Double Fine's Lee Petty talks Keeper and Creative Leadership | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hey everyone.

I'm Trent Custers, co-founder and studio director at League of Geeks, and you're listening to The Game Maker's Notebook.

Today, I've been chatting with my buddy, Lee Petty.

He's art director and project lead at Double Fine Productions.

They've just released their latest title Keeper, which is another game that Lee has led along with his phenomenal team, where you play as a lighthouse and a bird companion in this adventure puzzler.

It's as weird and wonderful as it sounds.

But of course we start talking about the early days, his childhood inspirations, playing adventure games through to his You know, his days working in the multimedia boom, at the emerging intersection of art and a bunch of weird and wonderful technology and software programs.

His development stories from working on some of Double Fine's most well-known titles.

He's been there for almost 20 years now.

So we're talking things like Brutal Legend through The Rat and Headlander and other infamous Amnesia Fortnite game jams that he's been a part of.

And then that obviously naturally provides the bedrock for many conversations that we have through the podcast about leadership and especially Lee's own leadership journey within Double Fine, as he has emerged, as you know, a leader who's shipped multiple titles, as project lead now at Double Fine.

And then, of course, we are here to talk about Keeper from creating a world that feels both alive and lonely, balancing emotional tones between the dark and light moments, and how Lee and his team know when to hold you in the darkness and let you up for air, and the tools they use, and how the team ultimately really just made us care about characters in a game with no dialogue whatsoever.

Without further ado, here is Lee Petty, project lead and art director at Double Fine Productions.

Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in-depth one-on-one conversations between game makers, providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.

Hey Lee, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Of course, man.

Such a pleasure.

I've been a lighthouse for the past few nights.

This is not relating to the game at all.

It's just a life update.

You know, it's been a little while since I saw you, September or something.

So things changed around here.

Just thought you'd want to know.

But not having a bath.

Waving a light.

Yeah, we got weird kinks in Australia.

We got everyone distracted with the spiders and the poisonous things, but they're not asking the real questions about what's going on down here.

That's right.

I'm glad to enable that side of you or so.

Thank you so much.

Feel very seen.

We always talk about representation being important, and here I am, very seen.

But hey, I'm having a blast, dude.

It's a wonderful, wonderful game.

So, thank you, awesome.

Thank you so much.

Um, we're going to spend a bunch of time talking about it but, as i usually do um, we're going to rewind all the way back the very beginning, to little lee.

And uh, i want to know about your first memory of games like and not the one that's just like oh, i remember playing this.

You know, the first game i played was this or whatever that's.

That's kind of boring.

I want to know the game, that kind of, or the moment in time that set your brain alight, or maybe was the first kind of seed or catalyst for putting you on this path.

Does any kind of landmark memory like that stick out for you?

Yeah, I mean, I got a few, I think.

We got time.

Yeah.

I mean, you know um, we're going back all the way back to the 20th century.

Now uh, talk about my early gaming memories uh, into a uh, a time called the 1970s, which is amazing.

Um yeah my, you know my dad was a big kind of a big nerd at heart and he want, you know, he brought home an Atari 2600 and you know, of course I remember playing a bunch of games on that, you know, and uh.

Um, and shortly after that I mean a few years after that my mom decided computers are the way of the future.

So she bought me an Atari 800 and I learned to do like programming and stuff, but also a lot of games.

So some of my earliest memories of games that like excited me are on those two platforms.

Um, and I uh, starting with Atari 2600, I know the one that um, that got me excited about the weird possibilities of games was uh, it was a game called adventure and it was like, You know, and you're these little, you're a little square.

You're a little square and you're fighting dragons with your little arrow.

And I remember.

You know I don't remember how I found out about this, because this was sort of pre-popular internet days.

But at some point it might have been my dad or I was reading like Byte Magazine or something like that.

You know there was this idea that like oh, if you went this place in the maze, you'd pick up this invisible dot.

And you'd know there was an invisible dot because it would beep, it'd make a sound.

And then if you went to a different part and you plugged in the invisible dot into a wall, it opens up a secret passageway and you went through it and it was just the creator's name.

Just like with glowing text.

It was like the first Easter egg I remember.

And it was like this weird peek behind the scenes that made me aware at a really young age that like humans made this.

Yeah, that there was a creator.

Yeah, yeah.

It was like a signature, you know, but it was like cool.

It wasn't just a, it was like you had to go on a journey to find it yeah, and i just remember that like uh somehow that, just you know, uh really affected me and uh, i remember um uh, years later uh, another early memory that that got me inspired that i still think about these days is i was playing this game called uh geez, i always get the name slightly wrong, but it's like the return of heracles And it was made by I don't know who made it.

It's a computer game they had made.

It was their first game was, was, was based on Alibaba.

Uh, and it was like the sort of, uh, tales of that.

And I never played that, but this one was based on Greek mythology.

So when you started the game, you could pick which character you wanted to play.

Um, and I think there were just a couple options, but after playing through the game you'd get more options.

So you could, you know, most people like Hercules or Heracles and, um, I remember playing that.

And, you know, in the case of Heracles, you start out playing like you're just a baby.

There's like a sentence or two about the hero, about this myth that would scroll on the screen.

You know Blade Runner style or something.

And then suddenly you're just like this little baby and there are snakes coming at you.

And if you didn't grab the snakes and strangle them to death, they would bite you and your game was over.

You just died and then you'd have to restart.

And so they didn't tell you there was no tutorial.

I was just like you know, and it wasn't until many years later, when I was a little older, that I read the actual sort of myth of Hercules and realized that was part of it right, yeah.

And then they advanced and and the way the game worked is you'd move between these different screens, so you just kind of get to the edge of a screen and they would cut to a different screen.

Um and uh, they were, but it was like you're creating this whole world and i remember at one point i went through um and and so you have to kind of like when you go into a screen, some of them were kind of blank, but some of them just had like npcs going around doing their own thing, so it kind of felt like they had their own life.

It was the first time i felt like They just were doing stuff and I was wandering into their scenes.

And if you interacted with them, I think sometimes you'd fight them or they'd talk to you and give you some bits of myth.

And eventually you had this little arc you had to find for your hero and you'd complete it.

Well, at one point I remember going through when I was first playing.

I went through and it was like this sort of forest area and there was a lake in the middle of it.

And there was no one at the lake.

There's nothing going on.

But then there was like a stag.

I saw a stag moving around, a little stag head.

You know, the graphics are very simple.

And then there was like a dog over here or a wolf.

I wasn't sure what it was.

And then I went to the screen and did something.

And I came back and the dogs were chasing the stag.

And they were like hunting it down.

And it seemed to just be kind of running some sort of like a life simulation.

You know where you keep the pixels away and you'd get in a corner.

And I was like, that's weird.

I don't even know what that's for.

Well, I played through that hero's arc.

I picked a different hero.

I went into that space and you could I think you could do these in different orders.

Yeah, that's how I remember it.

And then there was Diana was bathing by the lake.

And of course, she's a pixel, right?

She sees me and then she turns me into a stag for seeing her naked by the river.

And then I was like, oh, shit, I know what those dogs are for.

And then the dog started chasing me, right?

Like I had seen the scene in a different context and they chased me down and killed me as a stab.

And I was like wow, like that, just that, that whole game, just I was just.

You know, it felt like the first time I was like they were.

I don't know.

I don't know if it really was, but it felt like it could have happened or not, depending on how close I got to the lake.

It wasn't part of the thing I had to do.

The dogs weren't always in the exact same spot.

And I'd seen the scene play out beforehand because I'd chosen a different character.

And somehow, I felt like I was in a world for the first time, I think is how I remember it.

I felt like I'm in this totally different world.

There's something really...

There's something really interesting about that, you know, especially as an art director for so many years as well, you'll know this very well.

It's like the visual fidelity and everything that we push in games and the scope and scale of them.

But sometimes it's just like thinking about hearing that story reminds me how simple some of these illusions can be, yet how powerful the effect and the impact of them can be on us.

Like you say, diana's a pixel.

We're like we're back at what you know 20, 30 years ago whatever, playing this game, and it's just like this simple routine, but the way that you experience it and the illusion that it casts upon you is just almost as impactful, as you know, or just as impactful as what we're experiencing today with all our, our big bucks and our our many, many tries.

Yeah, I think there's something too about that era where there were fewer games in the market, but I think it was more about you know, like Tim Schafer and I sometimes talk about this like you would get like this was the game you got that summer.

Like this is the game, one game your parents could afford.

And you're just stuck with it for three months when you weren't in school.

And so it didn't matter on some level how hard it was or how confusing it might be or you know, like no real concepts of like player affordances or tutorials or anything like that because you worked your way through it.

And that was, you know, you had no choice.

But it also meant that it just kind of uncovered a different experience.

You know, that was I'm really glad I had.

In retrospect I'm really glad I had an experience where you just kept returning to this game or whatever game it was.

Text Adventures were another one I played a lot of.

All right.

Any that stand out to you?

Yeah, there was one that I remember really liking.

So I was a big Douglas Adams fan, so I played the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy one.

But the one that stuck with me was one called Suspended.

Right.

And suspended was is.

It came in this game box and I remember the box and it had like a plastic death mask of a person.

Like it looked like, you know, they had taken a face.

They gave you a plastic death mask in the box as well.

Like, yeah, no, it was, it just, it just kind of looked like, like a casting.

And then when you start playing the game, you're a robot, right.

So you're a robot and you're in this, what's sort of like describes again it's all text adventure.

So you're imagining what it looks like and you know, you can, you know, go north, inspect this, or you know, grab this.

You use this on that sort of stuff.

And at one point i'm i'm trying to figure out like uh, you know you're, you're i, if i can't remember, if you're partly broken or the whole, i think the whole, the whole area is broken.

You're trying to repair it and you are sometimes finding parts.

And there's a lot of hints about like, well, you need to find another robot type of thing.

And at one point I decided to like pull open a panel on the wall.

I don't remember how I led to there.

And then it starts describing this robot, which is unlike any robot you've ever seen before.

Right.

And it's like, it's like oh, it's got these cables and it's got these really advanced manipulators that like are jointed and they go down and they have five smaller manipulators on the tip of it.

And, you know, describing all this thing and it says, it looks like it's like plugged in.

So it's like, so I unplugged it so I could, you know, move it.

And I killed myself because what it was describing was a robot's point of view of what a human looked like.

You were in suspended animation in the wall as the character, right?

And you were seeing through the robot's eyes, like some sort of telepresence.

And that blew my mind because it like in retrospect.

I'm like yeah, that was how this robot, who's never seen a person, was describing a person in robotic terms.

And I unplugged myself because I didn't know what I looked like, because I'm only getting this like telepresence description or whatever.

Yeah, that game was really cool.

And I remember, but I just remember that moment in particular.

I was like So it's clear, like you were saying you know you were playing with your dad and stuff like that.

Was it a kind of big gaming household or did you come from like a family of artists or accountants or musicians?

Like.

Is it sort of what was it like in your home when it came to like sort of pastimes and playing games and what your parents were up to?

Yeah.

No.

Well, you know, my grandparents immigrated to the country and they were poor coal miners, right.

So no, I came from the opposite of a family of artists and and stuff.

But my dad was always, you know he, he was um, you know my my, a lot of my family are all seafaring.

They're like merchant marines and navy folks and things like that, and so my dad was.

He was a submariner and Um, but he was really into hot rods.

Right.

And and he had, he had been drafted to go to Vietnam war and he was super into counterculture stuff.

So when I grew up, I found all these like underground comics that I probably shouldn't have seen as a kid.

Right.

He had all these like furry, freak brothers and zap comics and you know like really 60s underground culture stuff, a lot of uh, rat fink, hot rod stuff, models and art and stuff.

So he had like interest in all these like unusual, even for the time, kind of artistic things and i don't you know.

I i think he originally bought the 2600 because he wanted to play the drag racing game because, like i said, he was a hot rod guy right, he was always working on cars and stuff.

So I was the only child and you know, both my parents worked.

So I was mostly I was just joking about this earlier today that you know my at a very young age, I don't know fourth, fifth grade.

I was a latchkey kid, right.

Which means I walked myself from home with a key, let myself in and I was alone most of the time.

And, you know, the summers when I had it off, I was just alone in my house the entire summer.

And, you know, I got a little older, I'd get on a bike.

And I disappear for 12 hours.

And that was just normal at the time.

Like they had no way to reach me.

There's still cell phones or a lot of, a lot of my childhood was spent alone, I think, you know, and um um, but yeah no, they were.

They were both sort of you know blue collar folks working and uh um yeah, but there was, i think that my first, my mom, was a writer too, you know.

I mean not professionally, but she was very much into writing and she wanted being an analyst for the state a little bit later on and, like my dad was doing, he was a carpenter and then that sort of stuff.

But um yeah, you know, but uh i, so i guess i sort of grew up with my dad's like just finding these things.

My dad was into uh yeah, that kind of kind of deed of inspiration potentially yeah, influence in the home.

Tell us about your, your sort of your school years and did you, did what did you?

What did you study at uni?

Like, what were you?

Were you in that?

Were you in the chess club at high school or were you running trackly or swimming like from the?

Was the sea, the sea salt in your, in your uh, in your blood?

You know it's funny.

Yeah, i was born in hawaii originally and i we went to california when i was pretty young.

But, like i yeah, i grew up in the ocean and i'm a very much still swimming sort of person.

But uh, you know we, my dad was a nuclear power guy.

So we moved, we moved from Hawaii.

We moved to, to California cause he worked at a nuclear power plant and all that sort of stuff.

Um, but you know, when I was in school, like I remember, in high school, you know, I I was really interested.

I wanted to be a writer and I was also really interested in art and I wanted to be an artist.

And then I had, you know, because of my mom, had had.

She told me later that she took a loan out against the house in order to afford a computer for me, which is crazy because we didn't have very much money.

And she just knew that it would be important at some point.

Incredible.

Wow.

Just crazy.

Right.

When did you find that out?

Yeah, a number of years ago we were just talking about stuff and I realized how little money we had growing up.

And I was like, how did we get a computer?

Cause that was like $2,000 in like 1982, which is like stupid amount of money, you know?

And she was like, well, you know, did this and stuff.

And I and I uh, I and I, actually just that even reminded me.

I remember at one point my dad um, there was a college, a college continuation course, which is like something they do on weekends, sometimes for adults.

And there was one in computer programming.

And my dad talked to the professor and asked if I could go.

And I was eight or 10.

And they said, okay, well, you can join, but you have to be here with them.

And there was this basic programming of Fortran.

I don't remember what it was.

It was pretty simple stuff.

But I didn't even, I mean, I didn't have algebra at that age.

I didn't have any math.

And so I sort of had to infer all these things based on You know, the stuff they're telling me.

And I just remember my first my first little computer.

And by the way, I'm not a programmer at all.

But like, you know, at that age, it was all simple.

You're getting stuck into things at that age.

Yeah.

You know, I remember the first thing I created was a nuclear war simulator which was like Super Mario Wars.

It's like you know, I think probably because the movie War Games is out and you type in prompts and anything you typed in would still result in nuclear war.

And then it just like, I remember I was just flashing the screen and did a countdown.

And that was probably not what most people were doing in that class.

Yeah.

It's like bringing back sort of, or it's making me think of those situations where the parents have to come in and explain the context.

Like, no, I work in nuclear energy.

Like it's, my son is not a psychopath.

It's okay.

My dad has a really inappropriate sense of humor, I'll say.

Like he would, I remember he would bring home like the nuclear safety manuals from his work.

He's like, look, this is really funny.

Like when it's, if it's a nuclear war, if something, if there's a radiation leak, you're supposed to stuff people's bodies by the door because they have a lot of water and they can absorb it.

So he's telling me all this.

I'm like, and he's like, you're like, yes, yes, good.

That's great.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

Yeah, actually, probably almost visible in the background there, kind of over here.

I have this nuclear fallout sign.

That's a real fallout sign from a bomb shelter.

My grandfather was an electrician and he used to wire up those things for the state.

And when they closed him down he grabbed a bunch of stuff because he knew I was into that sort of stuff.

So I got his fallout shelter.

He's got me these like civil defense gas masks and stuff that he thought I'd enjoy.

I don't know if these things were formative influences or if they just had you dialed from a young age.

It's hard to say.

Yeah.

Um, so I see your original question is kind of what did I study?

And, um, yeah, you know, I, I was, um, I would say I was really sickly as a child.

So I wasn't like at a young age, I really wasn't into sports and things like that.

Cause I was, I was allergic to the known world.

I was allergic to grass, trees, pollen, mold, cats, dogs, dairy, everything.

And I was just a regular bubble boy.

Yeah.

It was a really just had no immune system.

Um, And it wasn't until I.

But by the time I started getting into high school, you know, I started doing more physical things.

I used to race BMX and my dad got me into martial arts and wrestling and all that sort of stuff.

I did for a while.

But my heart really was like I just wanted to come home and create.

I think is what I did most of the time, you know.

So writing or art,

And when I eventually went to university, I went in and got a degree in painting and drawing.

I was sort of like of torn between which path to follow.

But um, i decided, and i didn't like computers weren't really a thing.

I mean, i took a little bit of computer stuff just to fulfill a math requirement.

I found it more interesting, but i didn't really.

It never occurred to me that there was any intersection of art and writing and computers.

Uh, that i would be interested in doing at the time.

Interesting yeah, was it.

Was that Because you kind of just hadn't thought that much about like, how the games are coming together, or that there were people in these roles that you kind of didn't identify with?

I know that was the thing for me is I didn't identify as a programmer and that's all I thought.

I just thought programmers made games.

I didn't understand that there even were writers or a thing called a game designer.

And when I sort of realized that I remember reading an article or watching a video, I was like, oh okay, this place can be for me.

