and we're not or no way a sequel or a followup or a spiritual successor just the way they handled modularity was incredibly Innovative so the technical aspects of this system is that is that on you or are you just writing the story and you're saying here is here are the elements and it's almost like did you ever play Mad Libs yes um is it kind of like Mad Libs where it's like here's the story but here are the places we can fill in various elements now to the tech on the technical side it's like you tell the team figure it out but this is what I need or are you

going in and figuring it out not necessarily Cod so so I have I have zero engineering background right right so I did The Talk The Talk was mostly my conception I may have checked with people to say like hey does this sound like completely impossible but we hadn't built it yet and um and we when we started building it um and Eric earin LED that on the technology side on our team and he very brilliant we very quickly had a bunch of majer elements in the game working exactly as I had imagined them working and but there's a huge I mean it's massively complicated under the hood um once you learn it it's incredibly powerful but it's massively complicated so no I'm not the guy in the front line I have a whole genius group of people and it's not just programmers it's like our narrative team um led by Ben Zach and Drew Mitchell they'll take story elements and they will the dynamic stuff has to feel good and there have to be enough time between beats and things like that and

that is they're very sensitive not just to the technology they're sensitive to the flow of narrative and so when you see very um um sort of heuristically heuristics are the right word you know we don't like the word random we like the word heuristics like a billion conditional statements and a billion things checking on each other almost entirely based not on pre-fabricated things but what the player is doing if the player's done this player's done that player's done this then then this happens at this location okay the player misses it wait long wait x amount of time and try to respond it as soon as you can right um and um people not just have to build the technology they have to have the art they have to have the the the right side brain of it too to make it not to that it feels right right right if we if the team if the audience feels like they're getting some procedurally generated thing that that's not what the audience wants from us they want they don't want to pay the price that they want they just want a great experience that the the kind of experience they expect from us you know deep World deep characters

great world building but they wanted to I think our guess is they want it to be more reactive to what they do right and so all this work is really going into that to making the game Dynamic enough where the player feels that they can take very they can have those conversation with their friends or what wait what you did what and what happened and that but they still expect the same level of presentation or better level of presentation than what we've had before okay that brings me to this huge question I've been thinking about for the last couple years because I'm making a linear Story game now it's an indie game so I feel I can get away with it just because it's not as expensive but like if you were to spend I don't know 10 million to100 million making a a double A or AAA game to to make a linear game that really the player doesn't have much agency at all except for how they play it like in terms of like the guns is that really risky these days I mean it depends like I felt what one of my so I had a bunch of impetuses for coming up with the narrative Lego stuff one of which

was I wanted you know I had made a game about how linear games are you know Bioshock the W you kindly moment is so much about how little agency you have sure and I once you once you make that joke you know haha see how linear we are suckers at some point you've got to then try to do something about it and you know we'll see if we're the we'll see whether or not we're the ones who could do something about that but then again so I felt I I I wanted to I was frustrated by the how stuck we are with linearity and I knew we needed an approach that was different than what people have done to achieve that and I I knew I had my drama major level of understanding of how that would function and that came out through the talk so you'll see by the limits of my technical abilities in that talk but um um but I have a good technical basis for understanding what's expensive and

what's cheap in games sure and so that I'm fairly useful in that front but in terms of a purely games look you have Space Marine was very very successful space Marine 2o was very very successful um was um so you have a bunch of Fairly successful linear games now but I do think it's harder because you know a eight hour experience especially if you're paying $70 I think I think when you're getting AAA prices yeah I think it gets tougher but you know the thing about guessing what the audience wants is you're often you know the audience will often surprise you you always have oh this is dead and that is dead and somebody comes along and to now is that I'm curious to see how you know Indiana Jones does it's a because it's an exceptionally good product you know we'll see if it you know how well does in the off audience might be a metric to look for you know G but then you have you know Space Marine too which is which was Pro which did I my understand did Super well and that was that was old school right yeah old school and that's that's the parent company of my publisher um that made that game and it

was a big it was a big moment when it just blew up and it and it's it felt like a return to the classic just what people loved or at least my generation you know I'm 34 what my generation grew up on which is you put you you press you put the cartridge in the in the in the console you and you start playing and you go down a path and you're challenged on that path I've got three kids they're they're you know tired they're hungry they're whiny they're crying I put them to bed when I put them to bed I don't want to open up a game and have to learn the whole ecosystem and and crafting and all this stuff so I'm sitting here going is Ken is Ken trying to give me something I desire while also making it different for every player meaning when I play Judas is the goal for me to feel like it's a linear game but it was new for me and it was and it's new for someone else

