Creativity Jijiji
Creativity Jijiji: "Conversations about creativity"
This podcast amplifies the voices of our true leaders—the artists. Writers, composers, producers, singers, actors, and poets show us new ways to see ourselves and the world around us. They illuminate the invisible threads that connect us, revealing the deep ties of our shared humanity.
At a time when we must come together as citizens of a small and fragile planet, the voices of artists matter more than ever.
Creativity Jijiji goes beyond the spotlight to explore the mysteries of creativity—where it comes from, why it moves us, and how it shapes our world.
Join us as we listen, learn, and celebrate the creative minds guiding us into the future.
Creativity Jijiji
Shaping Tomorrow’s Creativity: Insights from Game Maker Ric Neil
Discover the future of creativity in the video game industry with insights from Ric Neil, the innovative founder of Noctua Interactive. Ric's extensive journey through giants like Electronic Arts and Amazon Video Game Studios sets the stage for an engaging discussion on how emerging technologies revolutionize game development. Explore how these advancements empower developers with limited resources and draw fascinating parallels with using robots in construction. Ric shares personal stories from his Silicon Valley upbringing that underscore the transformative potential for aspiring creators.
In an industry often challenged by the tug of traditional expectations, we delve into the delicate balance between creativity and commerce. Ric Neil offers invaluable perspectives on maintaining originality within corporate environments, dispelling myths about AI's role in creative fields. His advice on leveraging creativity as a competitive edge is refreshing and thought-provoking, highlighting the importance of mastering foundational skills to thrive in ever-evolving corporate systems.
Step into the creative mind of the Noctua Interactive founder, who demonstrates how AI can streamline production and foster innovation. The conversation highlights the importance of originality and adaptability in game development by sharing experiences developing a trivia game and a brawler project. As we reflect on the broader implications of technology in creativity, Ric emphasizes the power of community and collaboration, inviting listeners to join a collective journey toward a vibrant and innovative future in video games.
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Are you a writer, a composer, producer, game maker and just sitting around scratching your head, going like what is the future of creativity? You know where do you start, what's important? How do you know if you even have a shot at a creative career? This is Chris McHale, and welcome to Creativity to Gigi. And on today's show we have with us Rick Neal. Rick is the founder of Noctua Interactive and he's worked at Electronic Arts. He's worked at Unity, Amazon Game Studios. He was the managing director at Streamline Studios. He's been all over this industry for years, from the ground up. He was a senior producer on Madden. That's pretty cool, and Rick has a lot of answers to our questions. So let's get to it. Welcome to Creativity. Jijiji, where we get your Jijiji on. Yeah, Jijiji, Jijiji, Right, oh, that's good. I separate out the mice from the men by who can get through Jijiji without getting tongue-tied. A lot of people go like Jijiji.
Speaker 1:Jai, jai Jai but you're just like powering it out. Anyway, look, I'm so happy you came on here. I want to tell you that you're I mean, look, I love talking to you, but, like, what's really been interesting to me is like you and I are both doing the same kind of thing. We're both sort of trying to innovate our way into the future a little bit. Here I'm taking a a different route because I have different goals than you, but but I think that we're kind of like you know, yeah, comrades, in a lot of ways. But you know, your choice has been one of the most interesting to me and I I really wanted to talk to you about it and I wanted to talk a little bit about video games generally and the future of them and how people are going to make money, because really that's kind of like it.
Speaker 1:I mean, so many people have lost their jobs and the industry is changing. I mean, the video game industry is hyperactive anyway, right every every 18 months. But what I like to do on this, on this podcast, is like we're doing a lot. You know I'm talking to a lot of people about their creativity. You know I've got photographers I'm talking to and artists, and I'm talking to a community theater director later in the week or anybody who's doing some creative stuff, because ultimately, you know, I believe that that's what we all should be doing one way or another. I don't care if you're an accountant or a banker. Right, I always say artists are my leaders. That way it keeps me away from the transitory stuff that we go through.
Speaker 2:Right, and it values what humans value. Yeah, it values what humans value. Humans value creativity and being surprised by something entertaining, right, enlightened, and enjoy. What do we try to do? We try to enlighten our customers, right, that's what we do. I get to enhance all of my creative juices and my knowledge of making really fun video games that I've had since the nineties with five of my friends that I trust, that know how to sing these songs and write these things Right, and and we walk away from all the support that we've ever had. So now I can go do a gig and I can get all the money and I don't need a lighting guy and a sound guy, and I don't need a manager and I don't need a. I don't need any of that stuff because now we have the tools, especially in video gaming, where I'm a self-published, self artist. We're just five designers literally working in design tools and a tool that lets us bypass all of the support that we've needed. So the analogy I use is this You're a contractor, you built amazing houses right, huge, amazing houses, right, and you've done it for 20 years Now. Somebody walked up and said I can replace all of the workers you have with robots. They work 24 hours a day and they do a way better job than any craftsman you've had doing tile forever. You still have to come up with the creativity of what the house looks like. But here's all your robots, so that one contractor and his two friends can make the entire house themselves with robots. That's all we're doing. We're accelerating the output of super creative individuals. So we should go from 4000 startups a month to 12,000 to 30,000 startups a month of creative people, because now the tools are in everyone's hand. That kid from South Africa can get Unreal and he has the same chances I have of making a great game.