Was it a similar thing for you when you kind of, like, why didn't you have that sort of realization?

Was it just never occurred to you?

Yeah, you know, I mean part of it is.

At the time there really wasn't.

I mean, you know, the programmer, game designer producer were probably one or two people at the time.

Yes, exactly.

The board.

Yeah, i mean, the art that i was aware of was like the people who did the cover art for the atari 2600 box, which i'd stare at, you know, um and uh, because when i was in university i remember i had an atari st and so it was a little bit later.

You know computer, but but i um, i i had not been playing video games for a while at that point.

You know, i kind of like i grew up with all these like Atari 2600 ColecoVision Magnavox Odyssey Intellivision, Atari 800, Commodore 64 Amiga,

And then I went to college and I just sort of didn't you know, I was not playing when the Genesis and Nintendo became big in America.

Like I just wasn't on my radar.

It wasn't part of my experience.

And so, you know, the thing that I remember This is kind of roundabout way of saying it.

I remember being able to go into a computer store.

I was saying this is sort of a weird way of saying, like I jokingly say, Nintendo ruined the game industry.

And what I mean by that is like when I was a kid, before the big video game crash, which was not Nintendo's fault.

Games were not targeted at children at all.

Like some were, but you'd go into a computer store and the most diverse array of strange computer games was available, right.

There'd be a game on like the prussian roman war or whatever you know.

There there would be a game on sea craft stations, there'd be a game on like just all sorts of strange.

If there'd be adult games, they're all just there in the computer store, sometimes in ziploc baggies, like sometimes some local person would have made them and photocopied yeah, and this was like the actual indie scene.

This is like you know, this is like the original early 80s, mid 80s right, and i just remember that.

And of course I played 2600 and a lot of those were were targeted children, but there was just such stuff out there.

And then when the games industry crashed and it came back, it came back as a package children's product for parents.

Yeah.

And that's what games were for a long time.

And I think at that point in my life as an, as an artist and stuff, I was like you know, it's not for me.

Yeah.

I kind of moved away from it a little bit.

And you know, and and I and you know, there's still computer games and stuff out there as well.

Of course i only jokingly say that because nintendo is an amazing creator of games but, like at the time, i was like it took for the longest time in my experience for them to once again be like like uh, targeting all sorts of different folks, you know, for all different sorts of folks, not just uh, for kids.

And yeah, for sure, it almost took like in a large, in a large way.

Obviously there is, you know, and I know you know this, but obviously there's like a game here and there that they're doing things and there's still interesting stuff or there's a tiny indie scene, but it really took that indie Renaissance and the democratization of like development really in like the late two thousands to smash that wide open and bring in all those new voices again that gave us all the games that were happening at that time.

You know, I know you're all doing amnesia fortnight, you know around a similar time and stuff like that.

It's just, it's incredible.

Like just how rapidly the diversity of titles and experiences on offer came around.

You know, it was really really cool.

So you were studying, sorry, go.

No, no, no.

I just, it just sort of reminded me, I just thought of this other.

This will probably like I think I'm outside the statute of limitations.

I can't be arrested for this, but I do remember when I was in like high school as a freshman or sophomore, so like 14 15, I remember downloading illegal software, pirated software, on bulletin board systems from Europe in different languages, like Amiga games and Atari ST games.

And I didn't know, I'd never heard of these games.

And I had no, I didn't have any instructions.

They weren't even in my language.

A lot of them were in French or German.

And I remember playing these games and how.

What a strange, like path of discovery to even figure out what the rules were, how it worked or what the game was.

And I just remember that being like Like, probably so different than if you bought the game and knew what it was about and read.

Of course, back then people read the actual instructions and they weren't in the game.

Tutorials were the book.

You know, I remember, but I just remember that.

And I didn't even know what the game would be about.

And I love that idea of going in blind.

You know, like at the time he didn't have a choice, but in retrospect there was a certain magic to that.

And a lot of them had the, like the European demo scene demos on the front.

These amazing audio visual things and like 4k or whatever the hell it was.

And I just was like, what is this strange subculture?

Who are these people?

You know, when you start saying like, why didn't I think about going into games or did I not?

I was like, I didn't know who they were.

I didn't know where they came from.

I never heard of a lot of these companies, you know?

And yeah, anyways, I just had that memory when we were talking and thought about that a long time. yeah wow yeah we had a we had a thriving demo scene in australia as well and it's interesting i wasn't aware of it when you know it was around the similar time that you're talking about when it was really popping off here but we i was the chair of a um of australia's sort of like largest independent games festival out here and you know it's not just like a festival at one point of the year we would do other events and everything and we did it was our 10th anniversary we did like a 10 years of replay that's the name of the festival and in the research for that i worked with a games historian academic out here called dr helen stucky and she's just incredible uh and one of these people like her encyclopedic knowledge of like not just what happens in games but what happened in games in this suburb of melbourne at this point in time and how this person is related to this person how it affected their works like a deep art historian or critic but for like 90s 2000s game culture and stuff and the discoveries like that i made about like the demo scene in melbourne and like the amazing stuff that was happening it was really cool and that they were like intimately connected and working collaborating with like people overseas in the european demo scene and stuff too it's really really cool such a such a bizarre like kind of offshoot of games and just so incredibly cool yeah and i know i you know i never really connected with any of those folks but I just remember being inspired by that.

Those maybe as much as the game itself, you know, they're so cool.

So you, you're studying painting and drawing.

So is that like a fine arts degree or like, yeah.

Okay.

And when you're, when you're doing that, what are you kind of, what are you thinking, Lee?

Like, are you, it sounds like, what are you thinking?

No, I mean like, what are your, are you doing it with any kind of intention?

Are you just doing it because like, that's where you're at at that point in time and you'll figure things out after that?

Or did you have a plan or kind of?

Are you, are you the kind of person to sort of lay down a plan in front of you?

Give us a little bit of like sort of where you're at at that point in time, about thinking about your life and sort of where you're heading.

Yeah.

You know, my my mom would probably say that I always had a plan, but I really didn't feel like it.

And I went to college and I was like, I'm really interested in this.

And my family was very encouraging.

I was the first person in my entire family to go to college.

And so they were really supportive.

Yeah.

And and they were like, OK, well, just just do what you want to do.

My mom tells me later that she knew I would figure out a way to be successful.

But I didn't feel that way.

You know, I still don't really feel that way, but I especially didn't feel that way then.

And I was like well, you know, I kept trying to my mind like well, if I learned to live really leanly, maybe I can just be a fine artist.

Maybe I can do fine art.

And that was really because I kind of went into thinking I would transfer to the, to the graphic design illustration program.

And the way this college worked is it.

You would go in as an art major and then you'd have about halfway through you'd do, a portfolio review to apply to, like the upper division classes with that focus.

And what I discovered along the way.

Well, first of all, I'm terrible about taking.

You know, I'm terrible.

I'm probably a terrible student in some ways because I feel like I didn't listen enough.

Maybe everyone feels that way when you look back at that age.

But like I...

I saw the illustration folks, and there were some amazing talented people, but they were just, I say just, they were just drawing.

And I was like, I really wanted to paint.

And I realized that an illustration degree at the time was all about drawing.

Now that would have probably benefited me because I probably would have been stronger in my fundamentals.

But I was just so... seduced by the idea of color and painting that i just said you know fuck it uh i'm i'm just gonna i'm just gonna get a degree degree in painting and drawing and not not pursue illustration which have been like the reasonable thing to do i would have like possibly come out with some hireable skills you know yeah and then i you know i went i went into like the painting uh program and i liked it but i what i realized i mainly liked it because i was really bad about listening to authority, which is probably still true.

But I realized that's why I liked it, because it kind of lets you do whatever you wanted, as long as you have like a project.

And I always had a million ideas.

But what I realized is that I wasn't.

You know, I could have been a much better painter if I'd gone with something that probably had a little stronger bit of a program.

It was a good program, but they were all aging modernists.

So they were like, what is paint even?

You know, art is just paint on a canvas.

And I will say that I did learn a different way of thinking about art conceptually from being in that program.

But I think I was also just like thirsty for like okay sure, but like how the fuck do I mix linseed oil with a turpentine?

To like, how do I blend colors?

And that was like, they were all like, well, just imagine the idea.

You're like, okay.

So it was like kind of a hard time.

So I had no, I really didn't have any plan.

And then I graduated and I was like okay, I'm going to go to grad school, because that's what everyone thinks they're going to do is no plan.

Right.

And this is not a dig on grad school, but I was just like you know if I get an MFA.

I had a BFA in painting and drawing.

I got an MFA and it's like, oh, I could always teach.

Not that I was ever really wanting to be a teacher.

But you know, if you're an actor or an artist musician, you know that probably you're going to wind up teaching to make ends meet.

So I was like, all right, I'll do that.

And.

So I kind of like worked a bunch of you know crappy data entry jobs on computer stuff.

You know, because back then like no one knew computers and they're like do you have spreadsheet skills?

Like they was like, Like I remember what's a term they used to use computer literate as a term.

And literally that just meant you didn't run from the room crying when someone you know it was like.

It was like pencil literate is like what?

Like could you hold a pencil and make marks?

You're pencil literate.

It was like that level.

That was the bar of difficulty for getting a job like that.

And I was like, yeah, I can do that.

I can do that.

Um, so I uh, you know, wind up like writing macros for someone's Excel and word perfect stuff at a, at an office.

That was my job.

But I, I would do that for like, you know, six hours a day and this paint all the rest of the time.

And, and, and, um, I, uh, I didn't get into grad school.

And then I, you know, I talked to my professors, like, I was like, what happened?

They're like, well, we don't accept any students from the same school.

So you need to go elsewhere.

And they don't want to accept people if you're in a year or two of graduating, because you probably haven't figured out that you really want to do it.

Yeah.

They're probably right.

Um, They wanted me to have more life experience, I think, right?

Which is fair, but it's hard to hear.

Something to say on canvas, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a little hard to hear.

And around that time... So this was fun.

So around that time...

A friend of mine who, well, we were more like, we were friends, but I barely knew him.

He was from high school.

He had gone to UC Berkeley and graduated a degree in computer programming.

He was working at a company and he remembered all the like art I used to do in high school and stuff.

Right.

And maybe some stuff he had seen in college.

And he was like, somehow he got a hold of me.

I don't remember how, but maybe through a mutual friend, because I hadn't talked to him in years.

And he's like hey, he's like Mike, this company I'm working at, they need like an animator for this children's DVD thing we're doing.

And he's like, you should, you should apply because you're a really good artist.

And I was like, I was thinking, I don't know.

I don't know how to animate.

And I was like, okay.

And he's like, yeah, you just need to know like Photoshop and bring some slides of your work in.

Cause that's what you used to carry on slides back in the day.

And, and you know, Photoshop.

And I was like, okay, yeah, sure.

I know Photoshop.

Now, of course I never used Photoshop.

So my girlfriend at the time worked uh, she worked at a college campus in the office and I was like Hey, can you steal one of their Macs for the week and just like bring it home.

Cause she, I told her, I'm like, I don't know.

I thought you were going to say a copy of Photoshop, but you're like, no, no, no.

I didn't, I didn't even own a computer at that point.

And I was, I was, I was like, you steal that computer.

Do you think you could smuggle it out of the office?

You know, it was like a Mac SE or something.

And, uh, She did.

And then I taught myself Photoshop with a mouse.

I made a couple of images on it, you know, and stuff, and saved them onto a floppy over that weekend and stuff.

And so I went to the interview the next Monday and I was like yeah, here's some stuff in my latest work on Photoshop.

I did wind up getting hired there.

But yeah, that was, that was, that was, and that's when I sort of like, was like i, it was strange because it was just like this weird inner, this weird coincidence, like you know, it's being in the right place the right time, but it did.

It did rekindle.

I was like, oh yeah, i really like computers.

Oh yeah, i really like games and art.

Like i do like a lot of the stuff that i was like i just didn't realize anyone would pay you money for it at the time.

You know um, It is so interesting in that era.

Adam Orff just interviewed Jeff Gardner in an episode for the podcast and I was listening to it.

It's a great episode for anyone who hasn't listened.

Jeff's saying that he bumped into a guy at a party that he knew and he was like hey, I'm working at this games company.

You should come.

And he's like oh, that's like there were so many people wandering around games at the time that like it's like their skillset and their childhood or like all parts were kind of leading towards it, but they just had kind of no idea that it was a thing or an opportunity or how to get in.

And then someone's just like, well, yeah, I'm over here.

You should do this.

Or like, Hey, there's this opportunity or they see a thing in the paper and they're like, Oh, okay.

It's really interesting how the folks like you kind of like bounce around and then just like plunk yourself down.

Did it feel when you, when you sat down at this, at this job uh, that you, that you'd scored.

Did it feel like you had kind of you were at home, or was it new and strange and kind of awkward to get into?

Or were you kind of just off and flying from the start?

Uh, I know, I think I was probably just, you know, super big imposter syndrome in some ways.

I remember those vibes for sure.

Yeah.

You know, and I remember, no, I, I really didn't, I really was not comfortable at all.

I mean the people there were very nice and you know I was able to.

I've always been pretty good about picking things up quickly.

So I was able to like learn all the software really quickly.

And we were using and make this, this, this product.

And and it was funny because I was like I realized, working there i was like man, i really want to get into video games.

But this was not a video game company per se, they were like a multimedia company.

Yeah, because dvds were new and so everyone was making multimedia dvds.

Yeah, multimedia was a whole thing right, like the whole thing, and hollywood is dumping money into it and um, and i remember uh, so we also, this company also, in addition to this sort of children's animation thing they had, they had a whole separate branch that I would eventually transfer into.

That was working on comics, doing digital coloring for comic books, which I did.

But before I got there, I I did some um.

They had a.

They would author a disc every month for this uh magazine called E2 um which, as you can imagine, is the same company that made E3.

They did it.

So it was electronic entertainment.

And so we did the cover disc for that.

So I, I like remember doing art and some, you know like uh, he wasn't, It was like macro media director, programming.

So funny, funny, deep cut macro media director.

Amazing that you know of this program because so many people don't.

But Solium Infernum, the game that we kind of like, rebooted and released last year.

It was originally developed in 2009.

It was released in 2009, but originally developed by one guy called Vic Davis out of Athens Ohio, who kind of had no idea about like like any kind of games communities around him just in his den at home, coding this whole game, developing this whole game in Macromedia Director like a multiplayer turn-based game with AI and everything like just forced this program coding in lingo to like do things that it was never born to do.

A program, as you know, as we're talking about, designed to make DVD menus.

So yeah, and he came from that kind of multimedia area as well.

Like him and his brother had formed a company where they were like making it was things like.

I think one of the things that he mentioned to me was like you know, you could buy a DVD and it was like utilizing the interactive menus you know functionality of a DVD to do like tours of like and kind of like historical, kind of like tactical playbacks of like civil war battles and things like that.

And they would like sell to these, like civil war.

You know um fanatics or whatever, or historian or buffs, uh Yeah, but like Macromedia, is people just doing?

It's like the dark arts of multimedia, right.

That program.

It's not around anymore, right?

It's long dead.

Yeah, it got bought by Adobe.

So all of the stuff that Macromedia used to be... Macromedia got bought by Adobe a long time ago.

And then they continued them for a while and they're long gone now.

But yeah, I mean, that's where the Flash was originally part of was originally a product that Macromedia made, that they bought.

Future Splash Animator was what it was originally called.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Who were like, you got to check this program out.

It was like the first version before it became part of Macromedia, which then became part of Adobe, which then everyone knows, Flash for now, right?

But they're like, it was called Future Splash Animation.

He's like, you can totally animate in this.

And then you can.

You know, there's like this little programming language that you can do some simple things.

And, you know, that was like, yeah, I was just weird.

I mean, I never really used those too much, you know, but I just remember at the time it was like all kind of brand new.

We used this tool called Elastic Reality, which was morphing, 2D morphing software.

We used it to.

I used it to do in-betweens of these keyframes because I'm not I'm not much of an animator.

So I was like, well, I can draw these poses.

And I was like I'm going to use this weird morphing software, which was developed for Terminator 2, to do in-betweens for a kid's software DVD, and here i am like if someone had a copy in the office.

So i'm using, like you know, elastic reality to do my tweens and i just clean them up.

Yeah, it was really, you know, really strange at the time.

You know yeah, probably not the best animation, but i didn't really know what i was doing.

But yeah yeah well, what's animation if not just a lot of drawings?

You know, just more drawings together right Luckily whatever, it was 240 by 180 at 12 frames.

A second didn't look too bad.

You can hide a lot in that many pixels, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

So you're at this place doing multimedia stuff.

When did you break out into video games?

When you make the leap?

Yeah.

See, no, it was a while still because I worked this company for a while.

We did these digital coloring of comic books.

And then the company – so I went and did that.

And that's where I got deep Photoshop experience, right?

Like again going back to the first version of Photoshop, which was called Barney Scan, because Adobe did – it was scanning software.

That got me around Photoshop right.

So we used this really early pre-layers version of Photoshop to color these comics, which was crazy.

Anyway, so I –

I did that for a while and then that whole company went bust.

And um one.

The art director there went and worked in video games, and I went and worked um at this company, this production company that did um film and video work, as well as early web work, as well as CD work.

And and.

So when I was at that company, which I eventually became the art director before I left you know I was I did a lot of learn to do digital video editing on an avid media composer in the early days of digital film editing.

I you know did.

I learned you know a little bit more on web stuff because we did some web animation.

So Shockwave was the macro media product we used to use.

I remember I almost got fired for making a program for a little thing called shockwave of the lambs inside of the silence of the lambs.

The boss has said, we need a demo for a client.

You just want something shockwave tech.

So just make anything.

I'm like, well, what is it?

Just make it interactive, make it anything.

