How Ready or Not Creates Tension Behind Every Door | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

To our game dev listeners, are you wondering how to expand your game around the globe?

Well, wonder no longer.

Xsolla Payments is a solution built for global game commerce and monetization.

It boosts player engagement with localized checkout experiences using your players' preferred payment methods.

The simple user interface makes it easy for gamers everywhere to pay for your games and in-game content exactly how they want.

Even better, they can save their favorite payment methods for quick purchases to help them get back in the game faster.

And you'll love Ixola Payments because of its customizable checkout and integration options.

With everything from sidebars and iframes to fonts and images, making the buying process feel like an extension of your game experience for payers.

Ready to go global?

Visit xsolla.pro slash AIASP or click the link in our podcast description to learn more.

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 Mark Ranson and Sean Gorman of Void Interactive.

Void is the developers of...

Ready or not?

The tactical first person shooter where you're role playing a SWAT team, whether it's in multiplayer or single player.

You're taught to fear every door which we talk about a ton.

But of course, we talk about how they got into games.

We talk about their path through these two AAA and then eventually landing at Void.

And when we get to Void we talk about stuff, like I said, that fear every door, how tension is a guiding light through their design, through their art direction.

Ready or not, it's very clear.

It was clear from the first trailer but it's clear playing the game now well past 10 and on the console version that it's a game that has a very distinct vision and it's a team that knows what they're delivering on.

And it's a real joy hearing Mark and Sean talk about that.

But it's not just in the game. that they have that vision.

It's also as a studio I mean.

It's been massively successful, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, no doubt.

And there's still this team that is working globally, completely remote.

It's clear that they understand and know who they are and how they want to work.

And so it's almost like this quintessential AA studio at the time when everyone's talking about that and how they're utilizing the culture and the strength.

They talk about things like recruitment and management and leadership and autonomy and trust and all these ways that they're able to execute, not just on the vision for their game but the vision for their studio in the face of such astronomical success.

Whether you're a designer or an art director and you're in the trenches working with your team, you're a studio head thinking about you know or wanting to see how other studios are deploying their team and their vision more effectively, or whether you're just a Rainbow Six Vegas sicko like me who's super excited for another SWAT sim, this is an episode for you.

So, without further ado, here's Mark Ranson, art director, and Sean Gorman, lead designer of Ready or Not.

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.

Mark, Sean, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

I made a joke about my partner just in the pre-ramble before we got recording here about my partner breaching and clearing this door to drag me out of here to make her dinner if we go too long.

But it's kind of how I'm seeing the world at the moment.

It's like when I used to skateboard as a kid and I would see the world in lines.

Of you know, I could hit that rail and then blah blah, blah.

I'm kind of.

I'm kind of seeing the world of how I would sweep it with my tactical team when I'm down at the shops thinking about all the scenarios.

If things went the worst possible way, they could.

And for some reason, the town of Brunswick in Melbourne Australia, called on me to rescue the local Ritchie supermarket.

So I appreciate you guys training me up for that.

Entirely the intention.

Yeah, so that every... every threshold and every exit that you need is a biggie or whatever it was.

You're looking for it.

Exactly.

Trying to sneak away.

Yeah.

Well, Hey guys, we've got a ton to talk about.

As I just mentioned, I've been playing ready or not for the last Got a week or so, I think, since I got back from DICE Europe.

And as a Vegas player, Rainbow Six Vegas player from back in the day, I did dabble in a bit of SWAT.

Touched some SWAT 4 for a little bit there, but Vegas was my...

God it was my oxygen as a teenager, I would say in my late teens, really appreciating a kind of trip down a similar memory lane here.

So we're going to talk a bunch about Ready or Not but, as we do on the podcast, I want to take it all the way back to the start for the two of you and talk about your first memory of games, how you got in the industry, how you found yourself at void.

So why don't we start with you?

We'll start with you mark, and we'll sort of bounce around between the two of you as we do.

Um, what's your first memory of games?

And not like just like the first game you played, but and it might be the same as this memory, but you know the one that set your brain alight, that might have put you on this path gosh, i mean, that is such a, such a fantastic question, because where do you even start with that?

I mean um, sort of i remember very, very early on just how excited i was.

You know, christmas i think it was like 96 rolled rounds and i got my first playstation one.

And I remember specifically I got Tomb Raider 1 and Wipeout, like the original Wipeout.

And I think I must have put like a thousand or so hours into that original Wipeout.

And I don't know if that was my first sort of like memory that made me want to go into games per se, but that definitely awakened something into me that like I didn't realize entertainment could come in this kind of way exactly.