Speaker 2:I was lucky to be born in the Bay Area in the 60s, in the middle of when the Silicon Valley was coming up, where you could go to Fry's and buy electronic gear. You couldn't do that anywhere else in the United States, so there was already a culture when I grew up of electronics and stuff. So at the age of eight I got in a lot of trouble because I took apart the TV and I added 16 more speakers to the TV, put them all around the family room and wired them all up so we could have speakers everywhere and hear everything. My mom freaked out my dad's like oh dude, dude, you should use lower ohm wires, and he helped me rewire the whole thing right. So it was that kind of culture that I grew up in. So I was working in the printing industry from the age of 13 till the age of 33.
Speaker 2:32 clients were from siliconics building the first circuit boards in Santa Clara to industrial light and magic that used the processor to do all the rotoscoping in Back to the Future and Star Trek and all the Star Wars games, movies, right. So it was all an analog world and photography was like. One of my favorite accounts was the United States government map system, usgs, and they had these huge cameras that could blow back. The room was 32 foot tall and the blowback camera could do a 20 foot by 28 foot wide negative, so they could blow up these huge maps and then shrink them down and get the fidelity they needed. And there was this amazing facility that had them and I got to be the guy that went in there and fixed all the machines.
Speaker 2:I wasn't operating the equipment and that was the process in photography you had to be the apprentice, then you had to be the journeyman, then you had to be the master and there was unions and everything. But I got to go in everyone's darkroom because I was the fixer guy. You had to come in and fix your processor and get out of here and get everything going. And then video games hit and I was hooked on Pong and I spent all my money in the 70s when I was 12 years old 25 cents at a time, yeah going down and riding and I just got hooked to video games.
Speaker 2:So, always playing video games, right, I got an Apple II and we were playing any game we could. We were stealing games. We were, uh, looking at the bits on the disk so we could figure out how to copy them right, just because that's what we were doing. Um, so I knew how to fix macintoshes because agfa had just switched to electronic typography from from analog typography and they bought a company called CompuGraphic and the input device for the CompuGraphic typesetting device was the Apple computer PageMaker 1.0. I knew how to fix the Apples because the first thing Agfa did when I'm a field service representative, they send you to Apple school. Go learn how to fix the computer so you can keep this going. So I had one of the rare Apple service ticket things that you could have outside of Apple, because Apple didn't do service back then. Right yeah, get trained as a tech. So I was the Apple guy.
Speaker 2:And because I grew up in the Bay Area, I had a friend that worked at electronic arts as a data input operator in accounting. He was basically running ledgers, right, so he was taking the money coming in from Walmart and putting. Actually that's what his job was right. So he was data entry operator. But at EA back then when he joined, I don't know, it was 70 people. So everybody knew each other and it was just a big geek fest and everybody played games, even the accounting guy. So on the weekends I would go to his house and we'd play games together and I started becoming friends with everybody at Electronic Arts because of going to these parties with Ray and Alan. And another friend of mine, ted, worked at Tandy at Radio Shack and he got a job at Electronic Arts to fix the computers because the engineers didn't know how to fix the hardware. So he was there for about a year and a half and he said you know, we need a guy to fix apples. And there I didn't know until after I got hired that the guy that was also interviewing for a job, who was literally retiring as rocket scientist from Stanford and he wanted to get into video gaming and he was leaving, uh, the Stanford linear accelerator program and he knew how to work on Macintoshes and they didn't know who to hire me or him. And I won out because I had been to parties with all these guys and they knew me from partying and I was a good thing and that was the whole reason I got into EA, risking a chance of like yeah, I know how to fix and that was my job fixing Macintoshes. So I had done the Zig Ziegler and the making friends and influencing people. Dale Carnegie classes and, and they both teach the same thing start a meeting off with a smile, right? If no, if no one wants to smile, stop the meeting. Go, come back when everybody wants to smile. Nothing is going to happen if you can't get these people to smile. So I just so I'll just do that my regular life. That's what I did.
Speaker 2:I walked into somebody's cube and I'm like, yep, there's a short between the keyboard and the chair. And then I noticed at EA there's all the ancillary regular process people, the selling and the QA guys and these. But there's a few gems in here of these crazy, I don't know autistic brains, these on the spectrum people that come up with these wacky ideas. And then two weeks later you see this thing that you've never seen before. You're like what is that? Right? And then they had this kind of process at EA to get everyone in the same pool and everybody felt comfortable in creating Right. And I'm like wow, this is an interesting creative pool that they have here, and I'm a big process guy, so I want to see how does the process work, the system work, and then I can fix it.