and it's new for someone else and it's new for someone El the goal is it feels like a well the goal feels like you are driving yourself but the experience is customized to you right even even though and to some degree all games are linear games right because you have one playthrough of it right Minecraft is about as nonlinear as I come but for your experience it feels but what's cool about it is your experience is radically different than your friend's experience yeah and so you feel that the world sees you like I games are to some degree I believe aspirational you want to be it's your time to shine and be the most important thing in the world now again that doesn't mean you're just doing pure hero fantasy my game said not to be that right you know do you really want to be Booker tot the alcoholic yeah guy who so you know I I don't do many spoilers but he did a lot of very bad [ __ ] and you're in his shoes and or Jack you know from from Bak or or or Judas is an extremely messy complicated brilliant

dark individual Y and I like putting the player in shoes of not tradition but the thing they all share is they're all very good at something you know they're all very very good at or a range of things but they're not they are not perfect personalities so I like that tension of being in somebody that you're not sitting entirely 100% comfortable with but there they have to be interesting and they have to be aspirational in some way right I think that there is a good feeling about linear games that you kind of feel like you're rolling through an rolling downhill through an experience that you and every moment feels fresh and unique and that's super exciting so I believe there's I believe there's always a space for everything you know yeah in terms of the budgets you know we were talking about in terms of the games I've done I wanted to do something that did some experim did a lot of experimentation yeah um you know because if we didn't experiment we wouldn't have Bioshock right if we didn't we didn't try to merge RPG and

firstperson Shooters we wouldn't have had System Shock two because system 2 is a pretty different game than System Shock one we took a lot of risk System Shock one is more of an adventure game you got tools at a prescribed time and you didn't have any numbers to make you never had you didn't really have choices about how you grew as a character system Shot 2 we were like let's try that and then with bios like let's try to make the environment really saying let's make these big daddy little I wanted a boss battle that wasn't in an arena right that could be anywhere that was the big daddies and I wanted a companion and I wanted you know the skylines in um in infinite I think if you're not taking risks you're dead and you also don't want to Define Yourself by your past work though of course we all are you know PT Anderson films are going to feel like PT Anderson films and you know Tarantino films are GNA feel like Tarantino films though he gets to go to Nazi Germany or France you know occupied France for one movie and then he goes Hollywood for another movie and so you want to explore different things but you know I'm I'm a creator with a stamp I

guess you know oh yeah I that doesn't mean I want to like people often say you want to go back and do a director's cut of like whatever and I'm like oh God that sounds like I understand why the audience wants it but it's me it sounds like look I'm you know I only got so many projects left I I wanna I want to take risks of course the problem with taking risks is you can fall in your face too yeah well this leads me to my last question can and I know your time is valuable so if you need to hop off let me know um I have one final question here which is it's it's related to the the game industry you know you're sitting here saying take some risk and and put yourself into a position where you could fall in your face but the problem is is I I just feel like the game industry feels really unknown right now like I feel like some people say the bubble burst in 2024 um some some people are saying AI is going to ruin it um how how do you feel about the industry right

now so it feels scary to me and I I don't want to take risks when I'm scared you know so when I say take risks take risks on the level of which you can take risk right like the risk picking out Judas like System Shock 2 we made it in 14 months nobody was going to say to me you have a large number of years to make a game back then because I had no proof and frankly not many people would have said it to me now because most publishers don't put the faith in their developers the way that T2 does T2 tends to make bet some people and look I hope I deliver through them you know that's my goal and I am fully confident to the best of my ability to say and and and to test that we put it in front of a lot of people that we are making the right thing and then we learn from our mistakes and and we and we move on I would say you always have to have some level of risk that you're taking on if you want success then you have to scale that appropriately for where you are in life and where you know where you are in everything this is true for you know I'm sure when you got married and when you decide to have kids there's a risk right

I'm sure you weren't fully secure that you would be able to like provide everything those kids needed but you know you can wait till you're 40 or 50 right and though you can't you know even if you could but then you're 40 or 50 when you're having those kids and that's a different experience than when you have them in your 20s I imagine I don't have kids so um you know I get it and risks are what without risk there's no there's no life but that doesn't mean you gotta you got you got to calculate those risks and you have to take on a limited set of them like for instance we started the game making Judas as a third person game and I was like this is a big risk which takes away a lot of things that we know about from our skill set is specifically World building because just the fact that in first person you can get closer to objects than you can in third person in your face I I didn't want to lose that element of exploring an environment and so very quickly said maybe this a risk we don't need to take right and we and we cut it out of the thing and for a while it was an open