So I made a little shockwave program where you're at the bottom of a whale and I recorded myself with a bad serial killer impersonation.

They lower a bucket down.

He's like put the lotion in the basket and you drag the lotion onto the basket.

First time my boss sees this is in front of the client.

He's like what the fuck did you do?

Anyway, incredible.

Yeah, but i didn't know that.

This is the same way whose grandfather was giving him fallout shelter signs and military caps.

They loved it, quite loved it.

Yeah, it was interactive.

You got to drag a lotion into a basket and you'd raise it up, fallen at one point and it was yeah uh, yeah.

So so i did learn 3d when i was at that part at that studio um, because it was, it was kind of new, because before then it was all like sgi level, you know.

So you had a special training.

No one taught in school, you know so.

But i did learn um auto desk there, which is this is pre, pre studio max.

And so I learned that program because we had to do some, you know, motion graphic style rendering stuff.

And so getting back to your question about when I got into video games.

So my former art director at the at that first company was working at accolade and he's like Hey, they're hiring.

You're a really good artist.

Now you have all this other experience.

You should, you should apply for this.

And so I made this interactive DVD as my demo reel, you know cause I had all that scripting experience and render out these little 3d graphics and stuff.

And, um, you know, pretty terrible portfolio, I'm sure.

Um, but I, um, I, you know, submitted it and, um, there were, uh, I interviewed two different teams.

I didn't hear anything for a little while.

And I was like, I was like, okay, well, um, uh, I hope I got the job or whatever.

And then, and then they, they called it.

One of them called me back and be like, Hey, we want to hire you.

Can you start like in two weeks?

Can we start in this project?

And I was like, wow, I got it.

I got into games.

This is amazing.

And so I thought, okay, I never left the country at that point.

Um, because we'd never had money to travel.

And so I was like, okay, before I go, I've got actual, you know, money here.

I'm like, I'm going to go to Europe.

My friend was living in uh, Bavaria at the time and I was like okay, I need, I can fly next week, but I didn't have a passport back then.

Three nine, eleven days.

You get a passport in three days.

If you just made up a lie about needing to go to a wedding or something, which is what I did in San Francisco, you know like went, stood in the line for two days, for several hours, got my passport, flew to Germany having the time of my life being in another country for the first time.

Yeah, I bet and uh, and when I was there.

Of course there's no way to reach me.

And when I get back from that trip like a week and a half later, the week before I'm supposed to start my job there's a message waiting for me on the answering machine saying that the project I'd been hired for had been canceled.

So blowing all my money on this trip to finally get out of the country.

I come back and the project that you can hire has been canceled.

And so, but it was just a message.

There was no contact number or anything else.

All I knew was like, well, I knew I was supposed to go to work.

So I went into work the following Monday and I found the guy who had hired me.

And I was like, do I still have a job?

He's like, I don't know.

He's like, you need to go talk to the studio art director.

So I went and talked to the studio art director.

And luckily he, The two teams that I interviewed with both wanted to hire me.

And so they canceled this one project, but the other team had not filled that position yet.

And so I went over to that.

That was like that rocky introduction to video games would have sort of was foreshadowed my first five or six years in video games.

It was like that chaotic.

Oh, really?

Just like a spell of bad luck and things like that?

I think my first five or six projects were all canceled.

Holy shit.

In games, right?

Wow.

And so it was like crazy chaotic time, because it was just when the industry was shifting from 2D to 3D.

Yeah, put a year stamp on this.

When did you start at Accolade?

Like what kind of time stamp are we talking about?

This has got to be about 96, I want to say.

Yeah, okay, right.

Yeah, right, because 3D is just making that shift at that point in time.

Yeah, and the PlayStation 1 was not out yet.

And so 3D existed as voodoo add-on cards for your PC.

It was the second video card you put in your machine that could deal with 3D.

And I remember and in retrospect that's the reason I probably got hired is because what I came to learn over the first year of being there was that most artists in the company all lost their jobs because the whole industry went 3D.

And most of these folks were traditional 2d artists.

And if like, one of the guys working there, lost his job, was a Emmy award-winning art director from Phoebe's playhouse?

Right now.

And so it was like they.

You know they have really good artists there, but they either weren't interested in learning 3d or not capable of of being cause at that time.

It was pretty technical.

There were no tutorials or anything.

There was a 900 page manual and no one to answer your questions.

It's completely different skill set right like yeah, and the gap is so much wider.

Yeah, exactly that's what i was just going to say even then, as opposed to now too.

Right, crazy so it was.

It was like a really big, but it was.

I think it was a really important lesson for me to learn, because i i think the reason why i was able to to get a career is because i was always interested in learning and i was pretty good about picking things up on my own pretty quickly and um, more than any artistic ability, as much as I don't want to admit, it is probably the reason why I have a job today, because I was, you know, those early days of of they're like well, we don't, you know, we need artists who can do this and uh, there's no school for going to video games, there's no school for 3d, and so I had a, you know, a drawing and painting background, but I also had just enough of experience in 3d and an ability to pick that stuff up quickly.

That is why i got that job.

I think um, but all but because that was such a big turning point in the industry.

Um, everyone was trying to figure out how to make this work, you know, and a lot of those early projects, like i mentioned, all got canceled um, because they they, it was a lot of, it was just perception, i think.

You know, the playstation one did come out during that very first project I was working on.

And that really changed, like everyone's perception of what games should be and the type of games people wanted to make.

But PlayStation 1.

You know, I actually shipped a PlayStation 1 game, but it is not an easy, as I recall, not an easy thing to develop for

You know I have a lot of very specific limitations and primitive tools.

Note, there was no such thing as a game engine back then for the most part.

I mean it was around.

So there was some people who made game engines, but usually at the studio was like we have a code base and a programmer will hand import and integrate every asset into the, into the code, and then you're rolling around right yeah yeah basically yeah, good luck iterating, you know.

So yeah, it was um yeah yeah wow, and so that that.

First, how many games did you end up shipping at adelaide accolade, do you remember?

Let me think um well, i worked on a bunch that didn't make it and i worked on some that did.

So i remember shipping.

So the first game i worked on was a, was a star control game uh, and that that project got canceled at alpha.

Um, it was a pc game and they decided we should be playstation one instead.

And we're like um, i've space opera adventure game on a playstation one, as it can happen um, so that uh, that got canceled.

Um see, i ship.

I must have probably shipped three or so, maybe by the time i left, because they're all so much shorter dev cycles back then.

Right yeah, of course yeah, i shipped slave zero uh, and looney tunes racing, one of the test drive things, i think.

Yeah, i shipped all those cool and then.

And so what were the kind of other stops?

Because we're sort of now i, i realize we're approaching double fine now like, what were the kind of other stops on the way to, on the way to double fine, and how did they, i think, as we sort of look at these next two stops, how did they kind of, how did they help, i guess, create the, the game developer that you went into, double finance like, do you remember any kind of formative lessons that you learned at your next couple of studios, of which I believe Crystal Dynamics was one as well right,

What are the things that you picked up along the way that put you in good stead to land at Double Fine?

Yeah, so there was Accolade.

And then after that, I co-founded a company that was around for a couple of years.

Oh, your own company?

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Man, circus freak studios was the name of our company which retrospectively yeah no, it's fine, it's fine yeah, and we did.

We did actually ship some games um, but uh man, what a, what a hard year um for that.

And uh i, i actually have a funny story that will like i won't go into too much detail, but like, when i was working at this company, you know we, we were doing at your company, you mean yeah yeah well, i wasn't the only owner, but yes yeah, i was.

I was one of the founders then and we um, we made uh, a superman game for infogram, because infogram but accolades, we had some context there.

And we're developing this original game that i was the creative director on called evil genius um, and it it was funny because we, we had superman was for the first xbox And when we started making it we had like four programmers in the whole studio.

So we had to make our own engine and ship a game for that new platform in like 12 months.

But we put all of our eggs in the Xbox basket because that's what Infogram, our first contract, wanted.

Well, it became clear by the time we shipped that game, no one wanted Xbox games.

It was good for Microsoft.

Everyone wanted PlayStation 2 games.

PlayStation 2 is a notoriously difficult platform to develop for.

And there was no way that four programmers with one month of salary left on the books could develop a PlayStation engine and get a contract, and all that.

So we were like, okay, we have this original IP.

All we have is Xbox tech.

No one wants Xbox games except for Microsoft.

So let's pitch it to Microsoft.

So we wound up pitching to Microsoft and we want, we were like, it was going pretty well.

They were interested in the title and we got to kind of like one of the last.

They had like several due diligence meetings, right.

We got to like one meeting and the guys were like, hey, do you know this person named Tim Schafer?

I was like, I don't, it sounds familiar, but no, I don't know who that is.

They're like, you know, he directed like Grim Fandango and Full Toggle.

And I knew those games.

I love this.

I was like oh yeah yeah yeah, yeah and and they're like well, he's got his own company now and we just signed a game and we think this game's a little too close and it's artistic style and spirit so uh, and his game's better, so we're gonna pass on your game.

So you know, like this is all tim's fault.

I appreciate the honesty but, like necessary, i'm not sure.

Yeah Now, I mean they were pretty brutal but, like you know, it was like that.

Like I mean.

I don't want to trash talk publishers but, like before digital distribution happened, it was aggressively one-sided in terms of publishers held all the power and developers held none of it.

Yeah, there's a phenomenal...

There's a phenomenal interview with Tony Goodman, the founder of Ensemble Studios.

It's from years ago.

I think it's from like 2013 or 2014, on what's called GameDevelopercom, now with Gamasutra at the time.

And he talks about back in those days how the strategy of a lot of these publishers were to just wait and just hold you out and delay negotiations, because they knew that all developers had a burn rate and runway and that the longer that they held out they could just get you eventually to fold to their terms.

And the reason why I was talking about it is because at the time you know he's negotiating with, You know the publisher that we all know that published Age of Empires in the end,

And they got one of the.

I think it was the record-breaking deal for the CD-ROM era in regards to the terms and everything that they got, because Ensemble Studios was an offshoot of one of his albums.

He had an IT company.

So it was like his kind of spin-off little games.

So they were just funneling money from that company.

So they were allowed to stay afloat the entire time.

And he got the deal that he wanted because he could wait out all the publishers that he was negotiating with.

But yeah, it was savage around that time.

Because I think what a lot of folks don't realize that you and I, some folks coming into the industry now we're in a whole new era.

Things that you and I know, Lee and folks from that era know is that you couldn't even publish to a console without a publisher.

So they were labeled literal gatekeepers.

They had all of the leverage and power.

You're just kind of waiting for that yes.

You couldn't even get a dev kit unless you were a publisher.

That's true.

Yeah, spot on.

You can't even get the kits, let alone publish.

And they were like 60 grand each too.

Yeah, crazy.

Even if you could get one somehow.

But you, you know, and they they yeah, I just remember.

Yeah, that was this.

It was so locked down, you know, it was like so um, and and of course you could, you know, in theory, ship on PC, but there was no steam yet.

So who's going to see, you know, go back to my days of my childhood.

I could put it in a Ziploc baggie and take it down to the local store.

Yeah.

This is outside of the statute of limitations, I'm sure.

But I won't name him in case I get some details wrong.

But the studio that I worked at, there's a very famous, who's now known quite internationally, creative director who's worked on some massive games who people know. friend of mine but he worked at the studio that i worked at and they he took because you know we're crunching doing crazy hours this is before my time there um and he took a dev kit home then his house was broken into and the dev kit was stolen and as everyone knows like that was i remember that being the drama at the studio for so long and it like praying relationships with whoever it was playstation or xbox or nintendo or something at the time i can't remember what dev kit it was but like that he took the dev kit out of the office and then that it just had like this stroke of bad luck, you know, something out of a film, like that night he was broken into and that dev kit was gone while he was out at the club and big drama.

Crazy.

Yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was like gold.

All right.

So very cool anecdote.

Yeah.

So, yeah, Tim went on a list somewhere.

So, really, it was getting a Double Fine was part of your assassination plot.

I see.

No, and so what happened?

So then I went to.

You know, when that studio folded, I went to Crystal Dynamics.

And I really liked Crystal Dynamics at the time.

And I think it was it felt the most like the stuff I really liked about Accolade at the time, you know, towards the end of it is that the dev teams were all pretty small.

Like, they were all well under 20 people.

And, and, um, at that time at Crystal Dynamics, they were a little bit bigger than that.

Um, but it felt.

It still felt like everyone was like the I went.

The initial project I was hired on was a was a platformer called Whiplash.

And it was about a indestructible rabbit changed to an insane weasel and you had to escape a pet uh X, you know, experimentation lab.

Right.

And this was made by like part of the old Dex team.

Right.

So it was like this really strange game.

And of course I'm on board with all that.

And um, and I remember the thing I really liked when I interviewed there because I interviewed a bunch of places like EA and 3EO at the time

And 3EO was working on the four horsemen, which seemed really cool and appealed to my heavy metal background.

And, And EA was working on some really cool stuff too.

But the reason why I went to Crystal Dynamics instead of those other two was when I looked at what the artists there were doing.

They were all generalists.

So the world?

Like I was going to go into the environment team and they were all building their own levels.

They were doing some level design, working with the level designer.

They're all building their own levels.

They did their own concepts.

They did their own texturing.

They did their own lighting, even though it was like a little bit bigger team than than the early days.

And I was always really liked that holistic approach just because I started as a journalist.

You did all that stuff.

Yeah.

And so I was like, Oh, this is, this is the team for me, um, in the studio.

And I really liked my time there.

And that it you know as, as as things went on, this team started getting bigger and bigger.

That started to go away.

But um um one thing I realized.

You know, I From working at Circus Freak Studios.

I feel like I got a lot of experience pitching.

Because I had to go out and pitch ideas for money.

And that was like, I learned about the business a bit.

And going to Crystal Dynamics.

I was, like you know, I really like being hands-on with all these different things.

And then, as the teams got bigger and bigger, and then, you know, the team I was on before I left was like a was I don't know, was it going to be like an 80-person team.

And I was art director.

But then I was like, I had so many direct reports. that I wasn't doing any art at all anymore.

And I thought you know, if I do this job, how this company wants me to do this job, I will very soon move too far away from touching things.

And I realized about myself of one, I think so.

I just to go on a slight rant about art directors like, if you're an art director nowadays and even back then this is, you know, 20 years ago uh the uh.

The problem winds up being like they want you to be in meetings all the day, mentor and guide people, as well as set the vision and all that, which is great.

I understand why people want that.

But the problem is that if you do that, so let's say you do that job, as they want you to do it for three or four years.

Okay, you come out of that and you have to go to another studio or something.

The first thing they want to see is your portfolio.

It doesn't matter that you've been an art director for 10, 15, 20 years.

They're like, well, let's see all of your art.

And you're like, okay, well, I've been doing that, right?

Like I've been doing this other stuff and I still have- You're bringing the portfolio of everyone else's work.

You're like, this is actually my work here.

I've been directing all of these other people's work, right?

So I was always doing side projects to keep my skills up, not only for that reason.

But I realized that I didn't want to spend.

I didn't want to start working on teams so large that I would spend all my days in meeting or directing.

I enjoyed directing.

I enjoyed collaborating but I didn't want to like never, I didn't want to get in.

A team is so big because I wanted to stay hands-on.

I was just sort of like, I'm like, I'm like a person in the trenches.

I'm a Sergeant.

I'm not a Lieutenant.

I don't want to be behind somewhere making decisions for other people.

I want to be working directly with the team.

So I, I you know, when we were, when I was working on that project, I just felt I was getting further and further away from that.

And then Around that time, Double Fine had been working on Brutal Legend.

It wasn't announced, but it was like, I don't remember, maybe a year into it or something.

And they had been working on their own engine.

And I knew two people at that studio indirectly, because one of them was a programmer who had worked with us at Circus Freak.

And he was a super smart programmer.

He was building some of their core rendering and art tools.

And he and I had collaborated a lot and designed this whole art pipeline together at the previous job.

And and Caroline was there as a producer and she had worked with her as producer as well at the studios.

So she was like Hey, you should interview this because we need, like an art director who can work in this.

You know, unusual style is also good at creative direction or like communicating the creative direction.

And also it was like really technical, because you need to help develop the art pipeline and engine and and you're also need to be experienced manager.

I was like, well, I can.

And, and, and then, you know, I was like, okay, I didn't know what the game is about.

I was like, sure.

I'll come in and talk to him and stuff.

And then when Tim showed me the game like, and we started talking like Tim and I have uh, he's a bit older than I am

I also have to point that out, but he, uh, the people who have got to know.

Yeah.

But he, uh, but he and I had a lot of the same references.

Like he was like, I'm making this game at heavy metal.

And so he's like going through their temporary menu system to show me something.

And then I'm like, Oh, Hey, that bell sound.

That's from hell's bells.

It was a hit.

It's like a ding when you clicked on something.

He said, Oh, you know that?

And I was like, yeah, I was like, Oh, that's a Randy Rhodes guitar lick.

And he's like, huh?

It became very clear.

Like I knew everything he was talking about in his vision for that game.

Yeah.

It's a good time.

Yeah.

You know, it was like a really cool connection there.

And um, and I also had never worked at a studio where I mean other than, you know, co-running my own.

But I didn't work in the studio where like, the person running the studio was was a creative person, not a production person or not a programmer or um, or even just a designer not that I'm saying designers aren't creative, but I mean someone who was like you know, kind of uh, just outside the norm at that time and I was like I was like I was like oh okay that's, that's really cool.

Um, And I had really mixed feelings about leaving my other project because it was still going on.

But I was becoming less and less happy there because Crystal Dynamics had been bought by SCI.

That got by Square Enix while I was there.

It had been bought twice.

And I can sort of see the writing on the wall for that project, not because there was anything wrong with the project, but the whole studio.