Speaker 2:Ea coddled me and saw that, oh, all these people that are joining the company that have a thirst to learn how to do this. The best thing we can do is teach them, because I can't hire them from Stanford. No one is teaching them how to make games. You're working on a development team and you could figure out how to get a guy out of test and make him what we call the assistant producer, which worked on the team they gave you. You just got a bonus in your check, wow, oh you. You helped dan become an assistant producer. Here's five thousand bucks, oh, wow, right. So that culture once you put money on something, everybody understands the value. That's how people work. That spawned amazing talent out of that team, right.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, I got to sit down with my hero, richard Garriott, and Andy Hollis and Warren Spector and Aaron Loeb and talk about video gaming and talking about anything, and they would share anything. I'm like how did you come up with the idea? Well, that was was 100. Driven by the constraint of the machine, we couldn't do x, y and z, so we just did a. I'm like, oh, and that became the hook of the game. Well, we made it fun, right? It's learning from those guys that were completely embracing the teach everyone around me everything kind of mentality, and that's how I've made and that's my whole career you know I was talking with lance massey, who is a sound designer.
Speaker 1:He said you've always got to operate from the 30 000 foot perspective as well, which is, you know you're in there working with the tools, but you got to kind of be up here like yeah don't.
Speaker 2:What's the process?
Speaker 1:if you keep that brain, then then you're actually monitoring your process so you can recreate it and ultimately, that's creativity. It's interesting to hear this story because what you're doing now and where you went in your career makes perfect sense based on this story, because in many ways, you're doing exactly the same thing. You're putting tools in the hands of artists, you're creating processes and you're kind of using it for a creative goal. It's exactly the same thing. And you've done what I think a lot of people are doing, which is you've kind of backed down a little bit. I mean, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but you backed down from a corporate engagement into a more back to more like, okay, a hands-on studio engagement with a lighter, more agile team that's really got their hands around the technology. It's interesting, how did you you worked on some big games that what games did you actually end up?
Speaker 2:there's a documentary coming out next week on the making of madden, so they interviewed me for four, three hours on that three and a half hours, so I think I'm going to be in it. I have a soundbite in the teaser.
Speaker 1:What was your role in Madden?
Speaker 2:I started as an associate producer and ended up as the senior producer when it moved to Tiburon after five years yeah, five years, Madden.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can see the route now. It's pretty clear. The labyrinth it's a lot about EA giving their staff opportunities to grow.
Speaker 2:It's that guy that knows how to get in the weeds and fix the data register or make a polygon work or fix a normal on a model, but he also can operate at 30,000 foot level and keep all the people in the trenches moving forward. I used to write proper planning and clear communication when I took over a team or started a team and I put it on on everybody's monitor and they're like what's this? A cult? I'm like I just let you know what I'm responsible for. If you don't understand what you're supposed to be doing today, that's on me. And if you don't believe in the plan, I need you to come sit down in my cube until you believe in the plan, because I need to change the plan until everybody believes, because otherwise, because I need to change the plan until everybody believes, because otherwise we're not going to finish Right, and that goes way back to seeing these guys. Because we're trying to do things that had never been done before, how do we know it's going to get done? I have to believe in everything. If I don't believe the schedule, that we have to do this in two weeks, I can't. Every second of every day is wasted because I can't move forward. Period, right. But if you're like OK, I kind of believe in the schedule, but I believe Rick, because he's selling me on the schedule and he's using his Zig Ziglar sales skills to get me to believe that's what it is the belief system. Anything in entertainment is a belief. I have to believe this song is going to be fun, otherwise why am I writing it Right? So it's that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And yeah, 30,000 foot level is where every executive producer operates at. And to go back on your smaller team thing, I think what I learned also by going to big companies is there are also processes and pipelines and systems that you have. When you get to Amazon, you got to work the system. Don't fight the system, don't swim upstream. Use the tools they gave you around. They're all different. And now you got to be successful at Amazon. Right, we kind of saw it as streamlined. It's like okay, this is the, the lego set I got. I'll be successful with this lego set. Um, and that's the game at corporate america. You're not making games. Yeah, you're. You're managing that system to get an output and and hopefully the game is okay, right, yeah, and it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It actually doesn't work. I mean, it works in terms of you can drive a bottom line and you can create a product, but it doesn't work in terms of industry leading innovation. It's it's like the opposite and my career.
Speaker 1:It's interesting talking to you because, um, I mean, I mainly know you as an executive, okay, so, uh, we worked together. You were the managing director of the company I was working on. But I've done a lot of living at this intersection of creativity and commerce and I've spent a large chunk of my career going to corporations and trying to convince them to buy my creative ideas. And you know, basically, if you function like that, you basically are a professional pain in the ass to corporate America. I mean, it was really like why does it have to be this way? Well, it has to be this way because it's going to suck if it's not. And I've always believed creativity is a competitive edge. So, you know, to me it's like let's get the creative right and then you guys can figure out how to make money with it. But you know we're going nowhere if we don't get the creative right.