Yeah, like i didn't know entertainment could come in this kind of a form where you just like lock in, it becomes muscle memory, going around these corners and that trancy soundtrack.

It's like oh, i didn't know this was a thing.

So i think that was pretty up there in terms of like the, the sparks out of walking me into into the games industry.

Um, but i mean as as far as If we were to go really far back.

I remember the first thing I ever saw in the cinema was Toy Story.

And I didn't really care about the actual story about it.

I was just mesmerized of the fact that you could create 3D animation of sorts.

And that, I think, was really kind of okay.

I don't know how this is made, but I want to learn softwares that create artwork.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah, it kind of awoken the maker in you, so to speak.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Were you?

How old were you when you, when that sort of happened when you watch Toy Story?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Like, like I remember, yeah, it was the first film I ever saw in the cinema.

So however old Toy Story was then.

I miss that.

Yeah.

Right.

So it's just not like you stepped off of your Amish planes and like into the cinema at 22 or anything like that.

Yeah.

I know the beard might give that away.

Sorry, I missed that piece of information there.

Okay, great.

Yeah, it's like I remember seeing Toy Story as a kid too, and it was a similar thing.

It's just like.

What do you mean?

This is like, not an actual like, it's not a drawing or it's not a yeah, totally.

So I get that.

What about yourself, Sean?

What's your first memory of games sort of setting something alight in your brain?

Yeah, sure.

When I was, I guess I would be playing games a bunch, visiting my cousin because he had an Xbox, and we would hang out more or less like two or three times a week.

So yeah, we would play a bunch of Halo, Halo 2 when you could play that all, you know, split screen.

So you'd be sat there for the first five minutes watching the game load in campaign.

If you guys remember that game, that the loading screen was abhorrent you'd probably sit there for like 10 minutes if your console was pretty old.

So in that time we would just punch each other and start beating each other up because we were little kids and Um, but yeah, and that was really good times.

You play that game to death and just over and over and over again.

But um yeah, so that would be like a really fun memory.

I have playing video games, but not certainly my uh, my earliest, but uh, certainly that one that lights.

That spark is.

Halo 2 was just such a solid game.

It was, I remember.

I, you know, I was a Nintendo kid and then I switched to Xbox in that generation when it came out.

I had a friend who was into video games who was a little bit more tech savvy than me.

And he basically went on this, it was like he worked for Microsoft or something.

He gave me this pitch and, like you know, actual paper leaflet materials that like had all the specs of the Xbox.

And I was like 12 or something being like, yes, this is, I must do this now.

Um, and I, I can't remember how it was.

I think I would have been around 12 and I went and traded in all of my games and everything in one suite for Halo and Xbox, and me and my brother.

Like you know, it's it's the same.

This isn't a unique experience, right?

So many of us went through this experience.

But that game is just it's.

It's like there's something about those system linked Xboxes in a room together, sleeping bags on the couch whatever, like.

Knowing your pizza boxes stacked up, parents not knowing when you're going to come down from you know the rumpus room or whatever like, and a bunch of rat bag mates punching each other and playing some halo is just like.

It's a core memory for so many of us in games.

Now for sure yeah, i feel like this modern generation in some ways are not going to have that experience and i kind of feel sad for them, because everything's like online now and everything's so accessible.

People will never know the struggles of playing like golden eye on, like a quad screen and being able to see where everyone else is.

Stop looking at my screen.

Stop looking at my screen Yeah.

We used to have this old CRT that would bounce, like it just something wrong with the tracking.

And so kids would come around and they'd be like, what's wrong with your television?

And we'd just be like, don't worry, you won't notice in 10 minutes.

It's fine.

And your eyes.

I don't know what it was doing to our brains like, but your eyes, just like you know, adjust to it.

And you're playing this game with this bouncing like incorrectly tracked CRT, even when you're that close to the screen especially.

You don't need to do that anymore.

You stand in the back of the room.

Even if you got real close to it, you don't have that feeling, that itch on your face.

So yeah, you don't see anyone sitting that close to things anymore.

I guess no, that is true, All right.

So you're playing Xbox.

That's the thing that sort of awoken it for you.

Sean, was video games a thing like in your household growing up?

Did you have, I mean, you said you went to your cousins and stuff like that.

Were you getting stuck into things, you know, in high school?

Was there any kind of video game stuff?

Were you heading towards that in college?

How did it become, you know Sean mucking around playing Xbox with his pals at a young age through to actually, you know, wanting to do it as a job.

I'm with you.

I would love to be able to tell you that there was a family there.

We had a PC and all this and helped me through programming.

Absolutely not.

No.