They were all you know when you get bought twice and everyone's trying to cut costs and you know we weren't the numerator.

And Tomb Raider was the other thing they were trying to make.

I was like, right.

Yeah.

Lara's in the building.

Yeah.

So I decided to leave because I really, my heart isn't creating new worlds and original property.

It's not in creating license.

And I created plenty of license things.

I know how to do it.

I know how to do it well, but it's just not where my heart is.

And so I was like no, I have this opportunity to go to Double Fine and work on this game that you know, that was still really early in development and uh yeah, so that's that's kind of how i wound up at double fun.

Yeah wow yeah, i remember it was just, it was so rad.

The announcement of brutal legend.

It was so cool, especially for those of us who, you know, were psychonauts fans or you know, there's obviously tim fans out there, but the studio just, you know, just starting and having the success with psychonauts and then um, brutal legend was just, it just had such a strong voice to it, you know.

And then obviously the like you know, Jack Black being involved was like a big thing for the industry at the time.

It was like Oh, like a big film personality or like you know, from other forms of entertainment, is coming to video games.

I just remember the hype around it was really cool.

And then, yeah, it's phenomenal.

Talk to us a little bit about how, how that went, like the, the development on it.

I mean i, you know, i've had some insights over the years.

We have a very mutual mutual friend, m ridgeways, obviously a friend of mine, so she's told me about some of the wonderful moments, you know, bringing the music together as audio director on that and stuff um.

But like i mean, obviously art is such a huge, huge element of metal as well right, and like metal has this really strong identity and incredible artists.

And you know Like, even if it's not for metal music, there's even, like metal, kind of inspired art right,

Like Frank Frazetta and things like that.

So talk to us a little bit about how you approached that project and came into Double Fine.

I'm sure you're keen to, you know, make your mark at the studio and you've been there now.

What have you been there 20 years now or something?

18.

It's 18.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just November was 18.

Yeah.

Wow.

As long as I've been in games, you've been, you've been at Double Fine.

That's, that's, that's crazy.

Weird.

Cause I, I, I never thought it'd be possible to stay at a studio that long.

It's probably something that happened to our parents' generation or our grandparents' generation is like stay at a job for 20 years.

It's like, yeah, it's a rule.

It says something about the studio you know and the you know, the culture that you've all carved out there.

But anyway, I digress.

Talk to us about, you know, stepping into Double Fine and your, your time on Brutal Legends.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was, uh, I would say that like, I'm kind of terrible when I start jobs.

I'm like the most neurotic person when I started a job.

But just assume like everyone hates me and full of imposter syndrome and everyone there was very nice, but it was um, you know uh, I'm always like okay, how do I?

What's the thing I can fix?

Like, how do I immediately make myself feel like useful?

Right.

Just like, and so.

I remember at the time, so, you know, Scott Campbell was still there for a while.

He hadn't left the studio yet.

But you know he was the art director on Psychonauts 2 and he'd done a lot of the production design on Brutal Legend, done some amazing work.

And they were kind of at this point where the engine was still kind of almost done.

They had done a lot of their early prototyping using Unreal 3, because it was the multiplayer stuff they started with.

And and so they're just starting to build out the world, the whole world.

And that's like the stuff I love the most.

I want to build the world.

I want to think about the world and what's going to inhabit the world and spend the space in it.

And I was like, oh, OK, this is undiscovered territory for me.

And there's all these amazing concepts and some ideas.

Tim had written some cool stuff, but like it was all still very in flux.

And I remember.

But at the same time I also realized that I just spent several years at Crystal Dynamics making what was the art pipelines for what they were calling their next generation engine.

Because it was right, you know, the Xbox 360 had come out or was about to come out.

And so I had spent like all the time developing that.

And I realized that when I got there that the artists were great artists but they were a generation behind in how they were making it.

Yeah right um, because they you know, they were a rookie team on psychonauts and did an amazing product and then kind of went right into brutal legend and they didn't have their engine yet.

So you know, they didn't, they didn't have the exposure of like a finished engine to learn all those things.

So i was able to kind of like immediately i was like all right, let me reorganize the art department a little bit and and um and introduce these new tech techniques and work with the programmers to kind of get those tools into artists hands.

So that was like This kind of day one for me because I could I could see from talking to all of them there's a lot of like people weren't sure where to go with it or how to get that look on screen.

And and so I kind of that's where I was, like I saw the biggest empty spot that the art team needed the most.

And that's where I started with on that, which was a great way to meet everyone in the studio.

Cause I kind of had to work with a lot of designers and yeah.

And then I think then the next thing was like I remember I remember.

So, you know, we we still do these to this day.

But but we do this thing that Tim started called the the Hoff, which is the hour of fun.

And it's a it's called the mandatory Hoff.

It's so basically periodically, when you're working on a game you have to like, stop and play the game.

The whole company meets and the project lead has to like sit there and take feedback and not respond to it.

You're just supposed to like listen to the feedback.

Yeah.

And so like uh, and then we do you know broader ones with people from outside the studio that he used to call pizza orgy.

Pizza orgies nowadays not called that.

Um, not today.

Yeah.

That was a Lucas arts term apparently.

Um, right.

Okay.

So uh, I just remember, in that first meeting I was like you know, I was like well, I don't want to come off as like too strong or whatever.

But I just remember.

I remember when I first played that part of the game in the world, it was all wrong to my eyes because it was everything was huge.

Absolutely everything was huge.

And so nothing felt epic.

And so when, when I was like, right, I was like, I probably shouldn't say anything.

But then, but then someone's like, well, let's hear from the new guy.

And I'd only been there like a week or two.

I was like I just remember saying I said I, just I said to Tim, and the company was like I feel like I'm staring at the ankles of your world and that is not where you want to be.

And, and, you know, and they're like, well, and then Tim's like, well, then you've got to fix it.

Uh, so, you know, that was like a big part.

That was like a big part of like.

Uh, you know, focusing on like.

Okay, how do we make this world visually rich?

It's an open world.

It's a big game.

For the time, open worlds was still pretty uncommon.

It was before Ubisoft invented the magic loop that everyone copies.

So it was like, how do we make this open world game?

But also just like, how do you physically make it with these early engine and tools?

But the thing I realized is that with metal album covers and a lot of that reference, you know they're kind of on one level.

They're amazing because they're almost naive style art.

They're almost like, they're almost, but not quite bad art in some ways.

And the important part was like, how do you capture that, but make it seem intentional?

So you're not imitating the bad part, but you're capturing the like you know Wagnerian drama in these crazy album covers.

And how does it relate to space design and the world and scale?

And all of that.

And that was kind of like the first once I kind of got past the tech thing, the first thing that I really wanted to sink my teeth into and really tried to help guide everyone as best I could to help create that.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, such a singular project, even to this day.

And even there is just so many genius strokes in the game, like the live action menu system at the start and the intro to the game.

I remember i actually showed it to my, to my partner tiffany, because she's a production designer in film and i don't know why, but it just came out like shot into my mind when we're having a conversation.

I was like i gotta show you this thing.

I pulled it up on youtube and you know like which showed her a video of it.

It's just, it's so rad, it's timeless very, very cool, great project.

Yeah, that was a fun.

That was tim.

Tim had that idea.

He's like we got to do a live action thing.

And Joe Kowalski, who was like the graphic designer, was working on all the menu stuff.

I was like, okay, Joe, he's like, I don't know how to do an album.

I don't want to make a physical album cover.

So I remember like, you know, Bagel and Nathan Stapley painted it.

And so I like, I printed it all out and I spray mounted it.

I made this album and I put registration marks in there for Joe.

So we could like match after effects, menuing and stuff later on, you know.

So he has registration marks in the art.

And I remember and then but Joe's the one went down to LA to shoot it because he was like he was going to have to make sure they get the shots.

And I remember Joe.

I was talking to Joe and he was like I'm not sure if this is going to work, but it was like he was really nervous about it because we'd known him.

We hadn't really done anything like that.

And you know, it's not like we're going to get a reshoot with Jack Black at this place later.

Right.

Um, just like a young Joe, like just given the job of getting down there.

You got a couple of takes, buddy, make it happen.

Yeah.

But it was so fun, and it was interesting because EA was sort of trying to talk us out of doing it.

Once we saw it they were like well, we playtested the game and most people aren't aware there's a multiplayer thing, and we think this live-action menu is getting in the way because you want to put it all in the start.

And Tim and I were like, ah.

You don't know.

I'm pretty sure if someone buys a game, they're aware of what features it has.

We were like, we can't change this video.

We couldn't do that.

It was so cool.

We just had to keep it.

That was a fun one.

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So something that obviously a lot of people, especially folks familiar with you, know double find adventure or have been, you know um, following the studio for a while and you know fans of the studio are obviously familiar with Amnesia Fortnite, right.

Maybe you can explain for our viewers what Amnesia Fortnite is.

And also I guess this is the segue into sort of asking you when that began and how that came about, because it's my understanding that this is kind of know.

This is one of the opportunities that gave.

Well, this is one of the things that gave you an opportunity to sort of step forward at the studio.

It was kind of like a project lead in a smaller form and everything.

So what is amnesia fortnite?

So amnesia fortnite originally started.

Its formats changed a bit over the years, but but what it still is is it's a two-week game jam where the studio is all taken off.

The projects they're currently working on um.

Three to five project leads, uh are created through different processes at different times.

They pitch games and then people sign up for the games they want to work on and we do a little bit of load balancing and then you've got like two weeks to make um as complete an experience as possible.

And so that was the big difference is it wasn't just a gameplay prototype, like I always thought of, as it needs to capture the personality or a bit of the heart of what you want to make.

So that means it needs audio.

It's got to have some visuals.

It's got to, you know, presentation, whatever it is.

It's not just about going deep on a, like a mechanic.

And so that was, that was kind of the idea.

And Tim, I think was originally inspired by the idea.

I remember the name of the director, but he had read about this director who who did this on film when people were like getting exhausted from working on.

I think it might've been Wong Kor Wai.

I can't remember which, which director it was.

It was like, got the crew was just like overloaded.

And so they're like, we just spent some time.

We took a break from the film and shot these shorts and we just like had fun and it rekindled my creativity for the movie.

So the idea was on these bigger, longer projects.

This is when Tim first applied.

It was during brutal legend and people have been crunching not crunching, but like working hard on making an engine, trying to figure out a game, then pitching it, standing up these multiplayer mechanics and

And they did that as a break from Brutal Legend and then went back to it.

And I missed that first game jam by a week.

I started like a week or two after that very first.

OK, so it was already at the studio sort of when you arrived.

Yeah, OK.

The first one had been done.

I participated in the second one on going on.

But like the first one, you know, I'd missed.

And for me, I had been told they did them.

And I was really excited because I had been pitching a similar idea to the management crystal dynamics.

I was like, but in a different context.

I was like look, these smaller games are going to be a thing again.

Like you can see digital distribution is coming up.

I was like you have all this underutilized people when a project is scoping down before another ramps off and you're not laying everyone off, which is great.

Thank you.

But like you have these pockets of time.

And I think the the resistance from them and this is just my inference, so it may not be the case, but the resistance in general was like they didn't want people to get too excited about doing something that had been through the like marketing, vetting management studio stamp, you know, because you know people could get demoralized.

They don't want to make the game and i was like i don't.

I was like i think you just have this time, you're just wasting anyways.

Like their skills are going to skyrocket, that creativity go up.

Just tell them it's not going to be a real thing.

I would still sign up for it any day, so they would never do it.

And then I heard Double Fun was doing it when I was interviewing.

I was like, I'm, I'm on board.

Like that was, that was actually a thing for me.

I was like, I'm really excited about it.

So I did, I did the second one, which was, I can't, I think it was right.

I think it was, I don't remember if it was, we were still working on Brutal Legend.

It was right at the end of it.

It was in there.

And back then it wasn't like, we didn't have a documentary crew.

So no one was filming it.

It wasn't public.

It was internal only.

And Tim just picked people.

He thought, had whatever he was looking for to be a project lead and so he he uh i guess appreciated the way i had art directed brutal legend so he um asked me to lead a project and i was like i've been talking to him about projects ever since i knew they were doing small games i just anytime chance i was like so tim i have this weird idea about this blah blah blah and and um so he knew i was thinking about those things and so that's when i did stacking um it was in that was that and that must have been i know it's probably close to 2009 that particular game jam um am i right in saying stacking was the first one to to sort of ship out of amnesia fortnite or was costume quest an amnesia fortnite game originally yeah so costume quest and stacking were both in the same amnesia fortnite right yeah tasha tasha was um the animation lead on brutal legend and she pitched costume quest and i was our direction i pitched stacking and we did them in the same amnesia fortnight and they both got signed at the same time for the same publisher but uh costumes quest was shipped earlier because i had uh i don't know if i had a larger budget or i just they were staggered a bit or how it worked but yeah but i want you know we went up shipping a little different times like five months or something i think yeah right Yeah.

God, I love both of those games.

I remember me and my partner at the time, we were a costume quest sickos.

We were playing it.

Yeah.

We had such a blast.

It was really cool.

Talk to me about, obviously you'd had your own studio and everything before, but you know, you'd done the amnesia fortnight at this new studio that you've been working at for a little while now, but talk to me about these sort of, you know, you're these formative years as a leader on these earlier.

Cause.

Then obviously there was like There's Rad and there's been Headlander and there's been other things right.

But like these formative years of you as a leader at Double Fine, is there any kind of fundamental lessons or things that you learned or sort of rites of fire that you kind of went through?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I think so many lessons always.

I think for me I do remember.

You know it was a short, so stacking was start to finish 13 months, including DLC.

And I had exactly one month of pre-production.

How many people on the team?

Sorry to dive in.

Well, it fluctuated a bit.

I would say between 12 and 16, maybe.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

But initially I remember we had one month for pre-production and that was like when I had to write the design document.

And, you know, it was just me and the lead programmer, I think initially during that one month.

And then we were like, okay, you're rolling.

Now there's milestones coming up um, and i think i think i mean i remember um, what did i think about that?

I remember thinking a lot about like um, the way in which, of course, you know, it's obvious to say, i guess now, but the way in which we made brutal legend could not be the way in which we make smaller games.

And i think you know like, i mean down to just the idea of like, i kind of went more old school with it in terms of, You know, a modern say, pipeline is like you have artists, someone does a design treatment, you know, or creative direction treatment.

Then you have like mood concepts or keyframes.

And then someone you know starts designing a specific character and you do all this iteration on paper and you do orthos and someone models it.

And that's not at all how we used to make games because, even though you sort of go well, it saves time and reduces risk because you're doing paper.

And it's true on bigger things.

But when you're on these smaller games, like you know like, because what can happen when you follow that sort of sort of standard approach to creating art is then you wind up chasing concept art.

And concept art is not art, right?

And there's a huge valley between a drawing and that.

Those are different media.

These are different goals.

And they probably shouldn't be ever chasing the exact same thing a painting does or whatever, but it's really hard to sort through that.

And so you know, in the old days we're like we do some crappy concepts, some quick concepts and we just get something in the game as soon as possible.

And then we just draw over on that in context.

And that was kind of what I sort of said is like okay we're, we're shortcutting a lot of the concept thing.

We don't have time for it.

We didn't, you know, we didn't really have a dedicated concept artist anyways on the project.

So, you know, we're, we're doing it.

Like I do some quick concepts.

Levi was on the project.

He did a lot of concepts too.

And then we're like, we block it out.

We throw it in the engine, see it with the game camera.

And then I'm just drawn over directly on that. type of thing.

And it's not really that uncommon of a practice, but it's a big shift from like, how people tended to approach art direction and concepts and stuff.

There's a lot of different things on the design side too, of course, but like that was, like just it was a big shift going for something like Brutal Legend, the stacking.

And I remember, I just remember, I guess, the point there being like I remembered how to.

I had to remember how to be very efficient with a small team and how many hats people had to wear and how to get everyone like.

We also didn't have a producer at the time.

So I was like I didn't, I didn't want to.

You know, we were using agile development but like any of the sort of scrum stuff, like I was doing all the cards and user stories and stuff, as well, as you know, writing the game and doing a lot of the game design.

I think it designed 95% of those puzzles and, you know, doing a bunch of art.

So it's like, you know, you, you have all these, these things you're doing.

So you just, I try to come up with processes to just cut out as many dependency loops as possible.

And so it was like, for example, I was like okay, everyone's working on the same level at the same time, the entire team.

No one's working on a level at a different time.

Because I can't split those dependencies.

We don't have time.

We're small people.

We're just all on boards.

Everyone knows what everyone's doing because we're all on the same level.

I mean, I was running slightly ahead.

But like, generally speaking, you know they're just So.

I mean, I guess the lesson I picked out there is you really, it's an obvious one, I suppose, which is like you really have to look at the time you have, the type of game you're making and the people you have it with, and build all of your processes around them the people and the product as opposed to saying well, this is how games are made because other people have done it.

And we've done it this way before.

And it, it solves some risk and you're like, okay, but the best process is not one.

There's one that's built around the people you have and the time you have.

And so I think that, was a good reminder of that and we got a ton done in that time and made a pretty cool game and uh you know i think that that was a big shift uh like as games got bigger and bigger and suddenly it was like small and i remember thinking to myself at the time i told tim this later i was like i think this is the first time i actually feel like an artist and i was at that point i'd already been in the game industry probably close to 20 years right i was just like i was like this is the first time i feel that way and i don't i don't it's not that i didn't realize that i didn't feel away before but i somehow felt i don't know what it was it was like it for me it was the mechanics and the visuals and the story what you're doing what we were saying we're all we're all telling the same story so to speak and i just felt like the most like art to me of anything i'd made at that time and maybe just because i was in charge of all that you know Yeah, it's like your kind of artistic voice or your ability to express yourself was sort of coming through the clearest, perhaps, right?