Speaker 2:That's the way I've always done and it's a different, it's a total polar difference in how you motivate people to be creative, as you, compared to people who make money. Right, right, it's the uh you're, you're selling your, your soul, right it's? It's the oldest profession in the world, as they say, is what we're doing? We're, we're whoring ourselves out.
Speaker 1:Kind of kind of I pushed back on that just a little bit because I've had a lot of success with my career and you know it's been doing things that people you know really argue with me about. You know, on the corporate level, you know, like you can't do that, why are you using tin cans? You know, I mean like I've never heard anything like that before, and then it goes on the air and it becomes usually successful. So I mean, I'm like I push back on that hard. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because we're at the. You know, I don't.
Speaker 1:You know, I want to say we're at a pivot point, except that we seem to be at a pivot point every 12 months, so I don't know if that's relevant anymore. You know, when I talk to young creators, you know, and they talk to me about their creative career, I always tell them well, you know, you should start out 10 years of piano study. Or, you know, go to art school and learn how to draw. You know, do draw with a pencil and master those those different steps in the craft before you go anywhere near like a technology tool, like any of these AI tools. What do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:That's absolutely how it and that's what people don't want to hear. Right, really, our unfair advantages between the five of us. We made over 300 games. Teachers and parents want to tell their students and their kids oh no, you can make the next Fortnite yeah, you can, after a 25-year career in the industry of making 700 crappy games, but you're not going to be the president of EA graduating out of school. You're not, and that's the short circuit that everybody thinks AI is. That's the false narrative of school. You're not, and that's the short circuit that everybody thinks ai is. That's, that's the false narrative. The false narrative is oh, paul mccartney used to have to describe every note to the symphony guy and he would write all the notes down. Now we gave paul mccartney a guitar. You just fired all those musicians. No, I didn't. I made it make way easier for paul mccartney to write way more songs and to get what he wants out of his brain directly onto the tape machine faster than it's just a superior tool. You still need the talent, you still have to have the creativity, you still have to have the fire in your belly right.
Speaker 2:When people tell me oh, I worked on a world of Warcraft for six years. Yeah, what did you do? I was a lead animator. I'm like, yeah, you didn't work on the game dude, you worked on jira tickets and you closed them out and that's all you did. You were a process. You're a robot, you're an ai in the game. Right, because there was a process we figured out we have to make these animations, they have to be put on this xyz path and here's, use this tool and that tool and this tool and now you go make this output for me, and then the, the game designer, five of them on World of Warcraft. They put it all together. Those are the crafters of the game. So now what I'm saying is AI allows you to be the game creator, straight into the engine, onto the screen, for you to get superior results quickly. But you still have to have that idea and that creative spark and know what's fun. You have to know what's fun and that creative spark and know what's fun. You have to know what's fun.
Speaker 2:The reason why you can hear something in nine seconds no, five things to fix it's because you listen to billions and billions of things and now you have that senior. Oh, I know what good guitar tone is. That is not good guitar tone. You know that, right, a kid coming out of college is like, yeah, I read a book about guitar tone. I think that's okay, he's got to do it. Sorry, he's got to be in it's time in the saddle. Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear it's 10 000 hours to become an expert at something. So just keep doing it over to make 10 games that suck right before you get your first job. Make your own game at home, and if you don't have that fire in your belly and it's too hard and you want somebody to be, then you, that's you the wrong industry. That's why I say 99% of people are not creative. They just want to play something else. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I can't and I don't think they understand the professional world, because I'm a professional music producer. I produce a lot of big music tracks. If a guy comes into my studio and he plays me a track that he made this way and that way using these tools and that tools, and then a guy comes into my studio and sits down at the piano and plays me his ideas, I'm hiring the guy that sat down at the piano and played his ideas Because the tools in that guy's hands are going to be like rocket fuel Amazing. We started getting into sampling technology in the 80s, you know, and at first it was pretty crude, but it got better and better and better and now I have libraries full of symphony orchestras that are pretty good.
Speaker 1:However, in my work, whenever it gets to producing a final track that I'm going to release here's a song I'm putting it out, I'm going to sell it on Bandcamp, whatever I'm going to do, I always labor it on the top with real players. So just you know, even though I've got great sounding guitars and great sounding pianos, ultimately nothing even comes close to having a pianist and a guitarist. So why do you think that is? I just think it has to do with the moment, you know, and it also has to do with collaboration, which is another one of those secret sauces of great creativity. I mean, I can write a whole song soup to nuts in this studio. Guitars, bass, drums sounds great. I'll play it to people and they're like that sounds great. Then I'll bring in a guitarist and a bass player and a drummer. It just goes next level. So it's a combination of like I've gone from the sample instruments and me playing them all to like. I've now got four human beings interpreting this stuff and each one of them is a master in their area.
Speaker 2:And when they're together, they play better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's collaboration.