outdoor environment and we said well we never built one of those and the tool set is marginal for it now maybe it's a risk we don't need to take because or maybe we have better opportunities El but then when we got into how the game is built and how you know the sort of factional elements of the game things we've never done before and then some other things people will find out about which we've never done before at all those you know we took those on as measure risk like the big daddy was a for that time was a big risk for that game and if we didn't take that risk but you have to measure and be careful you know do that does that answer that question for sure for sure it's it's almost like um I made a video about this um I think a month ago and I basically said that you shouldn't any business owner any business owner should not invest all of their life savings and their time and their effort into something that's not proven to some degree right so it's like when you say sort of SC scale your risk it's like you prove to yourself in your career that you can make firsters

shooters that Ken is good at leading a team of making firstperson Shooters H story driven ones right immersive Sim type games so you you proved to yourself slowly and you can now scale and scale and scale and scale because you already know what works and what basically generates a return on the investment and so you would never recommend someone just jump in and create a narrative Lego game without any experience first telling a story at all right no no no I mean as as Innovative System Shock to was it was built on an engine that we knew could do firstperson games that had decent lighting um and we added color to it because actually Thief didn't have color we had colored lighting thief didn't have colored lighting we had to sacrifice in things but we thought color was really important for the visual look of the game but our our RIS was much more limited as time goes on you can expend your risk but you you you have to

be like to some degree successes how good are you are guessing the risk that you succeed at gambling yeah it's a kind of gambling and people have different risk profiles at different points in their life um but if you're not taking any chances then people you know I think this happens to a lot of musicians like like famous musicians when they're 20s they're they're breaking New Concept s right this is extremely true in rock music for some reason and pop music they I mean who's which rock stars career is better in their 70s than in their 20s right where sometimes you have difference like filmmakers like you know George Miller made Thunder Fury Road when he was 70 and that was his best film as far as I'm concerned maybe the best AC film of all time and also full of RIS and in fact they pulled back on the RIS and ferosa I think and that was part of the reason I think that movie didn't do it as well right um because it was too similar to the first movie without taking the risk

that the second first one took I mean they're out I mean youve read I don't know if youve read about it was insane and everybody was miserable and everybody was in the desert for months but meanwhile there's that artifact of this gorgeous artifact of this film that we'll have forever yeah um but yeah it's It's tricky in terms of the industry um look the industry was tiny when I joined it you know tiny there was nobody had even heard of it like it wasn't games were not this is probably hard for young people to understand games were not part of the public Consciousness they were a weird Fringe thing my whole life has been watching the weird Fring [ __ ] I've like take off and become part I in the 70s I love DND D and Marvel superheroes and video games and those were all weird Niche little things then which blew up massively over time but you know you can also get irrational exuberance I think the past few years

you know when people talk to about these things same thing for the film industry uh interest rates were extremely low and people could borrow money effectively free and people were taking massive amount of investment and massive amount of risk and sometimes you can get people you know Executives and I include myself executive could really misjudge the audience and the desire for say you know certain types of products or certain um you know modalities like you know VR say right are people gonna if you don't take a risk you're you you're never going to know that like if Atari never took a risk there never would have been the Atari 2600 right if Nintendo didn't take a risk there never would have been an an Naas but somebody has to take the risk somewhere and you look at you know Facebook has been trying for many years to make you know to make that happen right VR happen and they spend billions and billions of dollars and so far it looks like it's strug it's still struggling though it's incredibly great technology but and maybe but some point

maybe somebody will figure out what the problem is and it would become massively adopted you know the iPhone was a massive risk right um people like well why and people generally the things that are best are things people don't even know they want or eat until they have in their hands and they go oh that's a piece of my life that was I that that connects a lot of things in my life that um make me very happy but there's no magic formula um you just have to take risks at the level you can take them and cross your fingers and and be honest with yourself and put it in front of people and make sure you can course correct to the best of your ability and hope and pray sure do you think that the game industry is particularly more like gambling than most Industries well what do you mean because like in terms economic model I mean it it it seems to me that the game industry is so much so expensive because it's

like every art form combined into one you know it's like this giant culmination of art forms and you've got you're taking a a gamble on every single art form and that you're your that your team is like the perfect team for this one thing so it just seems like a scarier business model and and people listening right now they're thinking I don't want to get into making games if this is a huge gamble I I would say that I'll say a couple things yes it is it I think it's I've worked in a bunch of art forms it is the most difficult art form I've ever worked in times a thousand um like when you're a screenwriter you want to add a character you know enter gy right when I try to if I write enter gy in my game it's it's concept art it's character modeling it's rigging it's animation sets it's oh my God turns out Jim's a terrible character well too bad right you better fix it