And through this vessel, perhaps, in your career.

Amazing stuff.

I'm interested in talking to you about being an artist at Double Fine leading a project, because Double Fine is historically a studio that up until that time was kind of led by, you know, not just a writing forward kind of creative lead, but one that was obviously, you know, had legendary status at that point in time.

What was it like um, in studio?

Was there just no sort of no growing pains or anything at all in kind of um switching the team from like someone who you know their idea at the studio at least of like a lead was someone that's kind of looking at the game from this kind of perspective or from this tool set or this skill set.

And then you're coming at it from another skill set or tool set was was there anything?

Was there anything around that that you sort of had to work with, or was it just like quite, quite natural you're, you know, because of the team that you sort of built up around you and stuff?

Yeah.

I mean, I think um, I will say that you know, like the team that Tim and others put together at the time, a lot of people who've been hired in the studio were all pretty natural collaborators.

And I think all had a good eye on, like an interest in the final product more than just their piece of the product.

And I think that you know and so I think that that's often can be a battle is saying well yes, I know you can write this incredibly amazing thing but like, that's not really what this game's about.

I've got to focus on this, you know?

And, and it felt like um, because Tim has a strong creative voice and they, a lot of those people, came to that studio to work with Tim.

So I'm sure I was a disappointment in the sense that I wasn't Tim but, like you know, I think everyone was still like used to uh, used to thinking that way, or at least open to that.

Um, and so I think I approach things obviously a little bit different as everyone does.

Um, and there were probably some things that you know they maybe missed about Tim and maybe some things they liked about me.

Um and um, you know for, for I was, you know, I mentioned earlier I, I mean, I'm certainly not Tim Schafer, but I uh, I do love writing and I have written.

You know, I wrote wrote uh, stacking and all of its dialogue and headland and rad as well.

And and so you know, I was still, I was still writing and give them, you know, like did a lot of like creative direction through written communication at the time.

And so I think they're used to a certain amount of that from them.

And so I kind of like tried to kind of adapt whatever my natural tendencies would be to do.

That you know.

But yeah, generally I think what was interesting is because we were.

You know, the reason why stacking and costume quests and other games came to be was out of desperation.

Like we had Brutal Legend 2 canceled on us.

And Tim had talked to me about being like the co-creative lead of that project with him.

And so that was sort of like in the plan.

And when it got canceled, we were like, well, we have these Amnesia Fortnites we did.

Can we pitch these?

Maybe we'll get them signed.

And so I think we didn't have a lot of time and I think everyone knew we didn't have a lot of time and was still invested in Double Fine.

So a lot of it was just like people were wanting someone to have a plan and just get to work and start making this stuff.

And so I think that helped me, because there wasn't a lot of like time for overly questioning too many things and you had to just react and bring it.

You know what you had.

And it certainly helped that everyone had already been working on a singular project together.

So everyone already had good relationships with each other.

So I didn't really have to wasn't like hiring a new team from scratch per se yeah that all worked to my advantage in that first time leadership role yeah it's it's funny on this podcast we obviously almost exclusively the people that we talk to are or i would say exclusively like their leaders in particular roles like they might be i remember you know we spoke to the lead designer and art director um from void who are working on ready or not recently, but you know, then it'll be someone like yourself, like project lead or a founder of a studio.

And so we're always having these conversations about leadership and stuff.

But it's, you know, it is interesting.

I remember the first time in games that I encountered cause I always just wanted to like be a creative lead as well.

Like I had things that I wanted to express or I wanted to like, get the best out of people and help, facilitate and empower others and, kind of, you know, lead the charge on that.

I always had an idea of like the direction that we could be going in if someone else didn't, And so it was naturally like I just kind of thought you assume you know when you're younger that that's kind of like your perspective is everyone's perspective, or the way that you approach something.

I remember the first time I got my first job and someone said to me that they have no desire to be a leader whatsoever.

You know that they just want to like make things.

And then our tech director said Obviously he was a leader to some degree.

But our tech director at League of Geeks for many years, Tom Johnston.

He's worked on some of the biggest games in the world at some of the best studios.

And I remember him saying all that he wanted to do.

He had no desire to have any kind of creative input or anything like that.

He was just like, and the thing that he loved was helping to execute on other people's visions and like inspired in that way.

And so I say all of this because I think there are.

Honestly, you know, when we're talking about the kind of leaders that we are, or whatever, sometimes the leader that folks are looking for is just the person who does have the clearest vision and is willing to stand up and say Hey everyone, we're heading in this direction.

Like things are uncertain or whatever, but I've got a direction to go.

It doesn't matter if you're a writer or an artist or a tech director or you step up from, like you know, being a level designer or something.

I think a lot of people are just happy to be like, okay, like this thing's moving again, right?

I think we all understand the value of momentum in a kind of creative commercial product as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then again, I think you know, probably having already done an Amnesia Fortnite on stacking, I think you know the Amnesia Fortnite demo was great um, and it people understood a little bit about the vision behind the game, because amnesia fortnight kind of forces you to try and create a whole little slice, if you will, of what that game could be in that time frame.

And in fact we even use uh, some form of the initial puzzles from amnesia for in the final game.

Because we were so short on time.

I mean they changed a bit.

But like you know um yeah, and use what you got right.

Yeah, i remember at taurus, my first studio it was things would move.

So i shipped 10 games in my first three years there, like everything from like a little browser flash game for the local city council recycling yeah, that pitch to ship process right, like it's.

I've spoken about a number of times on the podcast.

Nothing teaches you how to make games more and better than like, moving through that process a number of times.

Yep, all right.

So i know you've got another couple of stops along the way, like let's, let's swing by those.

Like what was, what was next off the ranks.

Obviously you know there's some things in between this, but like i mean your projects, was it rad or headlander was next?

Uh, headlander was next yeah uh, after that, yeah.

And then um yeah yeah, tell me about, give me the inception story for for rad, like it's just another, like what's this?

What's the spike of inspiration for that?

Yeah,

So um we, let's see, we had ship headlender and and I was, I had a couple of people Gabe uh, St.

Palmy, who's a lead designer on rad and and on keeper um, was working with me and and uh, we were like okay, we've got to come with another game.

And I, and I had this idea, you know, so I, I, it was weird.

So like stacking was accidentally signed, right?

Like I never made stacking to be pitchable. because it was just an internal game jam.

And then, when I was making Headlander, what I realized is digital games had evolved enough that people, in order to give you money, because the way Double Fine was structured, we would have to pitch it, sometimes even before a demo, to try and get the money to make the game, which is hard to do if you don't already have something up and running.

Right.

And so what I realized is that, you know, is that when I started making Atlanta, I was never intending for it to be as strongly a Metroidvania as it turned out to be.

I sort of shifted a bit partway through because it was clear that to get the money we needed, I had to align it with a known genre.

And so when we went to do rad, they're like, you need to get even more money for this game.

And I was like, okay.

I was like, well, I had a bunch of ideas.

And the seed of the idea started with this absurd I just love the sound of it which was this idea called one-man band of the apocalypse?

And I had this idea that you were a one-man band in the apocalypse and you had to cross the wasteland and your thumping bass drum which every time you take a step as a one-man band it, like beats the back of this drum would attract the slow mutants.

And you could kind of lure them into the range of all these other hybrid weird instrument weapons right.

And so it was kind of like this weird game where you're playing this.

And I really liked the idea, and I came up with some interesting mechanics.

But what I realized early on in that process was, like you know, I have terrible rhythm and I don't really like rhythm games.

Because the risk-reward loop is getting your rhythm beat wrong.

And I was like, I should not be making a game.

As much as I'm in love with the idea of playing this ridiculous one-man band guy, you know, and I had all these interesting mechanics.

And so what I realized is that what I really wanted to do was make a most apocalyptic game because, having grown up in the 80s, it was super part of my DNA.

You know, I talked about my dad working at a nuclear power plant.

And I was like, you know, like, uh, this is, uh, this is, so this is being made.

I don't know.

What is this like 2017 to 19 was when we made it.

And I, and I was like, you know, the world's world's not looking great right now.

Uh, you know, right.

And I and I just it brought back memories of all those nuclear apocalypse nightmares I used to have as a kid.

I used to have these nightmares, not be able to sleep about nuclear apocalypse.

And I, I sort of started it like, you know, and I had a kid And she was like 12 at the time or so.

And I remember, I remember thinking like yeah, you know, like I feel like this generation, that same generation that was calling me slackers, still around.

And those fuckers are throwing kids to the grist.

They're just throwing them to the mill.

Right.

We're destroying the planet.

And so I just thought of this like it reminded me so much of that part of my childhood.

And growing up in the 80s.

And I thought, you know, I need to do something about this.

And I needed to make a game.

That part of the story of the game was just the idea that you're just like endlessly throwing these teenagers to go and save this town for reasons you don't fully understand.

So I was really inspired by like that.

And I was like, and I really was interested in doing roguelikes, in part because I had never worked on a fully procedural game.

And I was really interested in it.

And also from a practical, pragmatic standpoint.

It was what I could ask for for money for a small team and get it because they were successful at the time for something a smaller team could do.

And so I thought well, there's an interesting loop here where you've got these kids and they mutate randomly as they go out, and then you as a player react to these different powers to try and complete this mission, but then when that kid dies and your runs over, there's just another kid they're willing to throw out into the wasteland and watch it mutate.

I was like that's telling the story that i like there's like a subtext of the story here was like all the townspeople were about saving themselves and saving you know ostensibly you too but like the sacrifice they're willing to make for it is you and it happens every time you die there's a new kid that just gets thrown out into the wasteland.

And so that was like I thought that was an interesting way to kind of like speak to those themes as well.

Yeah.

Have you found whether it's just through Amnesia Fortnight or even art that you're doing on the side?

I mean, obviously we're living in very strange times.

Do you find like understatement?

Do you find, do you find yourself needing to kind of like express, you know, any frustrations or any anxiety or any sort of thoughts or feelings about what's sort of going on around you in the world through through your, through your art?

I mean, i know this isn't the thing like some artists, they just that's what they do and they enjoy it and they do it for fun or whatever, and some like feel this kind of desire to sort of say something or kind of get it out of their system through art.

Is you feel yeah, it's weird?

Yeah, i mean because because art isn't fun for me, you know, it's like painful And but, but I but I'm compelled to do it.

And I've always sort of been that way.

Right.

Like I'm not saying there isn't there's joy in the flow state.

There's there's there are things about it that can be rewarding, but it's not it's not fun.

Right.

You know, and and so I think.

I can't you know, I don't feel like I've ever had like a specific call to action.

I just feel like it's a way of, that's just intrinsically me.

This is processing the world.

And, and you know, someone once asked me like Hey, do you have a dream game that you've always wanted to make?

And I always say no because I want to come up with the idea right when I'm about to make the game, because that's what's on my mind at the time.

That's what's concerning me.

And that's like I think it's like, if I want to make a painting and have it speak to my experience and hopefully indirectly, other people's experiences, because I'm a in the same world at the same time as these other people,

And, like you know, I mean I'm sure I have you know little little things I'd like to do, but for the most part I'm just like I want to.

I want it to feel relevant to me.

And that was what was on my mind at the time.

And you know, that's yeah.

I don't.

I don't know if that's kind of indirectly of answering that, but like it's a wonderful answer.

It's also interesting.

You're talking about not like I'm classically a writer.

Like that's how I got into games and I fucking hate writing.

I hate it with a passion.

It's like it's honestly one of the things, like you know, but I built a career off it and I'm good at it and it got you know and like I can, like you say, when you get in the flow state there's almost nothing better.

But yeah, I would always.

You know, I'd be around other writers.

I remember listening I wasn't around him, but I remember listening to an interview or something with Woody Allen once and he was saying how he just sits down and writes like and he's, he just like, it just flows out of him.

He's never had writer's block in his life and he loves it.

It's the one thing he wants to do.

And so obviously this way, so prolific with his scripts and everything.

And and I was just like that is fucking crazy that there are other.

I again, you just think that like Oh, I was writing this painful.

I love having written.

That's what I love.

Like I like having the thing and reading it at the end and being like, Oh, that was great.

Like that came out of me.

That's crazy.

You know?

Um, it's kind of like a childbirth.

It's like I don't, I imagine I don't, I wouldn't enjoy it while it's happening, but once it's done and I'm looking at my child, I'm like that's crazy.

That was awesome.

Um, so I totally relate to that.

You know the um, the challenges while you're in it, and the frustrations, or you know smashing up against the rocks of like expressing yourself creatively.

And especially, I think, if you have, if you have taste um As an artist, I think this is, you know, it's that sort of famous Ira Glass monologue, right?

It's like if you have taste and that's why you're creative then like, there is so much pain in seeing the aberration between like what your vision for something is and what your final execution or your execution during it is.

Our late great art director, Adam Duncan, wonderfully talented man um, I remember it's kind of a bit tragic because it was towards the end of his his time with us, like you know uh, but he, he said to me that he was just getting to the point, like after 20 or 30 years, 40 years making art, since he was a kid, that he could, like put his pen to his Cintiq and what would be on the page would be like what was in his head, like it was that one-to-one.

It took a body of work of like 35 years, professionally or whatever, to reach, to reach that point crazy challenge.

You know, what's interesting is, Recently I've been thinking about and I can't remember the name of the there is a condition where people aren't able to visualize things in their head.

Yes.

I have that.

I can never see any imagery in my head.

And I actually, I'm not convinced anyone can.

In fact, I almost think it's a syntax problem.

I almost think that people who aren't visual think they can do it, but they're actually not picturing anything with clarity like cause for me.

I'm like like they're like well, can you close your eyes and see an apple?

I was like, no, of course not.

No one can.

They're like, no, everyone can.

I'm like, well, I can't.

So like, I, it's just, it's not, it's like, it's, it's all black mist in my head.

Like it's not, but it's not, not seeing something.

It's, it's, it's, I can't describe what it is.

It's beyond words.

It's like, it's a, it's a mixture of an intuition feeling.

So for me it's like, as it's being created, is the time that it's being manifested or visualized, right?

But i have a.

I have an idea of what it's going for, but i'm not trying to copy a picture in my head, and so it's a combination of thoughts and feelings and probably some vision.

I just can't describe it in words and maybe that's how everyone is and i'm just misunderstanding this condition.

But like it is interesting because it it means that there are times like if i'm doing, you know, like there's things you do that you just get more mechanical, repetitive skill with, and that certainly gets easier as you get older.

Or sometimes it's just your confidence in the process because it's worked enough for you for 20 years and that's what you're seeing.

But i don't know that i'm actually ever seeing things in my head if any more clarity than i ever have, which i don't, i don't think i do and i don't i'm.

Do you think that that informs the kind of artist that you are?

Like, if you're the first time that you're visualizing something is when you're actually putting it on paper, as opposed to some artists like say, I'm not sure if this is the way, but let's say, the art director I was talking about Adam if he's like just seeing something perfectly in his head, like these mythical people that they tell us that exist, because I'm not like that as well.

So we can be deniers officially.

Yeah yeah, um feeling of language is all i'm saying.

Yeah yeah yeah, i actually feel like kind of quick segue for me, like i.

I feel like there's, you know apparently, because it's like a spectrum.

It's not like you have the ability to visualize or you don't right.

I feel like i'm somewhere in the middle, like i have a foggy image that i can't hold, like i can picture an apple, but it has no kind of.

It's hard for me to like get the detail and everything, and i actually think that that informs a how I direct things and how I approach things creatively, because it's all about kind of like broad concepts and texture and pace, what's it called pastiche and a vibe.

I'm constantly like chasing a vibe, and the works of art that I have always sort of fascinated me as a practitioner myself and as a creative lead, are the works that I'm talking about, games here specifically, that nail a particular pastiche that they're going for, whether it's clear that it's something of their own voice or whether it's they're trying to replicate something like say, a big game like Red Dead Redemption 2, you know and you're like

I can see how this thing is, they've nailed this pastiche.

But the reason why I've sort of I take the segue is because that does.

I think that potentially it informs a way in which I actually create and engage with.

You know my practice as an artist.

Do you think that, like not having that image in your head, are you finding yourself iterating more on paper, potentially?

Or like you're kind of discovering the art itself as it's coming out of you?

Yeah, I don't know, because I am actually really good at being very, very specific.

And that tends to be coming out more in writing.

I have a lot of writing, and I write quite a bit for the team as well to describe the high-level documents I put together for the different parts of the game are pretty... you know pretty verbose um right but you're more you would say you're more of like a literary kind of um your direction is more literary as opposed to visual or a bit of a bit of a hybrid yeah it's both really because like i i don't i like sometimes people will ask well do you did you come up with a mechanic and then uh the the setting and i was like well no it's just always simultaneous like for me it's always always simultaneous you know like i just it's not Yeah, it's just all things at once.

And so I feel like yeah, when I write, like when I'm writing something, you know again, language fails me here, but I have a sense of where I'm going.

And as I'm writing the words, it's being created as I'm writing.

And when I'm drawing lines and erasing lines and making shapes, it's not random.

Like it's not me just drawing random stuff and then seeing if that's interesting and then making other random stuff.

It feels like I'm realizing, and there's a word I could use, realizing at the time of creation.

And it's like you're in a dialogue with the work itself as it's being created.

Yes.

Yeah.

Love it.

It's like, that's a, that's a perfect segue into like Keeper.

I know that you folks have been up to other stuff you know in between obviously is you know, so I can all this too in there and stuff that you're on and everything.

But let's, I'm keen to just dive straight in to Keeper, because I think so much of this conversation that we're talking about is is so relevant.

Obviously I've been playing the game, as I mentioned, I haven't quite finished it yet.

I believe I'm like right at the end right now.