Speaker 2:So my analysis of that is you can have robots do anything you want them to do, but what you can't have them do is bring human emotion into it. And you're right. You get Joe Pass playing guitar by himself in a room. It's going to be amazing, joe Pass guitar playing, right. You put him with four other people and they're collaborating and have fun together. That's a magic thing, right? That's that's the thing that we're trying to get that creative energy, that creative spark. It's like why does a band work instead of it just being Paul McCartney by himself? Because the band is going to play. And that's the human element even working in games, that that collaboration you call it Really what it is is. That's that emotive, creative spark growing.
Speaker 2:I believe that whenever you put a great team together, you create another energy on the planet. I believe that when you have a great relationship with someone, whether it's a friend or your wife, you're creating another energy force on the planet, and when a relationship ends, it's the death of that energy. And when a team ends, it's that, and we should pay homage to that, we should honor that. We should see that that's how humans work. Look, none of this is new, dude. The hindus figured it out 8 000 years ago. The shamans figured it out 10 000 years ago. This human dynamic of us being able to manifest things in a creative way is way better when there's five of us together on the same page and we're motivated to generate something. That's the job of the executive producer. Make sure everyone's on the same vibe and the same page, because you're going to get professional output. And yes, we can do the NBA Stanford thing and just break down every game to what are the five actions. And here's the first 100 clicks, like we did.
Speaker 2:I played him and take the soul out of everything and have robots make games. Sure, we can do that, but you're not going to have that energy force created and I don't know how to say it any other way. Is it on the disc when I put it in my xbox? No, but it's represented in the game that I play and I can feel the energy that that team put into it and feel that I don't know how we tune games. Dude, it's so weird. I wish I could write it down. I don't know how to tune games, it's about. One thing I do know is if everybody's mad at each other and the art director hates the lead programmer because he can't get what he wants. I can never tune a game and make it fun, and if the art director is like one step away from dating the lead programmer, if the art director is like one step away from dating the lead programmer, it's the best game ever, right, because that trust and that human dynamic is that's what makes creativity Creativity is is not measured in output, it's not measured in something that we can see on the screen or count on us.
Speaker 2:It's not. It's that energy of when the Beatles first got together. They were mates, dude, they loved each other, they were making. They actually believed that they were going to change the world, and that belief is what we talked about earlier. That's all you have. Making a game. You have to believe it's going to be fun and if you can have a team that loves each other and respects each other and they believe in that, then you have a hit game.
Speaker 1:You're, you're skirting around. Uh, you know something I really believe in, but it's something you can never talk about the woo-woo-woo factor of life. When I read these guys talking about AGI and all that stuff, I'm like I just roll my eyes Like dude. Not only is it never going to happen but, it's absolutely unnecessary.
Speaker 1:These tools are fabulous and we can develop and use them for all sorts of fantastic things, but the idea that somehow you're going to recreate human intelligence is just like you're Don Coyote tilting at a windmill. But I just really think that really the most important thing is like it's something we do not need. You guys are tool makers. You should just work, focus on the tools and then get out of the way of the artists who are using them. Focus on the tools and then get out of the way of the artists.
Speaker 2:You can call the guitar and walk away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we need a sharper chisel. Thanks, you know. Now I'm going to make a statue out of this block of stone. You can go and have lunch, thank you. Explain to me your general process. You're overseeing there, you've got five or six people and you're working together as a team to come up with these games.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I hit the jackpot and the CEO that I started the company with this is his fourth startup, so he's done it before, right? So the fear of how do we get the money and everything. It's kind of mitigated for my whole team because, like Nathan's done this, of course we're going to get started, money will be fine, he knows how to run a company. But on the other hand, he showed up with money from his last startup, which always helps. But he said when I first met him he's like I went to college to be a writer. I've written 20 stories over the last 20 years but I've fleshed out seven of them that I would that. I thought when I retired, I'm going to write these as novels. These are great novel stories. And then I went and looked at book publishing and everything and I decided you know, it'd be way more fun to make these video games and see how humans interact with my story and world. And there's, it's just going to be a slug with no output on the novel side. So he's like I'm going to make video games instead. That's when I first met him and he's like I'm like you shouldn't do that, dude.
Speaker 2:Making games is really hard. It's good that you have stories, but the more and more we talked I realized our secret sauce is I have a founder that showed up with money and seven stories that he needs, not wants needs to make as games. That fire in your belly is all the motivation, that's the creative process we have. So then you put a team together that understands that vibe. It's like these are Nathan's stories, we're going to bring them alive in the game and it kind of doesn't matter the genre and the type of game you're going to make. We're not all motivated to be like we're going to reinvent headshots and first-person shooters. Let's go after that. That intent is totally different than we have a founder who has seven stories. If we make all of these games, we're going to be really happy that we made seven more games. That's it. We don't care if any of them are his. We don't. Our numbers are based on cell 300000 on Steam, which has one point eight billion people and live off that and create really good stuff and have fun making those games like we did back in the right.
