Essay Making Games 03/2015 FROM CORE TO CASUAL HARD LESSONS APPLIED CASUALLY Former Rockstar Art Director Ian J. Bowden explains which ­lessons he learned in twenty years of core games production.

Ian J. Bowden wenty-two years in games. Two plastic bimbo.)? What did 20 years in the is Art Director whole decades. It came as a blind- games industry make out of me? Now I have at GameDuell. ing revelation to me when I real- male pattern baldness, too much grey hair ized it in 2013. In Autumn 1993, I and a weakness to migraine headaches. And a lucked into my first junior artist whole heap of experience. job in a tiny studio called Hook- stone Ltd. that was situated in the Mistakes? I made them all ... In 1997 Ian J. Bowden founded Mobius Entertainment where he was post-apocalyptic wasteland of North Yorkshire, Just over a year ago I left the AAA business Art Director on over a dozen handheld and console games. In 2005 T UK. It was the year that we were playing »Sam and found that I was looking for a different Mobius became Rockstar Leeds and Bowden left his mark on out- and Max«, »Doom« and »X-Wing«. Production challenge which presented itself through an standing AAA productions such as »L.A. Noire«, »Red Dead Redemp- values were pretty low still, but improving inspirational industry veteran called Todd Eng- tion«, »Max Payne 3« and the »GTA«-series. After two decades in the field of core game production Ian is now Art Director at GameDuell to year on year and the games industry was lish, leading the social and mobile games unit boost the visual style for their social and mobile titles. beginning to have pretentions towards the of the Berlin-based games company Game- mainstream. Like most of the UK-scene at that Duell. I wasn’t sure that I was the best fit for time I sort of fell into the business. There was a casual game setting, but Todd, who also just no real plan, no dreams of world domination recently joined GameDuell from Popcap where through the medium of the pixel and the he was Head of Studio for the Asia Pacific polygon (except, perhaps, in »Sim City 2000«), Region, convinced me otherwise. I believe the just a desire to be involved in something more hard learned lessons of those decades of AAA fun than a regular office job. development as well as some of their success You see, I had graduated from Leeds Univer- factors can be transferred and applied to the sity with a degree in English and Art History a casual games production. On the 1st of August year before. With such illustrious qualifications 2014, twenty-one years after my first taste of my options were teaching or wearing a garish, game development, I began to put them into itchy nylon uniform and asking if »you want practice in my new studio at GameDuell. fries with that?« You can probably imagine my delight to have dodged either of those particu- The Eisenhower Plan lar bullets and found my way, by luck or fate, I’m sure most people are familiar with the into a creative industry for which, back then, maxim »fail to plan, plan to fail«. I’ve always there were no real qualifications necessary. hated the smugness of that particular cliché. Perfect for me since neither English nor Art Say it in a whining nasal voice. Make a smug, History are real qualifications. weaselly expression while you do. That’s how So what do I have to offer from 20+ years it sounds whenever I read it. I want to punch with a track record that covers huge franchises that phrase in its face. I’ve always preferred like »Star Wars«, »GTA«, »Red Dead Redemp- Eisenhower’s »plans are nothing. Planning is tion« and »Barbie« (Yes, Barbie. I did a horse everything«. A plan is rigid, if something goes riding game for Mattel starring the immortal wrong, if a goal shifts, the plan is no longer