But, like I think we should start off with, for anyone who's not listening.

You know, maybe we've got people listening to the podcast who are familiar with your work or familiar with Double Fine, or they just listen to the podcast because maybe it's because of me, or maybe it's because they love the podcast.

So why don't we give them just a?

I'm sorry to do it to you, but like, give us the elevator pitch.

Explain to people who may not be familiar with Keeper like, what the game is.

Yeah.

So Keeper is, we're calling it an adventure puzzler game.

It's an atmospheric, a ford vibes ford game um, and.

And in this game, um it takes place in this sort of uh futuristic, uh space, post-human space, and you play a lighthouse who, uh is awoken after eons of lying dormant and learns to walk and is compelled to kind of reach the center, this mountain peak on this island, um that you awake on.

And you are joined by this unusual seabird we call Twig.

And that relationship forms a part of the story, but also some of the mechanics in the game, where you use the lighthouse's light to do things like grow plants or activate things to spell darkness.

And you also control Twig, who can do things that are a little more tactile, like fetching objects and pulling things.

Yeah, that's the as near as I can explain the game.

It's a.

It's a strange game to explain, you know, because we started off and I was like I want to make a game that has a shitty elevator pitch.

But you know, I think that was that was my goal is a game with a shitty elevator pitch that is not clearly fit in one genre.

So it's so funny that you bring that up, because i played the game.

I was playing the game for like 30 minutes and i literally paused it to read the steam short description because i was like how the fuck did they describe this game like i want to see the poor marketing person, like whether it's spaff or whoever at xbox like is helping you or whether it's you, you know writing this description for the game.

I was like who's the poor bastard that had to try and describe this game in like 180 characters or whatever i'm saying um, and of course, it was wonderfully uh, atmospheric and kind of vibes for the description itself too um, but i think adventure pilots hilarious of you know, like i said in my time with that's a very apt um description.

I think something that's really important to just kind of uh set people off in the right with the right kind of perspective on the game.

For the conversation we're about to have too is one of the most interesting elements that makes it so atmospheric forward, or atmosphere forward, is that there is no dialogue in the game either.

There's no narrative as such in regards to like We're setting things up with, like someone's telling you what's going on, or even on the screen, like objectives, or you know it's all visual.

So maybe that's a great place to start there.

Where did the sort of seed of this idea come from?

Was it this idea to kind of tell a story without any words?

Was it just a?

Were you doing some kind of east coast like tour of old, like new england lighthouses, or how did this sort of start to form itself in your head?

Well um, they're.

They're kind of like two, two big inspirations for it, and i think um, one.

One is uh an earlier iteration of the game um, and one is uh reality like life.

At the time when i was thinking about this and um, you know it, the idea came from uh, during the pandemic times, And that was not specifically the thought of a lighthouse, but the idea of something that was silent.

And that occurred to me because, you know, during the lockdown, one of the things I do a lot is really like hiking and backpacking and that sort of stuff.

And that was kind of one of the things I could still do.

And I often go on walks to think and walks in nature.

And near my house there's an old, abandoned mercury mine that's been abandoned for over 100 years and is now a bunch of hiking trails.

So there's old rotting equipment and stuff still off to the sides.

And, you know, I went out there quite a bit during the pandemic.

And, you know, I just sort of started thinking about, like, is this it for humanity?

Are we all done?

We're all spent.

And then, like, what's left of life?

You know, not just the pandemic.

The pandemic was like the cherry on top of all the stuff going on in the world.

And I was just like you know.

I just started thinking about like well, you know, the plants are still going to be here.

These plants will probably still be here.

And how would life maybe evolve?

And humans are so bad about predicting the future.

I was like, you know, it's not going to be any way any of us could ever imagine.

But the relevant point there about the silence was like the world was kind of quiet, even though it was tragic.

There was also kind of a beautiful quietness about the world at times.

And when I would be out on those trails I was all alone and and um, so that that sense of being in a outdoor space uh, and that that vibe and silence stuck with me, and um, uh.

And then, at around the same time, we had been working on um, some ideas for a new game and um, originally it was like was set on an island and it was kind of this like wizard-like character.

Who was this caretaker of this island?

And um, and I had written one mission and it had dialogue at this point.

But there's this one mission I'd written.

And it was just sort of written in a narrative way.

Cause it was just like, I was trying to feel like what the tone of this game was.

And it was in this mission.

A farmer on this Island was asking you to escort this lighthouse back to the sea.

Cause the lighthouse had wandered onto his field and was ruining the crops.

I sort of written this thing.

And so there's this lighthouse that was up on these rocks, and you had to like, get up onto the lighthouse and pilot it back down to the sea.

And so I wrote this whole thing about.

When you went inside the lighthouse, it was bigger on the inside and the outside.

And you saw this whole history of humanity as you spiraled up to the top.

And then you get to the top and where you point it's light, it walks and you take it back to the sea and all the fish are no longer in the ocean.

They're walking around on metal legs around the coast.

And the sea is polluted.

And then you use the light of the lighthouse to clarify the water.

And then the fish give up their legs and go back to the ocean.

You go into the water.

You go under the water.

You see silhouettes of buildings, what's left of humanity.

And you merge onto a rock.

And a chorus of stones arrives in the rock.

And they start singing.

And you point your light on different ones to compose this beautiful chorus song.

Uh, and then the rest of the water clarifies.

And that was like the mission.

I just had written this little thing and this is before the pandemic.

And and when I uh.

And then we know cause we work on.

This prototype is Gabe and I, and then we got pulled onto Psychonauts 2.

Right.

Okay.

Yep.

And so why was on Psychonauts 2, which was about 16 months or so?

So you pulled it.

It wasn't just to close it out.

You're back in the team.

Back in the team.

So this idea just stuck in my head the whole time.

And then the pandemic happened during that time.

And I was like, what if the game was all about a lonely lighthouse?

What if it was just about this lighthouse?

The whole game was a walking lighthouse.

That sounds absurd.

I love it.

And you know, and then, because I realized that a lot of it, a lot of what people were going through and what I was going through too, was like OK well, what?

What is my purpose?

What is my purpose anymore?

Like in the lighthouse is a great metaphor for this for me.

Like it doesn't most lighthouses nowadays don't even really have a purpose.

But imagine like 10,000 years in the future, they definitely don't have a purpose.

And so what if this is about like the purpose?

And I and I.

And that silence was part of that.

I think.

I think it was like a combination of things you know, both because of my inspiration, but also having a lighthouse talk is just silly.

I didn't want to make a silly game.

This wasn't about silly things.

And I like silly.

I like I love writing dialogue.

But I was like you know in some ways.

You know that that really is very different for Double Fine to make a game with no words.

And then I was like, also this player character, who's going to care about a fucking lighthouse?

We're going to make people care about a lighthouse and we're not going to have words to do it.

And you know, like a lot of things just came from that initial decision and it put me outside my comfort zone.

And I was like, that's where I want to be.

I want to be outside my comfort zone, which no one really wants to be, but we all know how important it is to be.

And so I just tried to go for it, basically.

Were you kind of like on the side, kind of piecing ideas together or you like, while you're working on Psychonauts, or was it kind of just like you had to keep this thing inside and just on your walks?

It's kind of manifesting itself.

And then you know, post Psychonauts, you're kind of let go and were able to open the floodgates of you know, this kind of pent up creativity, so to speak.

Yeah, it was more that it was just, It was just baking in my lizard brain for a while.

And this came back to what I was saying earlier.

I think I wouldn't have been able to make the same game even 16 months earlier, because the stuff I was thinking about post-pandemic and during the pandemic was so different.

It had to reflect what I wanted to make, just instinctively.

And so the other idea felt old to me, even though it's not old.

No one even really knew it but one other person.

Yeah, and there are some elements that persisted like, if i like, i have this video that's like five minute video i made of the old prototype and idea before we stopped working on to go to psychonauts, and i watched it again the other day and i could see elements that snuck their way through keeper but changed quite a bit and um yeah, that's it's.

It's interesting how that all that all came about, but that that one decision to make a silent game changed absolutely everything about the game.

It changed all the puzzle design, it changed The camera model.

It changed so many things because that really common affordance was gone.

The players have no idea potentially what to do and where to go.

But that's what I wanted, right?

I mean, I wanted a game that took a step away from those things that other people do not, because there's anything wrong with them.

I just wanted to see how it would feel if we approached the game differently and the game made different choices and what space that would inhabit, and if it would be more powerful in some ways by removing some of those things.

Do you remember any of the particular more gnarly challenges that you had because of that decision?

I know there's famously all the tales about um cory barlog's insistence that you know, god of war, the reboot had to be like one cut.

And then they were like there.

I think there was one point where they they did a cut, but they hit it when you like, go into the mouth of the snake, right and there.

So there are these things that you're like okay, that's not an issue for like 80 of the game, but then there are going to be these things that we come up against that just seem completely impossible to surmount.

And do we have to like, ditch this idea?

Did you ever encounter things that just seemed insurmountable or really laid a gauntlet down in front of you to sort of reach that goal of yours on the other side?

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it was really hard.

I think part of it's just even going back to just how one does level.

Design was quite a bit different in this game.

And And I think you know for this like if you approach like a standard gray box, white box sort of process, when you're say, much more metrics or systems driven, you can kind of like okay, I know, this is a platform where I can get.

This is a fun double jump distance.

But, like when a game relies so much, especially earlier in the game, it switches it up quite a bit over the course of the game, but especially earlier in the game where we started working on it.

So much about atmosphere.

I wanted very specifically to leave negative space in the game.

That's what i call it, like there's no negative space in games.

Games are like everyone plays games, like you're a content shark, here's a dopamine hit, here's dopamine.

Here's a level upgrade, here's a skill challenge, here's a.

And that's what pulls people through the space right like.

I know from making games that if i just had fluid movement and and chest-like objects or rings that made cool sounds when you got to, it'd be fun.

I could make that fun.

Absolutely No depth, but fun.

And so like, I knew that could happen, but I was like, we're not doing any of that.

And so negative space is just like moments where there isn't anything demanding that you have to do it, but there's still small things you could do.

But it's also about being in the space and trying to communicate that to people early on, especially before you have any sound or music or visual fidelity or richness.

And you know it just looks boring right, you know like and so.

So really that we started, like you're getting to level design process early paper maps, i was like i'm describing them with emotions, not story beats.

We're like this is where you feel ice, this is isolation and here's these colors and This is like uncompressed space.

And here's where you feel, you know, the weight of the task ahead of you.

And so like, it was like, that was just put on the paper maps too.

And so I guess indirectly, like I felt like everything changed because of that.

And another one that was an early decision.

You know, our very first early part of the game, like a first sort of first playable, if you will like we didn't have.

We had a sort of more standard third person camera.

And what I realized early on was that especially the early forms of the player character move relatively slow.

And I mean it's not.

You know it's not painfully slow, but it's not the speed of which people.

It's not the fluid movement paradigm that people will want to use to re-traverse and scour the map looking for more detailed puzzle stuff.

And so I realized that we really had to direct the camera in order for people to see all the elements we wanted them to see, without a lot of visual affordances, to like highlight things and pop things up and to tell you where to go and to give you hints and to have you know a cut scene for every step of a puzzle.

Like you know, all these sort of standard things you do in a third person action game we didn't want to do because they're wrong for the game.

They felt to me like to be wrong for the game.

And so we made it a non player controlled camera, or at least not directly controlled.

And that changes everything in the game, right?

That like changes the whole space design.

It changes like how much uh, wandering the players want to do, like how far down a side path they want to go before feeling the tension of not being able to swing the camera around like like, and that came from being silent right because um yeah, and then, but they both connected to atmosphere, which was like one of the earliest pillars, that sense of being in a space uh, in a way that's different than most games.

Yeah, something about something about the atmosphere as well that i just really really adored about keeper, that felt different to other games that may take on a similar structure, or you know where you're moving through an area maybe even has a directed camera or something like an, an inside or an artful escape, or you know similar experiences to some degree.

Is, you know, and especially as well, in a post-apocalyptic kind of setting or right, or a post-human setting?

Um, Your world is just so full of life and so populated I think is also another way of putting it whether it's a little robot town that you go into, the automaton town, or you know, like the sea life that you're in, you know swimming alongside the big sea beasts or just the birds around the place and the little creatures that you can shine your light on, and they scatter.

Talk to me about, obviously, this is a very important element for you, right?

Like talk to me about this idea of like populating the world and the kind of you know, the purpose behind it or the challenges that you encountered as well.

Yeah, that's an interesting one too, because you know, like you said, other sort of things that are somewhat similar in structure tend to be not filled with characters.

And, you know, some of that's just because the scope of the projects perhaps.

But I think for us it was weird because initially I was like okay, this is all about isolation and loneliness parts of this game and it's still there.

But you know, it's one of those things that like, especially working at Double Fine, we have so many people who are into characters and love characters and all this rich character backstory and interactions and stuff that you know there was always.

Like people at Double Fine were always like this game's empty, where's all the life and you know, and so that is a studio influence there in part.

But also it was challenging because to some extent it takes so long even to stand up and make interactions and puzzles satisfying, especially when their payoff isn't necessarily like an abstracted puzzle mechanic overlaid into the game, but their integration with the world.

And that takes so long to get feeling good that we had to prioritize all those sort of interactions and game fill and all the different forms of the player characters like setting up four entirely different player characters and how they control is a huge amount of work and making them all satisfying while we're meeting the overall narrative goals of of what, how they move and what they're doing that we had to delay a lot of the ambient life until like the last you know year of the project or so.

So we had some in like, we had certain, some areas but, like you know, the animators were always like pulling their hair out.

I was like, I know it's coming.

It's coming.

It's going to come in later.

And you know, and I I, I did sort of sometimes say look, the point of the game is not for you to Dr Doolittle everyone to to like paradise.

But it's for you to wander in and out of these moments.

And some of this some of this wildlife is in like weird little feral packs.

Some of it's like these monolithic creatures.

Some of it have developed their own little towns and civilizations.

And so we still want moments of quiet and, you know, in between some of that.

But I think it became.

I guess I you know the big part, is it?

Reason was so important to me as well, in addition to just like adding personality and life, is that I didn't want to have a game loop that was meta or it was about grinding right.

So I didn't really want to have a lot of like collectibles that were there for you to upgrade something or to do a transformation.

But I wanted to have things that, like I remember, in some of our early play tests, you know, people were like I liked it, but I didn't understand why I was growing this flowers.

What does it get me?

And I was like it gives you beauty, that's what it's there for right, and like that's why it's there.

It doesn't give you anything.

It like connects you to the world.

It it tells a story uh, and it's through your action and it's not mandatory.

You know you get to play the game um, and that's that.

Interacting with those other creatures kind of filled that role as well, even though of course they provide, you know, the broader context of the puzzles and and other things, just that.

Just that being able to like emote with them, with with the bird, or play with them with your light or see them scatter, like just seeing them inhabit the world, also tells a story of this sort of like life cycle.

You don't understand that you're always a little bit of an outsider, too right, which is like the lighthouse is really kind of like an alien compared to these other creatures in some ways, as strange it is.

And I guess I wanted the player to feel like that lighthouse, too right, to feel like they're learning how to walk, to feel like, you know, they don't quite understand these characters, but they're not, despite the way they seem like we didn't follow the classic character design, uh approach where like they're all friendly, so they're all like rounded bubbles and they're all smiling.

No, there's some really like strange formidable, large characters who do you no harm.

They're not there to hurt you right, and i like that was an important part of the, the game and story as well for me.

Were there any kind of touchstones of inspiration for you in regards to other media or creatures or things from real life that kind of influenced your or the team's creature design or your approach to the towns that you choose to make or the civilizations or stuff?

Because there is that you're moving through these different areas and these different civilizations that have these incredibly different vibes or unique kind of atmospheres or tones to them.

Were there anything that's of particular interest, inspiration for you in the creation of those civilizations or characters?

Yeah, I mean a bunch, you know.

I think I mean from real life.

I think around around that time of the pandemic I had like I was thinking a lot about like plant life and maybe a little bit about speculative biology and things like that.

Like, but I in particular I I remember reading about and seeing a movie on on mushrooms and fungus and how they connect and the mycelial network and how trees can piggyback off that network.

And I just found like that whole idea of like life connection.

Cause a lot of the themes about connection.

I found that really inspiring.

And I found that it's almost alien.

Most people, if you just say that to an average person, they might be like, oh, that doesn't happen.

They can't communicate with trees.

They're like, actually, they do.

They can prove it.

I saw a documentary.

Yeah.

It's really fascinating how strange that stuff is.

And I think that was certainly one point of inspiration.

And I think also surrealism in general is an inspiration of mine and surrealist painting.

Yeah.

But also there's a found object aesthetic there that I think is kind of interesting.

And I sort of wanted this almost like I would describe it earlier to the team as like, the creatures are all kind of like hybrid, almost like an impossible mix of stuff, whether or not we show it to the player.

Like the player sees a lighthouse, but like, is the lighthouse alive?

Is it magically animated?

Is, you know, these other creatures look like living rocks.

These other creatures look like living vegetables.

There are some creatures that clearly have like, the detritus of humanity grown into their spine, but they've got.

They're also a tree and they also have some organic bits that you know.

You're not sure what is what, or maybe it's some weird communal organism.

And I think that that collage sense, that like sense of like stuff has come before it and things have evolved and connected from things before, but in a rational or unpredictable ways was, like always, something we were looking for.

So you know, even though we call things like okay, that's clearly kind of a crab.

It's got a crab shell and a claw.

But you're like, look at a little closer.

You're like, well, the shell actually is like a sea mine and its legs aren't crab legs.

It looked more like an enemy feet.

And there's also a wheel stuck in there, you know, like that sort of like that sort of read.

And some of them are quite small.