because we can't remodel him um and that scales across the budgets right you know and and but eventually you have to live with things like there's a bunch of stuff that we did like we I wrote the would you kindly scene in BioShock very early in the project and I'm like I wrote the scene I thought it was really good like okay now the rest of the game has to sort of lead into this scene and I knew a bunch of things about the game like I knew about the game but I had to live with that because that was one of the most expensive animation things we had ever taken on at the time so we animated it we had an act come in to do a performance we videotaped it we animated to that performance got a little Golf Club um and we couldn't go back and redo that the time we didn't have the budget so I had to make the game work around that um in terms of if you don't want to be in the industry look I think people don't like are not going to like this answer but anything in the Arts if you feel you can do anything else and I've worked in the Arts and I've worked not in the Arts I worked I was a screen when I was very young and then I was out

of screen running because I failed out of it and I was back in other jobs for years and when I got back into art got back into games I knew that I had to do it and I didn't have a choice and I was going to live with whatever the consequences were and I gave up a job that was paying me twice as much on Wall Street um as a IT guy wow and and they offered me a partnership to stay and I knew was was a huge risk but I knew if I didn't do it I would hate myself forever and I didn't have any I didn't have any money for my parents I had about you know $4,000 in the bank or something you know I've been able to scr together I was almost 30 years old um you know I was 29 but if you if if you're not sure this is not just games I don't think any art is a good field to be in because it's so competitive and so brutal um because everybody wants to be in it and it's so hard to make and you could work on something and then get shut down you know when you go and you're working at another job generally you do something

and it gets resolved and you move on to the next thing and that work is done art is much more is much trickier than that what if you make a game and you're all loving and you put in front of testers and they absolutely abort it well guess what your job's not done yeah um you got to keep working and sometimes you got to keep working when like you said you have that problem with your narrative and we had almost exactly the same problem on Bioshock everybody hated it when you show it to them and then you're like what's wrong you guess something that happens in the first five minutes and you and you do it and you take those two weeks and you hope and you pray that it's the right answer but you we both have the same experience we were honest enough with ourselves and the audience that we found the right answer and and we made it work yep yep it's it reminds me of uh we'll wrap up here but it reminds me of um making a game or making a graphic novel or writing a screenplay it's like it's like buying Bitcoin it's like just be okay with losing it at all like you need to be okay with burning the cash or the time or whatever it took to to

create that project and I think I think honestly I think most people can't handle that it's it's too painful you know um it has to be not a choice for you like if you could do anything else do it I'd say right but some people have to make art and it was so painful in my life when I wasn't making art I was so depressed Art's my salvation and and I'm so lucky to get to do it and also never forget that every day when you're feeling it's hard when you're feeling it's terrible wake up and say hey I've I got paid to be in a meeting about how high the jump height should be for this robot you know and who else gets to do that and look I've been through it you know one day I'll do an interview about all the shitty horrible things that happened you know in my career but I kind of wasn't surprised because I was in the film industry I was very young and I saw the shitty horrible things that can happen in that career

um but at the end of the day making art is a very is a blessing and I feel incredibly fortunate yeah well dude that's a great great note to end on um I appreciate your time and uh is there anything else you wanted to leave the people who who dream of making indie games and and get in the game industry is there anything you else you want to leave them with look I think one of the way to marginalized risk is if you can make games at night with your friends and stuff and keep a day job so you mark you minimize your risk right do something as a product I used to I used to when I used to work I used to go home from my day job and I write screenplays at night right Y and it was hard right because I or I put on plays like I remember I was in New York and I was working a full-time day job I go home go to the gym go to rehearsal go home do rewrites from rehearsal wake up early in the morning and it was hard but I did it because I loved I loved making art and um but you know you if you can marginalize your risk in any way you

know right now there's so many tools there's so many ways to meet people to do stuff it's just coming in for a job interview if you've done something you've done a mod you've done a project you're going to be way ahead because you know what it's like to ship something without having to like risk your whole life on it oh yeah that's great advice especially people in their 20s like get yeah the Energy starts to go away slowly the older you get and oh yeah kids come marriage life happens when you're in your 20s you've got so much uh time to burn and don't burn it watching Netflix or at the bar with your friends you know spend some time building a project I think that's really really good advice cool okay uh Ken link is in the description for Judas everybody wish list Judas below um also the link to your your Lego uh lecture is there anything else you want in the description bud no I think that's it just a link

link to link to Judi and that and um I really enjoyed the chat thanks so much I think it's I love doing develop oriented talks I don't get to do much they awesome and just remember don't forget to check out ovani sound below they are the sponsor of this podcast and they make it possible thank you ovani sound it's also a really good value for the price it includes a ton of Essentials and everything you need to start making your games sound professional the offer really does end in just one week so go check it out by simply clicking the link in the description