58 Details: Good games valid. It is the process of planning that is impor- tant, everyone knowing their part in the greater are like great architecture picture, a team dialogue creating a synergistic So, good games are built on the solid founda- strategy. I was involved in a game which started tions of planning. However, Mies Van der Rohe, as a 3D »Tempest 2000«-clone with a robotic one of the great pioneers of Modernist Architec- spider as the player character which, over the ture said that either God, or the Devil, »is in the course of two years, morphed into an epic space detail«. His body of work not only paid attention opera with a mysterious female bounty hunter to the gestalt, but also to the tiniest details. If protagonist caught in a battle between warring a game artist wants to make something truly factions of aliens ... and then got unceremoni- outstanding, they should learn from Mies van ously cancelled. Unsurprisingly. der Rohe and consider everything as gestalt. But how, I hear you ask, could that happen? In open-world games like »GTA«, the reality of Three little words: Lack. Of. Planning. We the world is sold by the attention to detail. I’ve simply did not understand our goals, or how to carried a sketchbook for many years, record- achieve them. If, like Ike Eisenhower, we had ing faces, buildings, the minutiae of life. It is done our planning, everyone could have moved a device to train the eyes to see what makes a forward semi-autonomously towards finishing world convincing and reproduce these details the game that we wanted to create. Instead in another medium. Get the little things wrong there was the pernicious spectre of unchecked and you can undermine the players’ suspension feature creep. There was no one who said: »But of disbelief, break their immersion. hold on ... what about the spider?« Want to make a believable room? It’s not just In casual games, working with a small team, about clever lighting models or complex shad- effective planning and pre-production is vital ers. An artist needs to think like an interior de- and achievable. In all the projects that I’m signer, an architect, an electrician and a builder. currently involved in, the GameDuell propri- Where would the plug sockets go? Is your room etary development engine and the two games in Europe? In the US? Those electrical outlets currently in development, we have intentionally will look different in different regions. Are the reserved pre-production a major chunk of the doors the correct height for a human? How high development timeline. During pre-production does a door handle have to be? Basic details to all team members are involved. The team is get right. Ignore them and the room will look informed about every new idea and how it fits weird, awkward. The player may not be able to into the whole. Team leads communicate and tell you why, but the vague sense of wrongness discuss the entire plan with their team, every- will make them uncomfortable and mar the thing is mapped out and goals are clear. Indi- experience. But do you want to make a room vidual team members can see the deviations to that feels real? That’s where it gets fun. We’ll age the plan and red flag them. The synergistic crea- the room, add scuffs and stains, dust and imper- tive benefits of the time we consciously take for fections. The skirting board that doesn’t quite exploration, research and planning are palpable. join up at the corner, leaving a gap. The slightly Our teams are also aware of the other develop- off angle of the light switch. There are no truly ment projects in the company, which stimulates straight lines in nature, to the constant dismay creative input across actual team boundaries. of the modern architect. The artist next has to This way our projects profit to a large extent imagine the person who lives in that room. They from the lessons learned in the pre-production must inhabit the room in their imagination. Ar- and planning phases of the others. thur Conan Doyle in »The Sign of Four« creates a

In the early nineties, most developers in UK became part of the games industry Over the course of two years, a 3D »Tempest 2000«-clone morphed into an driven by the desire for something more fun than a regular office job. epic space opera due to lack of planning.

59 Essay Making Games 03/2015

watch, full of little details that Sherlock Holmes You see, tools are important. Running a small uses to deduce the character, habits and the art department producing the dizzying amount eventual death of Watson’s brother. The details of high quality content that is expected of a tell a story. Human beings have evolved incred- modern AAA game is near impossible without ible pattern recognition skills and, as artists, we good custom tools. Give us a good tools pro- can leverage this ability to trick the player into grammer, a place to sit (and an unlimited sup- reading the narrative of a room. We can tell a ply of coffee and pizza) and we can make you a compelling story with the most subtle of details, world. It is all too familiar to find that an artist and even the most anodyne story of suburban gets used to an awkward work around, no mat- domesticity is better than no story at all. ter how much time it costs, manually manipu- Want to make a house? A city? A world? lating assets. This waste of time and resources Extrapolate from that. In the casual sphere, the can be largely reduced when you have a good games are simply collections of details to be tools programmer or ideally a technical artist nailed. The basis of a successful casual game is writing a tool to automate the process. Every broad appeal. Look at the »Candy Crush«-fran- small piece of mindless drudgery that is excised chise, »Angry Birds«, »Bejeweled«, »Plants vs. from the process leaves an artist a little more Zombies«. These games are consistent, instant- time for creativity, a little more time to polish. ly readable, never producing cognitive pops Even with small teams, high production val- in the player’s mind. They are truly consistent ues are achievable; our audience deserves no brands, they have the details nailed down. less. At GameDuell we are creating a toolset They may not have the prolonged play times and pipeline that removes the grind from the of a »Mass Effect« or »The Last of Us«, but the creation of assets for cross-platform develop- production values and polish are analogous. A ment. Using a proprietary engine, written in bad choice of typeface, an ill-conceived icon or HAXE, and after months of research and test- a confusingly coloured button can make the ing the best commercial tools available the difference between an engaging and fun expe- artists are free to create assets which will be rience and spoiling your audience’s enjoyment, converted seamlessly to all target platforms leaving your app un-tapped and languishing; at build time. Obviously, to create the perfect uninstalled to make room for the next »Flappy user experience, each version is treated by Bird«-clone. We make our little worlds for our QA as a discreet entity and the art is modified players to inhabit for a short time, on their accordingly, but the simplicity of the process commute, while waiting for a friend. releases the art department to polish the ver- sions to the highest degree. Give me tools! When I moved to Germany towards the end Coherent worlds have to be created, by artists. of the glorious European summer in 2014, I was The waste of time and resources of having an artist manually Archimedes said: »give me a long enough lever ambushed in a bar by some industry-types manipulating assets can be avoided with the right tools. and a place to stand, and I can move the world.« who plied me with alcohol in an attempt to get me drunk enough to spill the »secrets« of the creation of the terrain of the »GTA«-games. It being Berlin, where a bottle of beer is cheaper than one of water, they easily succeeded in their first goal but not the second. Through the pall of smoke in the dimly lit bar I could see the looks of bewilderment and disappointment forming as they posited theories of what landscape genera- tors they believed were used, what procedural terrain techniques had been employed, how the vegetation was generated, how the erosion channels on the mountains simply must have been done with World Machine ... Each theory was in turn, denied. The simple truth, the elu- sive secret, was that every square metre of the games had been built by hand. Built by artists who cared about their craft and had total com- mitment to making something that was not just »good enough«, but better than everything else. Their time was maximized by optimized builds, integrated source control, good tools that don’t create the geometry or textures but free the artists to actually craft them. But people make the real difference When we hire new team members, what do we look for? Artistic and technical skill, obvi- The attention to detail is essential to make a game world seem realistic. ously. Portfolios are the first thing I look at as