And so you may take you a while to see some of those elements, which I love.

They don't get you all at once, you know?

So was there some um, when I was playing it, and especially around the some of the puzzles that involved, like these kinds of multi-step things that you're interacting with and specifically with creatures engaging with them I felt like there was some scavengers, rain kind of inspiration.

You've watched that show.

Does that form any kind of any kind of inspiration there in regards to like this kind of series of getting this creature and feeding it this thing and then it eats that thing and then you get to float up, or yeah, i mean that onto the game?

No no, that i mean that show came out while we were making the game and it's definitely a cool show, but you know, what i had seen years before on during rad, is the original short.

Yeah, the short yeah, i remember that too.

Yeah avengers right, which which for rad, we were, you know, we were looking up a lot of reference from like mobius and and uh, miyazaki is always kind of a perennial reference, you know, and and i think um, I remember the short.

I remember the short being impactful because the short was silent and it was strange.

And as much as I love Scavenger Reign, Scavenger was more impactful because for me it was just like it was all a mystery.

And so, yeah, definitely.

I remember like we looked it up in RAD and I'm sure it was still in my mind.

And then Scavenger's Reign came out and everyone's like, check this out.

And I was like, oh, it's really well written and it's cool.

But I like the weirdness of the original even a little bit more, you know.

But the original felt like a bolt out of the blue as well, like it kind of, because it was almost like a decade or something before the, before the series hit the air, so it was really, really ahead of its time.

Um, i'm glad that you brought up miyazaki because, as you say, miyazaki is kind of the perennial reference for a lot of folks you know, working in media and stuff these days, for those of us who grew up, grew up with it or discovered it, you know, during our creative practice.

But there's something that Miyazaki does really well that I think a lot of people don't talk about when they talk about why his work is so good.

And I feel it's how well he balances, which is kind of a question of pacing in the end, but how well he balances, how long he holds you, the viewer, in the darkness, kind of underwater right.

So you think about something like Howl's Moving Castle or Princess Mononoke.

Sure, there's adult themes in there, but when I'm talking about emotion or atmospheric vibes or tone, his films will have a very oppressive and I mean effect on the viewer tone at times, and very

Very anxiety-inducing, very intense, and it's hard not to feel the things that those folks in those shows are feeling.

But I think the mastery in how Miyazaki and Shibley handle that is they know just the right amount of time to hold you there and when, at what point in the film or in the arc of the story, and then they let you out.

And they'll have these incredible moments of levity and brightness and wholesome good vibes that we all know, and love and sweetness that we all know and love.

Mirzak and his works for.

But I feel that's something that Keeper did really well as well, because I'm classically, you know, I just I'm like oh, I don't like being down here in the dark.

Right.

And I know that's the point of it, but like, I loved just when I was like, I just had enough.

And I was like God, you would not only bring me out of that, but you would bring me out into a meadow, and the sun was shining and birds were flying.

And then the next stage.

I'm like floating around light as a feather, as a lighthouse, you know um talk to me a little bit about.

Actually, i'm just going to phrase it as a question how do you have a kind of a framework for that?

Are you feeling it out as you're going?

Are you laying this down in these kind of pacing charts that you're talking about?

You're talking about time.

How do you know when to when to pull players down into the darkness and when to kind of release them and not only release them but sprinkled some little sugar on top to sort of heal, lick their wounds and heal them from the dark?

Yeah, that's, I mean, you know, you're right.

And those are some of the things that I really like about Miyazaki as well.

And I think, i mean you know some of it just for me it's it's not so much that i have like um a pacing chart per se at least on this game um as much as you know i have a general sense that the pacing over the course of the game as the character changes gets faster and faster right and and um but within those moments you know and and that one you're kind of talking about with the darkness in the field was like that was i remember that was like one of the earlier areas that i had had written and done like the initial paper map for and i was like you know i i sort of like was like i almost just want to like i don't want i was like i just want to have just a little bit of interactivity in here and so like i almost want to stretch this to the point where people are just try to find that space where they're just like just like i just i'm done with this but then the payoff happens And then it feels the payoff feels even better.

Right.

And it's just sort of like, I mean, you know, this is contrast in art and everything.

And it's, uh, it's intuition really for me, how to take that space.

And I think um, you know mechanically, like looking at like more of a beat chart, you know, we we certainly have areas where we were like okay, this is some just being in the world's time and space.

And this is like a more concentrated bunch of puzzles.

Like you get to the town, you spend a lot of time in town, bunch of rapid succession of little puzzles you're solving, and then you like get beyond the town and then it's just wandering again and you're seeing life come back, start to come back because of what you did in the town, and then you know, then there's a big dramatic moment right, and then you're like okay, now i'm in a compressed space again and now we release you again and you just get to live in the moment and that's just kind of like the way.

Like that, you know, i would think about it versus like a specific time and formula, but you know it was, it was definitely trying to um, part of it's about variety too, i think.

Yeah, you know, one of the other things uh, for the player in this is because it it's not a game that has like because i knew it was gonna be like six hours ish or so um i i, but i wanted to to remove like death and failure and i wanted there to be puzzles, but i didn't want them to be.

I wanted to be satisfying to you, but not like stick like well, you have to go and look up all these puzzles, right?

To do them.

Um, and that's, I guess that's super subjective and hard to get to, right.

But like but uh, I just I just wanted to make sure that, um people had that that time.

To just be in that space, I guess, is just the way I always thought about it.

And that variety was a, was a step in that because I almost wanted to hit people too much art.

Like we almost just switched up.

You hit me with too much art at some point.

I was like crazy, i'm playing it on like my big, like sort of tv and my like games room upstairs and i was just like i'm having an out-of-body experience right now.

But it was like.

That was like i think that's just part of the like, the thing that that we like that was where we got some of the depth from too.

It was just like some of it on on, some of that variety and some of that's the emotionals, emotional tone of the game too, just trying to keep it varied quite a bit.

And you know the one constancy like, kind of like.

Early on, like when we first started putting the game together, i was like okay well, i like the idea that there's these companions and each of these companions you get and have different special abilities.

The game starts to get more complex puzzles as you get more companions and therefore you have more active verbs at once, and part of the game is is like using which, which companion to use and maybe combining companions with your light.

And then i realized though, early on, that like as fun as it would have been, design puzzles for that, that it started moving away from like the one thing that i think people would really need to to get through this game, which would be like a strong emotional dawn behind between the sort of main characters and have them always be there.

Um, because initially, if it felt like the bird was coming and going all the time, or like the bird was being replaced by a different character and that was being replaced by another character,

Like, we lose that.

And that's, I think, hopefully the sort of very relatable universal thing that people can kind of like hold on to through the game.

And so, like, we really involve simplifying a great number of things to keep that part intact.

Let's dive into that because literally you activated my trap card.

That was the next question that I had.

It feels so much, even though this is a story in many ways about a lighthouse navigating this world and being pulled towards this particular destination, the emotional core of it does feel like the relationship between the lighthouse and Twig and seeing that develop and i mean the relationship is built i think there's a part of us as humans that we buy in immediately you know we're playing the game we're there for the experience so you go okay cool there's a relationship here that i'm meant to be invested in and so you get that handshake but you kind of just take that handshake and run with it i mean i was and you're pulling at some of those emotional like strings very early and i think very effectively so how how how did you go about kind of mapping out that emotional journey of these two characters that, you know, obviously there's these mechanical things that is, you know, increasing the bond there or whatever, but did you have almost like an emotional chart or idea of how you wanted these two characters to build their bond?

And I'm interested as well, in addition to that kind of sort of like more high level plan or how you develop the emotional relationship, what are some of the finer things that you had to do?

Like did you have to put more bones in the lighthouse's you know rig to be able to get it to like look up at the bird, or to look up at twig, or something like that?

You know what's the sort of high level and, in the weeds, elements that came into play, of securing such a successful kind of because it is successful.

You know, I really feel it through the game like a successful emotional relationship between these two nonverbal interspecies, if we can call it a lighthouse species kind of objects, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was, you know.

I mean it was funny because when I was, when I was pitching the game internally and I was trying to get people to work on the team, I remember going to the animators and like I was like OK, look like like you're going to have some things that aren't going to be as emotive as usual.

But like this game will, like you have, like you have to figure out a way to make people care about these characters with, with animation, as well as other elements.

But I was like, that's like that's the hardest thing. you know, we've got to do it.

And and, and I think you know one thing was thinking about how those characters could be expressed from the start.

And so they both went through, you know, several iterations.

And one of the things we figured out earlier at the lighthouse was, like you know, trying to make this thing move around the space was the initial lighthouse that we had put together for early movement prototypes was just, you know, it was a big, rigid cylinder as a lighthouse probably would be.

And, but you know I was like it doesn't One.

It doesn't speak to the idea of the game, which is this like all the forms in the game,

One of the reasons the game is so painterly and gestural is, like we're saying, through form and color and shape, that everything could be alive here.

The entire island could even be alive.

This rock could be alive.

And so the lighthouse will be needed to communicate that as well.

And so one of the things we did early on was like come up with this idea of breaking it and just like these big pieces and then have like some inner rock layers.

So it can kind of do these C and shapes, you know, as it moves up and down and around.

And then immediately you know it's not like we're humanizing it too much, but it does give it a bit of anthropomorphism where you're like okay, this thing feels more alive because it's more organic in its movements.

And that's also why I wanted these legs to.

I mean, they're a little off-putting for some people.

Most of them are in association with crabs or spiders, but like they still feel like organic on some level with the way they skitter around.

And, and, and, you know, like that, that was a big, a big thing with the lighthouse.

And also, you know it, it actually has like when I was a very early part of the game is like the character goes through all these transformations that were totally changing the shape of the character, where we're like well, how do we get people to intuitively understand this is the same thing, soul in these things, if you will and that is like well, we've got to keep that lens.

That face has to always be there and it can't change right and um, you know which, which you couldn't really do with a human right.

You could like cut someone's head off and stick it on a different thing would just be creepy, but you could do with the lighthouse and, and so you know we, we also like um, when we did this early research on Fresnel lenses and stuff.

The lighthouse is a light design.

That I settled on is not at all how a lighthouse is light, is built.

It's actually much more like a concert light because, like a lighthouse Fresnel, you know, it's usually at least bi-directional, if not more omni-directional.

But we needed to have some sense of direction and aiming not only for for game feel, but also, like I wanted it to have a face.

And so, like You know, I basically came up with this make-believe pivot with a Fresnel lens that kind of is more like aiming a spotlight around.

It's not how they work at all.

But most people don't question it, right?

Because they're not light health experts.

But we also like, even took the framing and like you know, broke that off to create these sort of eyebrows that the animators could kind of move around to give it a bit more emotion.

And so you know like there was a lot of just like relatively uh, specific character design choices there to support that, that any one of them isn't super expressive by itself, but all told, you know, it really helps.

Um and uh, same with the you know twig uh, you know, we kind of went through this like it's a strange, it's a hybrid creature.

All the first glance, you're like, oh, it's just kind of a bird.

And then you're like, well, it's kind of got like a dog body or maybe it's like a dragon.

But if you look really closely which you know you don't see all the time.

Twigs, bones are made of wood.

Its beak is wood.

It's the bones coming out of his wings are driftwood.

It's got kelp for a tail and wings and stuff.

So it's like this hybrid kind of fish, bird, dog thing.

But at first glance, it's like more conventionally designed.

So you're like very, you know emotive, and it's got.

We have these big antenna like things to act almost as like eyebrows and expressive things.

And that's why the tail got bigger as well.

Cause when it's riding on the lighthouse, you see the tail a lot and see these things.

And so you know these are all small things, you know like the very specific things you're asking about.

And um yeah, we actually had to develop a whole little system for dealing with the wings because you know conventional skeletal mesh you couldn't really fold them up without them crunching interpenetrating, looking uh, not pleasant.

So we have like there's actually a whole flipbook system where we're like swapping out wing models at different frames and stuff to get these certain like silhouette and poses we really wanted them to have, in addition to all them being skeletally animated.

And uh, you know it's also using uh control rig on unreal to fake physics.

So when you're moving around, the bird is constantly doing this procedurally as you're moving around, make it feel like it's going along for the ride and All the flight stuff is dynamic.

We had a guy, you know, James Collins, right?

This whole dynamic flight system and dynamically plotting the path to land on your character.

It's like a lot of behind the scenes kind of hidden systems work to kind of make it feel somewhat natural, you know.

Yeah.

And I'm imagining the lighthouse legs are procedural IK as well.

Like, would I be right in saying that?

Yeah.

And which is a fantastic segue into, I saw the arachnophobia warning at the start of the game.

Yeah.

And I was like, okay, there's going to be big spiders, I guess.

But I only realized now that is that in reference to the lighthouse's legs?

Yeah.

Did that come up in focus testing or play testing or something?

Well, you know, Microsoft has a lot of great resources and they have a user research group and they conduct a lot of plays.

But one of the people in the user research group was, like you know, these legs kind of look like a spider leg and And, like you know, it could catch some people by surprise.

And I was like, well, there's a lot of strange stuff in this game.

There's a lot of weird holes and holes and stuff.

But I was like, you know what?

Like, it doesn't hurt anything for me to put that warning there.

Yeah, of course.

And, like you know, I tried to write the warning because you know I didn't have to use a pre-found.

So I just sort of wrote it as like, it's a strange game.

There's no real spiders, but there's some things that might remind you of it, might make you a little uncomfortable um, and because, like that, we were a game about the unexpected, but there's so many other unexpected moments in the game that didn't need to be one of them but yeah, it did come out of a.

That was exactly what it was for.

There's no, there's no real spiders in the game or anything interesting tale.

I remember i interviewed the guys um, that did the midnight walk, which has some kind of like similar atmospheric kind of vibes to your game.

Um, and you know the you move around your own house or whatever house moving house and stuff, and they had the.

Just a funny little anecdote they had ik animated legs as well and the the house is kind of like a.

It's not like a dog or a pet, but you know it can follow you around and things becomes your home.

But they found that there was this natural because it would, it would have to settle down for you to enter it or and because it was kind of procedurally trying to animate.

It would like kind of walk around a little circle and they couldn't fix it.

They were trying to fix it forever and they got feedback from testers that actually it gave it like a cute little dog-like character, because you know, dogs would like walk around in a circle before they lay down in their mat or something.

It was a complete accident.

So there's this real beauty that comes from this, like procedurally animated ik stuff.

That um, i feel you're a game.

Just it lends it so much character having this.

These things scramble over the rocks and up and down.

And especially like you're saying with the bending back and forth.

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is alternative controls.

I mean there is.

I remember when I picked up the game for the first time and I started playing and I was like well, and my like lighthouse, and it reminded me of like playing a jewel stick game for the first time, like which was me with my brother.

And you know obviously, being a game developer and everything, I'm like, oh okay, this is a new I've had to figure out.

I'm like, oh okay, we're sweeping left and right.

And then we've got the Y axis here as well.

But, you know, my brain had to adjust and I knew it would.

I'm interested.

And I was, like you know, sure enough within five to 10 minutes.

I was, just like you know, unable to handle it appropriately.

Talk to me about, like the alternative controls and finding, because I remember just earlier in the interview you were saying that the lighthouse was the way.

Sorry, the light from the lighthouse was the way initially, that you were directing the lighthouse.

It sounded like in earlier prototypes you were hinting at.

Did you go through many iterations of the controls?

What kind of a confidence level did you have that people would be able to pick this up and grok, this kind of alternative control of swinging this light around pretty quickly?

Was it a challenge in development?

Did you iterate much?

How'd you land on it?

Yeah, that was a whopper, man.

That was a hard one.

And it's interesting because, as it turns out, no one really has any controls that are close to Keeper anyway.

And we looked and, you know, like the closest that you have in some ways is like Luigi's Mansion.

And they're terrible.

They're kind of terrible.

You know, like this doesn't help us.

Yeah, these are bad.

And I know why they're terrible.

So the thing is, we went through so many iterations on aiming and what you know.

Ultimately, what happens is like you look at a game.

So if we had a more consistent camera model let's say we had done like an inside shot sort of camera model, where it's always mostly a side score, maybe pitched or yawed a bit here and there, then it'd be very easy to do a screen relative control system that people would just find more intuitive, right.

Aiming right always points to the right of screen and left.

But the problem is we not only do we have side scroll things, we have top down, we have full third person looking, we have some where you're really small, some where we have like every form of camera angle imaginable in some part of this game, not to mention very different forms of the player character that move at very different speeds.

So, you know, we tried a lot of different things.

And one of the things that was tricky is that We have these sort of two modes of life.

We have this unfocused and this sort of focused mode.

And the unfocused mode is just like, it's always on.

And you don't ever have to use that to progress the game.

But it is certainly one of the most encouraged forms of player expression in the game.

It's just aiming this thing around and watching stuff grow.

Yeah, I'm painting the environment the entire time as I'm rolling around here.

And so we wanted you to always just be able to do that at all times and not like make a modal thing, like you might have in this mansion or something.

But we did realize that, like sometimes when you want to be precise about your aiming, you know that's where we kind of want that focus mode.

And it kind of goes into a more easier to control sort of strafe mode.

You're moving a bit slower and so on.

And part of that was to kind of deal with some of that.

But we tried different forms of all these different sort of screen relative controls.

And we play tested a lot of different ones.

And they basically all break.

Because what winds up happening, it's kind of a hard thing to describe.

But when you wind up going from, let's say, like you've got a real camera, that's kind of framing your character from the side.

And you kind of go into more of a three-quarter third-person camera.

What is considered camera and forward, back and character, forward and back and relative completely shifts.

And it's not possible to fluidly map that level of camera difference to a screen without it needing to be reset at some point.

So if you're willing to commit to hard cuts, you probably do with it, but like we didn't want to.