Speaker 2:Use an AI tool to write the entire dialogue system right and he can right. So now we can understand what the story is and on the other end it's like oh, we're going to craft this into a Metroidvania game. We really like Hollow Knight, and so we're going to use the kind of the dynamics of Hollow Knight, pivot a little bit and put that game in. That's the beauty of video gaming. Now you can just follow somebody else's game, add your own sauce to it. It's your game. There's no, you can't copyright a game play element. Right, it's kind of like I look at it as a lot like a band. What kind of music? And we're going to be a grateful dead cover band. How about we write our own songs that are kind of like the dead meets talking heads? Oh, there's now. You have a whole new band. That creativity came out of that, right. But but you really do have to start with what we call a fast follow, what you would call a copy, when you're building any game.
Speaker 2:These days, if you want to say I'm going to reinvent gaming, you're warren specter and I'm going to do the next immersive rpg sim, you kind of need 100 million dollars in 10, 15 years to do denn. Dennis Dyack has been working on his new game that's going to reinvent the genre for seven years. He'll probably do it, but he probably needs another three or four years to do it. We're not doing that. So we thought about this a lot last year and our strategies kind of changed a little since, right before Gamescom, we realized the conventional way of making video games is dead. So stop trying to go for that pattern, right? What's a new pattern, right? Well, we have some startup money from Nathan. We have a team that I know can execute and make things. Let's stop putting all our effort into getting the three million dollars we are asking to go make our Metroidvania game and let's put that on the shelf. We have all the idea ready to go. It's scoped out. If you gave me the money, I could start tomorrow.
Speaker 2:But let's go make some other things just to prove our point. We're telling everyone we can make things a lot quicker with AI, so let's prove it out. So we started on a journey in August late August, early September to let's do a fast follow of a brawler game, because a brawler has one feature the problem with doing a vertical slice. Right now, you've got to put all the features in. Well, that's 80% of your work, because you have to have all the features in a game. You know that.
Speaker 2:So what we decided? Let's make a brawler game that we can make with us four people and some AI tools, and let's With the goal of can we make enough to sell to pay for our health care this year? Yeah, which is nothing. Can we make 70 grand on a game, right? That seems like a doable goal. Really hard to do, actually for the first game you do, right. But on the other hand, it tests all our pipelines and how are we going to self-publish and how are we going to get through QA and how are we going to do translation and how are we going to do ESRB all the other stuff that's not making games. We're going to exercise that pipe, right, so that when we're, if we do have to go to investors, we can turn to them and say we're already a publishing producer. We already have a couple of games out, right?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so now we have an opportunity with David Sunshine, who owns the largest repository of trivia questions on the planet, to make a trivia game. Well, adam Bell, our CTO he worked at Gamescom. I don't know if they did 30 of them. Derek Sunshine has done over 20 a month for three months. He made multiple trivia games, so we have it in our DNA to make a casual game. So my challenge is let's prove to all of everybody we're saying yeah, rick, we have really smart people with AI tools who work faster. Can you make a trivia game in less than a month?
Speaker 1:Okay, so how does that not eat up your team? I mean you've got a lean team like five or six people I don't know how many people you've got working on it and now you're going to take on some service projects. What does that do?
Speaker 2:It's not a service project, it's go make another game. So, okay, okay, pablo Castillo, our lead designer and and working in unreal, it's his brawler idea. So let's test that idea of let's get all the blockers away from Pablo being able to sing his song in unreal. Pretty much the entire game has been written by him. The CTO, adam is helping, is helping out with oh, I can work on the camera for you. Tell me what to do. So there's a little bit of jobbing that stuff out. But Pablo knows Unreal so well he can go be solo dev on this project and make it himself.
Speaker 2:When it comes to art, we're using purchased assets and then we'll fix them later with, if we need to change the assets, what they look like. But getting to the fun is the most important thing for Pablo. That's not blocked right. Adam, who's worked on multiple games at the same time in his whole career, is like hey, dude, you can prop up a trivia game while you help Pablo. He goes yeah, fuck, yeah, I can do that right.
Speaker 2:So there's no real diluting of the team and the effort still remains pure on both those things, and it's not really a distraction. It would be a distraction if they're like you have to use our engine and our tech and I need this sdk integrated. That's not what we're doing. We would work with a team that wants one of our games to work in their portal and we get the game right. So that's kind of where we're staying. We're I'm staying on the. I'm building teams that build games. I'm not not building DevOps teams and monetization teams and marketing teams and ad network teams. I'm not doing that and if I need that stuff, I'm just going to job that out, because that's the commodity of gaming. What's not the commodity is what you talked about earlier. So those four to six guys in that team that are highly creative and now I've removed all the blockers into them being able to be productive right away in Unreal, right away. We started Alpha. That's my new thing. We started Alpha.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's say a couple.
Speaker 2:I'm going too fast for you.