60 an Art Director. To waste those skills in tedious donkey work is not only a bad use of resources but an effective morale sapper. About a decade ago, I presented my first lecture where I likened the games industry to First World War trench fighting and my team to a harried squad of soldiers. Basically some kind of half-baked »Band of Brothers« metaphor. In retrospect, I’m rather embarrassed by the arrogance of the talk. An art department is not an elite fighting unit. Nor is it a machine to make art (although, when it works properly, it can be an awesome art machine.) No, at best it’s a family. We spend at least eight hours per day working, talking, laughing, and playing. Add to that the oc- casional late nights at the office or after-work beers or cinema and we spend vastly more time awake with our colleagues than we do with our actual families during the working week. It is imperative that there is total team cohesion and that begins with the interview process. Cultural fit cannot be underestimated. I would rather hire a good artist who will ben- efit the team dynamics than a great artist with An art department and furthermore a games studio is a creative beast by nature. an ego problem. Unlike oysters, irritants in a creative environment never produce pearls. Around 1999 a young texture artist came chine« analogy is flawed. A machine is simply for an interview at the converted church that the sum of its parts. A studio is much more than used to be the Mobius Entertainment office in that. Correctly nurtured and given space team Leeds. We didn’t really need a texture artist, we members can grow personally, take ownership, were hiring for modelers, but this interviewee drive projects in unexpected new directions. At was so charismatic and fitted so well, that I Rockstar Leeds, the artists would have field trips. forbade him to go to his next interview that We would bail for the afternoon, have lunch and same afternoon and attempted to hire him on go to one of the galleries or exhibition spaces the spot. Within a month, the guy who at his in the city, exposing ourselves to new visual interview had said »I can’t model« was build- experiences and to the wider world of art and ing level geometry for the ill-fated »where’s the creativity, usually ending up with an argument goddamn spider?« game. Fast forward a decade in a pub about how someone’s »six year old and he was the Lead Artist at the Rockstar kid could do better than that«. Now, with my Leeds studio, instrumental in the success of new team at GameDuell, we’ve taken this to its the »GTA«-games, later to build the Activision logical conclusion, a weekly optional creative Leeds studio from scratch. He is now Art Direc- slot for the artists (or any other interested team tor and co-founder of his own studio. member) where there is the opportunity to take Some of my best hires have come first from part in organized activities from workshops on gut feelings about team fit teased out in ram- illustration, through liv e drawing, to a hilari- bling, seemingly-chaotic interviews. A prospec- ously chaotic large format white-board version tive new team member, who settled into the of multi-lingual Pictionary. interview, could answer random questions like »what is the correct colour for a pack of cheese Lessons learned and onion crisps?« or »take two animals, splice And so ... after more than two decades of work- them together, make a better animal. What ing in the games industry, watching it mature is it and why is it better?« and still maintain into a medium with real cultural weight, humour and composure usually got a job. The seeing development of new genres and new trick was then to find the place for our new re- ways to interact and play and being fortunate cruit. Good staff, whatever position they were enough to have worked on some of the most initially hired to fill create a uniquely shaped influential games in the history of the form, I niche that they can fill and be comfortable have learned what, precisely? in. With the texture artist, there needed to be That planning is important. That details can some encouragement, but he achieved more make or break the experience. That we should than even he could have predicted. A lucky QA invest in tools and in people. Also that Domino’s hire eventually became a senior artist, a junior pizza tastes great cold in the morning and too modeler became the studio’s Senior Technical much free espresso stops you from sleeping and Artist. How could that happen? makes your jaw ache. Oh, and that there is a An art department and furthermore a games correct answer to the spliced animal question. It studio is a creative beast by nature. The »ma- is »Spider-Chicken«. Obviously. Ian J. Bowden

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