So that basically like left us with this mode that, like you know, and then it came down to okay well, if we're going to do sort of like character relative controls, which is what we shipped with you know, we had the some that were constrained to just the front arc and then when we would play test, those people be like i'm a lighthouse, i want to always spin it around, like a light can go anywhere.

And then, of course, when we did that, people were like i'm really confused, i don't know what i'm doing.

And the problem actually really comes down to the fact that it's a couple things.

One is that most things modern games with these sort of cameras don't let you do that, don't let you game all around your character.

But also you don't have an instinct for your characters facing in this game when you're a lighthouse, because as a human you're like hardwired if you see a face or side of the face of a human character, you know exactly, without thinking about, where that character is facing.

And we put so many little affordances to try and help encourage the player understand where the lighthouse is facing intuitively, without looking at it.

But it's still like takes a little getting used to because you know, even with like okay, there's a strip of lights only on the back and they glow.

And they glow when you're dashing, they glow when you use your focus light.

They, like you know, we have we have stripes on one side and not on the other side.

We have like the angle of the roof it's pitch back so you can't really see the light without going through a cage when you're from the back.

Like all these little things in there are still not enough to combat this like lizard, lizard brain.

So we have so it does like it does take a little bit of people settling into it then, and the only thing i thought was like but, but once it's once, you kind of get a little more comfortable with it.

I think they work quite well and the, you know, encourage the things we wanted to encourage and they work across all the different forms of the player character, which was another consideration that people wouldn't know right right at the start.

Really good point.

Yeah.

You know, it's like you get to the boat and you're like okay well, boats have inertia and they move fast and you can't lock the light to the front of that.

You'd be counter steering to try and hit anything.

You know, it's like this, it's a really interesting problem to solve.

And I think it was probably the thing that was mechanically the most challenging to try and get to where we did and there's a lot of subtle things that we did with the light you know so like if you're not touching the stick it always kind of like will you know go back to the front of the character uh by itself um if you're not force driving it and you know we have like some moments where you'll go into certain tricky camera angles where we actually do have invisible aim constraints that will constrain it to just a certain part of the thing and most people never even notice it yeah i never understand yeah we kind of dip in and out.

There's like a lot of little subtle things that we do all over the place to try and make it less of a pain point.

And a big part of that's level design too, you know is that is that if you wind up having a non like, a very nonlinear space that has a lot of hidden information and people wandering around it too much, they you start to get this tension of like.

Either it's like not being able to map the light aiming controls when you're walking out the camera, or it's wanting to.

I really need to swing the camera to see where I'm going.

And so a lot of the level design tried to steer away from that, while still leaving some things open to explore and find.

And so some of that is You know, like our side paths are mainly just what I call like little appendages.

You know where you go off for a little bit and you don't like wind like this and then reconnect like you would in a more classic level loop.

You know, or if it forks, you can always kind of see where the other fork is going, so that you're never like oh, I completely missed that.

If you want to go back, you feel like it's a choice, not because you're completely confused about where you are. this is like a lot a lot of it really informed a lot of it and it took a while to kind of get to to a good place yeah i can see it it's one of those features that you know as a game developer you start playing a game and you're like oh there's dragons here like there's a there's a bunch of a bunch of dragons were slayed to get to this princess you know uh it's yeah it's it's quite a quite an achievement i did want to say like i i it's it's interesting you talk about level design because i i noticed myself which i think is another feat of this game and the work that you and your team did uh the game you know it's not one of those games that has the like the yellow painted lines pointing to everything or whatever but i really did there were only a couple moments in the game where i was like where the fuck am i going which way am i but like some of these areas feel so open and like so that they feel like there's so many options for me to go down, but I've continuously, I'll go down, I'll be like, okay, what about this path?

And then nine times out of 10 or more, it's the actual path that I need to go down anyway.

The level design and the flow and the progression of this game felt so organic and natural.

And I mean that's obviously one of the biggest challenges I imagine you had, considering that you have no meta UI saying this direction or you know narrative, even like to spoken narrative, I say, or written narrative on screen to help you out.

What were kind of some of the pillars?

I know you've spoken about them a little bit but like, how do you reach a point so successful as that where someone like myself can step away after the?

You know, playing the game for five hours, a game that's explicitly done well like, has very few tools to tell me which direction I should be going in.

And yet I find myself, you know, 19 times out of 20 heading in the right direction.

Was there a relationship with the play testing loop?

Like how closely did you work with the level design team?

Like what's the kind of development iteration process and kind of some of the approaches that you took to your level design that kind of gives you, gives the developer, the result that you've had in a game like this.

Yeah it um, I think you know, in thinking about sort of like our overall level design approach.

It's similar to most games in that, like you know, usually starts with a high level write up for the level.

That I would do.

And then it would go to kind of we use digital paper maps that are sort of collaborative, like mirror boards, where we can kind of we did all of our paper mapping there.

Um um, and that's very, you know, sort of conventional um.

But one thing that's maybe a little unusual is that when we did our sort of our white box stage, our first standups, you know it was important before we moved on from white box that we authored some version of all of our cameras and did a lighting pass on white box stuff.

And the reason for that is because I'm always been a believer of.

I did the vast majority of the lighting in the game.

But big part of it is that lighting is such an important tool and it usually comes on too late in level design.

And, um, when our lighting was a hundred percent dynamic, we didn't have to bake anything.

So there wasn't any workflow issues.

And so we could, we could stand it up very early.

And what that does is it, it lets us, you know, it's, it's like camera, a very important tool for directing the player, but also creating a sense of space and atmosphere and, and, and creating a visual hierarchy of where you want the player to go and what are the important things.

And and so um the camera, though I'd say it was overall the biggest tool because because it's a directed camera.

Um, we did uh, a lot of subtle things, depending on kind of the area of the game you in and which character you're playing.

But you know, there's a lot of like, very subtle state changes that the camera goes through based on uh, your progression.

So in some of the more platform areas, you know it it will suddenly like pivot or change as you do things like lower a platform or as you complete a puzzle, and never is like cuts and forces you to leave the space.

Cause, a big pillar of the of the game is not to rush you through it and let you take it at your own pace, but it still guides you.

And a lot of people don't even really notice the guidance except for in a few, few moments.

So I would say that was, that was a big part of it, but also, you know, getting that lighting in early in some form.

And of course it's lower fidelity, but that means that, you know, early on in our level of process, process raw, I'm also blocking in shadow shapes that are maybe invisible, maybe off camera, maybe something in the level geometry to kind of carve that path and filter the noise for the player.

Um, and of course, you know, there's all the other Sarah standard stuff too.

Like motion is probably one of the best affordances that grabs our uh hunting brains.

Uh, you know, more so than flashing signs even, like you know.

But yeah, you know, it's true.

Like our, our licorice whips, our uh flashing signs, all of our standard, you know.

Game affordances for for pulling through the level design were were a bit different um, because we were trying to keep them pretty integrated with the world.

Yeah.

And I and I think, as I said, the one of the things that was most impressive about it was just how invisible to me, even like a seasoned game developer.

I was like what are they doing?

Like, why, why do I know where to go all the time?

And I did notice the guided camera.

I remember there was a specific puzzle where I was like, okay.

And I very confidently headed in a direction.

And I was like, I don't think I'm meant to be running into the camera right now.

And so I like, sure enough, I spun around and then the camera helped me point in the right direction, so i noticed that one a little bit.

But yeah, i was actually just impressed at how implicit all of these things were and how kind of invisible the little guides and assistants that you'd been providing players were, at least for me.

Yeah no, you fooled me all right.

My one of my final questions here, i guess, is um, you know, double fine is just an incredibly storied studio that has like a fan base that is, you know, Like just loves, loves Double Fine so much.

Obviously you know the studio was initially built around, like Tim and his works and stuff and a lot of the fame, I should say, for the studio.

But now we've had a decade plus almost two right.

I think of you know really capable leaders in Double Fine.

Now there's tons of games coming out of Double Fine with project leads who aren't Tim.

And I think, but then also there's been the Microsoft acquisition, right?

So now you've got this parent company, you're a part of Microsoft Game Studios.

So I'm interested if you could lay out for the listeners here what does it look like at Double Fine now if one of the leaders or one of the devs in the studio wants to kind of make a game like Keeper.

Like how does a Keeper kind of start and rise up?

Is there a...

Is there first an internal kind of green lighting phase where something happens?

Does everything spin out of a kind of amnesia fortnight?

And then what does it mean to sort of go to?

We've spoken with you know, Josh Sawyer, about Pentament and like his process of like Obsidian pitching that to Microsoft and how it was a perfect game pass fit and things like that.

So yeah, Talk me through.

I know we zoomed out like from the creative and now we're looking at kind of the business end of getting a project like Keeper lit internally at Double Fine and Xbox, but especially more so for you because it's a fucking game that's so hard to describe.

It's about a lighthouse, right?

And there's no words and everything.

Talk me through the process of how a game gets kind of like this gets greenlit.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.

And I would say like our process for that over the years is like constantly evolving, which I think is great, because I think you know people often talk about innovation on the game side, but I think innovation on the business side is just as fascinating.

And this is like something that Tim is really good at.

And creative as well.

It's not just like there's creativity, deep creativity in that business, like how you approach the business.

End of things.

Yeah. which I love, I love, you know, cause it's just, it's just another aspect of what we do.

Right.

I think you know.

But currently, like you know, like the process can often come from a from a few different places,

Amnesia Fortnite certainly like, not necessarily that we're making Amnesia Fortnite games necessarily, but we're doing that process still.

And they're not always public.

So people haven't seen it.

And I think what that does is it just?

It exposes people who might potentially be interested in this type of career, gives them some exposure, gives them a way to try it out.

And also maybe, you know, maybe they realize like nope, that was the most stressful two weeks of my life.

I don't really want to do this.

But it also might inspire them to go like OK well, I really love this, even though I kind of fucked it up.

How do I get better at this?

Or maybe they just were like, I was born to do this. you know, whatever.

And I think, so I think that's cool.

Like that's an opportunity you get too much paid to do.

So that's really cool.

And that's still part of the studio and we still do those.

They're just not public at the moment.

Yeah.

Great.

And then I think the other thing is that you know, Tim and other studio management are always looking for people who they feel might have that ability based on other lead experience that they've done on other projects you know and interest.

And so I think there's a component of that.

And then, as it relates to Microsoft, I would say that, and again, it's an evolving process, but this is the first post-acquisition game we've released.

I mean, technically Psychonauts 2 was, but it started.

I should say it started before the acquisition.

This game started post-acquisition.

Yeah, first full cycle, right?

Yeah.

And so we've developed, we currently have an internal process that involves an ideation phase, where it's a very small team sometimes just two people or so and you know you basically wind up pitching internally to to a sort of creative group creative leadership group and uh then if if they're on board with it you know there's usually a lot of open questions or things that are concerns or things you should be thinking about and then there's like usually a little playable demo I think and then you're going to continue that phase for a bit it's a little playable demo and that demo That timeline then is when we talked to Microsoft before we were allowed to go into pre-production.

And so they have, Microsoft has this sort of concept review thing.

It's technically not a green light.

I'm sure if I was like this is a game all about Microsoft Word, they might be like eh, not that one.

But it's more a chance for them because they really for studios like us, which are what they call partially integrated studios, we're treated as our own business unit effectively.

We're part of the Xbox games group but we have like, a studio budget and we have our studio processes.

We have our own studio culture and HR and all that sort of stuff.

That's ours.

That's not part of Microsoft.

So they?

They want us to have our own effective process for promoting leads and leadership and coming up with games.

And then they want to see it.

You know, rise as we, as we feel confident, we want to go into pre-production and have their input on it.

And then, um, then you're off to the races basically at that point.

And so that's, that's kind of what we do with keeper and and with keeper in particular.

You know, we I, Tim and I talked about, like I, when we first got bought by Microsoft.

You know, we had this conversation, Tim and I did, and

I was like, you know, if I were Microsoft, why would I buy Double Fine?

And this is before they bought like Activision and Bethesda and stuff.

So they were still kind of in a purchasing thing.

But I was like you know they were, at the time Microsoft was really or I should say Xbox was really specifically wanting to promote Game Pass more than anything else.

And I said you know, it makes a lot of sense to me if you think about Double Fine as being an uncommon type of studio that could make unique stuff that they could only get on Game Pass.

I said, I think it I think it makes sense.

And I was like, I think that's how I want to pitch this game.

And so how I sort of pitched it to Microsoft and the studio was like I wanted to make something that I was describing as like a palate cleanser, like something that didn't require you to have a huge ongoing investment, that you could play in a few sittings but be different than the sort of offering you get anywhere else and hopefully stick with you.

And maybe you play it again with a friend.

Maybe you play it once a year because you loved it so much, but it'd be something you could play in four to six hours, but it it isn't like you know eating into your, you know halo time, your force of time.

It's, it's like it's, and then maybe we even like, over time, attract a different type of player to game pass people who are looking for those different type of experiences.

And you know, and I, and I sort of said, you know, along those lines, this is, this is what Keeper is about.

And, you know, I think early on, I tried to, to hit them a lot with a lot of beauty and tell them about like where the game came from, the inspirations and what I was hoping where it would sit and how it wasn't like, like, even though it's a strange game, I just came up with this term weird, but chill early on, which is just sort of say like, it's, it's a weird game, but it's not, it's not a violent game.

It's not a hard game and you can kind of chill out and play it at your own pace.

And it's broadly playable because it doesn't demand a high level of mastery to play the game.

But it is not a common game.

It's not playing, you know, it's not like others.

So, you know, I tried to like pitch it kind of in that pocket.

And I think each game that we do, we go to Microsoft, is probably pitched a little differently depending on what it is.

And I think that's what Tim always just sort of says is like, hey, we're a creative driven studio.

We don't stick in one genre or with one type of lead or we kind of like.

We want different points of view.

We want different perspectives.

And we want to explore what games can do for us and how we can bring our sensibilities, our sense of personality or comedy or life, or whatever it is, to those games.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah, wonderfully insightful.

Thank you, Lee.

All right.

Well, you've shipped Keeper now.

It's out there.

Let's take it back to the hiking for my final question.

What are you doing that's not games at the moment?

How are you licking your wounds after shipping a game?

And are you still out there hitting the trails?

Yeah.

I realized, of course, this is the last year.

I'm like, man, I'm in bad shape after not exercising this last year.

I'm rebuilding.

I was actually, you know, it's funny because I

I've been so focused, as as all of us are, when we're like shipping the game, everything we're dreaming of our game.

We're like wanting to connect.

You know cause like that last to try and land this weird fucking game and have it resonate.

You know you're like, you're just like thinking of all these things and and So you know you get a little time away from it.

And then I feel like the part of my brain that has been slumbering is starting to awaken.

And I immediately start thinking of new ideas, new projects, whether they're games or art.

And one of the things I thought about was I was thinking about the cycle, because I also.

There's this thing a lot of people experience when you ship a game, where you're kind of almost depressed even if the game goes very well.

You almost have this like because you're at such a heightened level of productivity and awareness and you just your your brain's on fire.

And then you kind of like take a breath and you're just, you feel almost like depressed is not quite the right word, but it's, it's almost maudlin, you know, the sort of sense.

And I was thinking about a painting, these sort of like a diptych I wanted to do.

And I was like, because when you're making the game it's all about like I thought I just, I just pictured in my black mist of a brain these sort of two figures.

And like one of them was just like everything is flowing together away from the figure and it's like this exhale like making a game is like a very long exhale where you're just like everything that you've been inspired by and built up before making the game, you're just spinning, you're spinning it all, you're pushing it out into the world and other people and then when you ship, that game is you're like, you're like a husk in some ways, but but not in a bad way.

Now i'm like okay, now i'm starting to wake up.

I'm starting to take in all this stuff.

What's going around me, looking at new unreal features, a new blender feature, but also i'm painting on canvas.

I've been painting in that good unreal air.

Yeah Right.

But in the world and getting out there again, I'm going to be traveling more soon.

So you know, like it's like this period now where like, I'm pulling in all the color into me instead of expressing it all out.

And it's like this kind of cycle that you just have to kind of remind yourself that that's part of the creative process.

And that's part of, you know, like that roller coaster is part of it.

And so, yeah, I feel like I'm rebuilding myself as a creative individual right now and trying to like take in new things and engage with skills and activities i haven't done as much in the last year or two yeah reloading or recharging so to speak yeah i love it well thank you for your your exhale is a breath of fresh air this game i'm just having such a blast and you know for all of the all of the crazy camera angles and you know the critters and the like just the wondrous like adventure i really do implore everyone who's listening to to grab it on game pass or you know on your platform of choice it's just It's just a stunning experience.

So congratulations, Lee.

Thanks for chatting with us today.

Yeah, it was my pleasure.

Thank you for joining us for the Game Maker's Notebook.

For more information on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, our podcasts and our other initiatives, please visit wwwinteractiveorg.

[The Art of Silence and Atmosphere: A Conversation with Double Fine’s Lee Petty]-[Double Fine's Lee Petty talks Keeper and Creative Leadership]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Creative Journey of Lee Petty

Formative Influences and the "Dark Arts" of Multimedia

The Double Fine Philosophy: Collaboration and "Amnesia Fortnight"

The Creation of Keeper: Designing for Atmosphere

Key Design Pillars:

Leadership and the Future of Creativity

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Art of Silence and Atmosphere: A Conversation with Double Fine’s Lee Petty]-[Double Fine's Lee Petty talks Keeper and Creative Leadership]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Creative Journey of Lee Petty

Formative Influences and the "Dark Arts" of Multimedia

The Double Fine Philosophy: Collaboration and "Amnesia Fortnight"

The Creation of Keeper: Designing for Atmosphere

Key Design Pillars:

Leadership and the Future of Creativity

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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