Speaker 1:No, you're not. Actually you're coming some really great stuff. There's been some heavy-duty piracy going on in the creative world which has left a lot of artists like myself who have a lot of creative work out there, a lot of songs on Spotify and a lot of words you know been published in books and stuff. It's like it's really put a deep question as to exactly what is going on and, quite frankly, it kind of feels like, especially with what's been going on in the political world in the last couple of years, that you know we're into a final assault on copyright itself. Copyright is a hindrance to a lot of the business planning in the technology industry. You know it's obvious that they are not respectful of copyright, you know, and artists and writers and musicians are the low-hanging fruit, you know, and it's come down to a lot of artists are going up against, you know, deep-pocketed corporations to fight for their short story, right.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of sidestepping the whole thing because we're using our concepts, hand-drawn by Rachel, to get that output from the art tools. So we're using references on our work, like we need to build a bigger library of our own to make things, but it's working and we can edit things and we take things from that. So our content is never going to be we're just going to copy Mickey Mouse and put it up there because Mickey Mouse is known, because the difference is this we're part of that 1% that is not going to ship the next mickey game. We're shipping new content. We're creative guys. We're writing new songs. Right, and you're right. 99 of the reddit people are just going to rip off everybody else's ideas and reach and that's the crap that no one wants to hear and that's the crap that no one wants to play. That's's not creative, that's just rote.
Speaker 1:I can take the AI tools and I can run Studio GG by myself. I can build my own websites. I can do my own designs. I can do my own whatever. You have got a company of five highly qualified artists that are functioning, and your model is great. What's missing in both those thoughts is this the industry that trained and nurtured me and delivered me to the world at this high level of creative experience is no longer there. So the question becomes if you're a young creative listening to this conversation between two successful creative executives, how the fuck are you supposed?
Speaker 2:to get there. I would be so motivated if I was a young person right now. You know why? Because I don't need to go to a big publisher EA to make my game. I can go make it myself and launch it on Steam and see if it's any good and build my own community, and I can be a solo dev and go all the way up and I can be among us.
Speaker 1:So is that going to buy you a house? That's really what it is.
Speaker 2:If you are good enough, if you're.
Speaker 1:Jerry Garcia yes, if you're Chris McHale, no, I mean, chris McHale is a journeyman creative who has made a good living and sent his kids to colleges and bought two houses and cars and the whole shit Because you figured out the system.
Speaker 2:It wasn't because the system supported you.
Speaker 1:It's always been this way. I mean, like you know, bob Dylan is going to make a living, no matter what. I mean he's going to break through, no matter what, no matter how much he tries not to. You know, it's like. I always loved Kurt Cobain, was always like you know, I don't want to write any pop songs. And then went out and wrote, you know, five classic pop songs that are still played on the radio today. It's not always what the artists want. I mean, if you're blessed with that level of talent, it's going to happen for you, you know, you know it's. I mean, you need luck. I always need luck in life anyway, but I mean, basically that's gonna. So like we're kind of at that point where the five percent are going to make money and the 95 have got to go figure out some other way to make money. Is that's where we're at?
Speaker 2:I mean, I would have loved to been a professional musician and have the same lifestyle that I have by playing bass and tuba. I I'm pretty good to sit with anybody. I'd sit with you and you'd feel good. I can make any guitar player sound better as a bass player, right, but I'm not that guy, right, and I could have eked out of a living and been okay, um, but I wouldn't have had the but. But for me, I still play music. You know why? Because Because I need to, and that's the creative energy that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Even if you're not making money as a musician, you're still out playing and you're gigging and you're in a cover band in Tahoe and you're playing three gigs a month and you're super happy because the juice you get, what you expect out of music, is the joy you get when you play it. If you're going to make it music to be like I'm going to be rich and I'm going to be the next billy eilish, that's the wrong intent and you'll never succeed, right? If you go in saying I'm just going to, I need to sing my song, kurt cobain, and it's a new thing and I want to do that. No one can stop you. You're a force of nature and if it resonates if it resonates and you're lucky you might make some money on it. That's the way we should look at music and all creative endeavors on the planet. If you're good enough and you can find somebody to buy your art, then you can sell it before you die otherwise what's the test for young creators?
Speaker 1:I mean, you're starting out in this business.
Speaker 2:Start making shit. Now, if you don't, I talk to people like I want to do. My kid wants to be in gaming. Okay, what game engine has he downloaded and started building a game with? Oh none. He's gonna wait to go to school. Okay, fail, he'll never be a game maker. Oh no, dude, he took my pc and he loaded up minecraft and he built five mods on it. Now he's downloading unity and he's building things and his mom's mad because he formatted her hard drive. That's the kid. Kid that's going to make video games. The same with a guitar player. I'm waiting for someone to teach me how to play guitar so I can be the next Neil Young. That guy will never make it right. If it's like he was five years old and I couldn't take the guitar out of his hand and all he did was play guitar and sing Neil Young songs, that kid will make it. That's the belly.
Speaker 1:So there's been a huge shakeout in the video game industry in the last, like you know, 36 months or something like that A phenomenal amount of people, I think 50,000 or more people. Yeah, have lost their jobs. I mean, I'm just and those jobs? It's not that they lost their jobs and they're going to find another one. Those jobs, literally were not coming back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so so is it just, is that, is this, is that shake up? Just another version of what you're talking about? It's like the the deadwood has been overboarded the processes and the pipelines are changing, right.
Speaker 2:So now the industry has. So the bigger games like call of duty has 4 000 people on it, right, they have to generate that money every year, otherwise activision goes out of business. As a process and a pipeline guy, you don't mess with that factory, you leave that factory alone. The next factory comes along and we figure out how to optimize things, because I need my bread and butter factory to make those things. So Call of Duty could still consider every hand drawn animation and nothing in AI for programming and nothing in AI and modeling, because they can't afford to do that, right, they just can't. So they have to run that way. So for bigger teams, sure, but I'm telling you, if you're the VFX lead VFX guy on Forza I do all the VFX and it's beautiful and I won two awards You're not making games, sorry.
Speaker 1:So if you're talking to young creators, it's like what you're kind of saying is get your hands on the tool and start making stuff and get your expectations in line. If your expectation is to go out and have a successful career, you're probably off on the wrong foot to begin with. If your expectation is I'm just going to write a cool song and go to a coffee house and see how the five people there like it or not, that's right, that's, that's probably a good expectation, and maybe that five people turns into 10 people. You know, and you, you kind of like, see the path open up in front of you. So it's as you say it's, it's tough, people don't want to hear this stuff, but it's also sort of reality. And and the other reality is, um, you look at me, uh, you know, um, I am still working hard every single day on on my creativity. I still pick up my guitar every single day and, you know, get my keep my fingers working yeah, because I need to, and you got to have a sort of an obsessive nature.
Speaker 1:You got to say like I'm going to make the 10 mods from minecraft or whatever you're going to do. That's kind of obsessive work. So I mean, I've only come across not many people in my career who really have that to be honest with you.
Speaker 2:That's us right. That's right. It's us, it's us.
Speaker 1:And you've got to sort of stay a little obsessive. Ask my wife. She's not going to come in here all happy about this conversation because she's going to be like yeah, Chris is like ridiculous, he works 14 hours a day. You know what? I don't work a single hour a day.
Speaker 2:All of the operating systems that we use today on computers, all the great coding languages, were written by people that graduated college from 1956 to 1962. There's no new operating systems. There's no scripting languages, perl all that stuff was by those guys because they were coming up when the computer was brand new and it was punch cards and they could that's. They had Fortran and Pascal and they're like we can do better than this, right, and they were there by necessity, but were also 100 lucky. I was 100 lucky to be in the bay area where electronic arts is trying to do something new and I could be that guy. No one had talent, no one had a way to make a game, so everybody was on the same level playing field to get started. That this is another one of those moments, right when kids are coming up, it's like wait a minute. I went to school right when AI was coming out. So, yeah, it's three of us. We do the work of 500 people because we all learned AI natively as we came up. That's where we're at.
Speaker 2:People don't want to admit that. Here's the beautiful thing. The thirst for humans to ingest entertainment is endless, bottomless. There's 28,000 games on Steam. There could be 75,000. It could be a million, it doesn't matter. People will keep buying that. It just keeps getting bigger. Humans want content. Right now, we're going to fulfill all these needs with AI. Robots are going to take us to school, they're going to teach us, they're going to do everything for us. What they're not going to ever be able to do is delight and entertain my brain, and that's where we're all going to go. We're all going to be creators in 100 years.
Speaker 1:I try to keep creativity to Jijiji to 40 minutes because I believe people only want to listen for 40 minutes. You and I are closing in on an hour and 35 minutes, so this may be the warm piece of Creativity, jijiji, and I can't tell you how grateful I am that you came on this show. I'd be happy to do it again.
Speaker 2:I think there's other fundamental things I've gotten to the point in my life where I get more out of mentoring and helping people than I do out of making money.
Speaker 1:Trust me, I hope you become a friend of this show. I'm building this show one episode at a time. I'm only into six or seven episodes, but yeah, there's a lot to talk about. And I think that people say to me how are you going to make money with your podcast? I me, how are you going to make money with your podcast? I'm always like I'm not trying to make money with my podcast, I'm just I'm just trying to put evergreen content out there so people coming behind us can listen to the shit and go like these guys were truly out of their fucking minds.
Speaker 2:You love, I can tell the minute I saw in your eyes. You love humans and you love the creative spark and you love giving humans the opportunity to live a happy, fulfilled life. And if you make 8 000 games and none of them make any money and you are a cash register guy at Safeway and you paid for your life but you were able to live a life where you made 8,000 games and you felt really good about it, that's a fucking fantastic life, dude, and that's all we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:This has been Creativity to GG produced by Studio GGG, and that was Rick Neal, veteran game maker, someone who believes in creativity and the process of creativity, like I do, somebody who's dedicated his life to it.
Speaker 1:I thought he had a lot of interesting things to say and we hope that you like listening. Please review the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, like the podcast and visit us at studioggio. You know, join up. Join us as we innovate our way to a new, creative future. Creative workers unite is what I like to say. This is Chris McHale. Thank you so much for joining us and listening and we'll see you next time.