So I think this is important as well to sort of tell you this story.

So no, I didn't have a PC and the family until really that we could all use, until I was in my mid teens, maybe mid to late teens.

And that was, you know, your computer that was in, you know, the kitchen, the shared space.

So when you're on MSN and all that, you're everything you know to the whole room while mom's cooking.

You're trying to talk to your crush.

Yeah.

It's not really a conducive environment.

Counting the X's on the end of a message and go, damn, it's only two this time.

But no, I didn't have really a house where that was all promoted.

In fact, it was certainly looked down as, well, you're a bit of a loser.

And, in fact, if I don't get the chance to play games upstairs which I did because I was very fortunate enough to have a mom and dad who had hooked out some money over Christmas to get me an Xbox, which is awesome and uh, so I did play a bunch of games.

But as to like programming, as to actually any work in school no, in fact I really computers did not come easily to me, but what did was art.

So I always found myself a pen and pencil you know whether it was even paintbrush and canvas uh, getting in there and painting.

So um, I think where I left at that point, then I'd gone through school college, you know.

I graduated college, went to another college, thinking I just need a little bit more time to figure stuff out.

I actually reached out to one of the concept artists at the time who worked at Naughty Dog.

And they actually got back in touch with me just to send a message.

This was early days Twitter.

So if you remember back then when you could actually reach out to people, I sent them a DM.

It was like a hundred of us in games and then a bunch of comedians and some early tech adopters.

And it was a wonderful place.

When you actually sent a message to what could be a Hollywood A-lister and then the fact that they might even reply to you was not actually all that uncommon because there were so few people on it.

But yeah, back then.

And so that was actually, I was looking for, well, what is this job?

I've just discovered this as a career.

Tell me more about what you do.

And yeah, they were very grateful, gracious enough to get back to me, to which I'm very grateful.

So that actually helped me.

When I got back into college again what would be for a BTEC, they call it, so it's think of it like in the UK it's between college and university I wanted to learn how to use like Wacom tablets to do concept art and yeah.

So let's say long story short.

That's how that journey begun university and then into games proper wow yeah, it's interesting.

I actually that story resonates a bunch with me as well.

Like you know, i i've said it many times on the podcast before the the um computers at my place were work computers.

My parents had like a business from home and so they were petrified of putting viruses.

I just so it was literally a part of gaming that i didn't interact with.

And it's so interesting because, like i know a bunch of your crew and you know the ready or not and void origins has modding and that kind of stuff in your teen years as part of the origins right, and so many other people that i interview on this podcast who are like founders or creators of these majorly successful games and studios.

They started like coding when they were eight or you know modding on high school and it just is not not the path that i had at all.

So, thank you so much.

I feel seen right now.

Thank you sean, we can do it.

We can also be successful in games without programming at eight years old.

Yeah, and there's also a generation who likes a valve mod.

Yeah, there's also a generation that come before us is people have been my bosses and some seniors in my team which didn't go to university or taught themselves or they just got, you know, just got a job from a friend and then for 20 years we're just learning how to code pretty much on the fly and became some of the people that now make the tools we use.

So Yeah, it's not everything needs to go through that same pipeline.

So, yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's kind of like the whole games industry, similar to the Big Bang.

It's just like a whole bunch of bouncing off each other for like 30, 40 years.

And then we just had a games industry.

Mark, how about you?

I'm hosting the podcast for the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Interactive Sciences, and I've just like reduced the games industry into the bunch of accidents.

You know what I mean.

That's how we do it around here.

Mark, tell me about your happy accidents and how you got into gang, if it was that.

I mean to make again, to resonate with exactly what both of you just said, almost exactly the same story as well.

So, like, I got a PC.

We're after, like, all my friends.

Like, I think I must have been about sort of like 13, 14, maybe even 15 at that point.

Meanwhile all my friends you know friends had them since they were like 10 and things like that.

So um, I didn't get a pc until much later than I felt like everyone else did like, to the point where it's like if I was doing homework I had to go down to like the local library or like go around, said one of friends house, to type up the report.

Um, so it was amazing when I finally did get that pc and I was like all right, this opens up all kinds of fun new things.

And I remember, because I was, I was doing art at the time you know very much like Sean, fine art degrees paintings, drawings and all that kind of stuff.

And I randomly stumbled into RPG Toolkit Maker, which was like a sprite-based game-making system for making Little Stairs games.

Now, I couldn't code for Chocolate.

I am just not a coder.

I'm not hardwired that way.

But I remember just how satisfying it was when I managed to get a little sprite character moving or like talking to another one, and it was just like i felt like such a like a god of my own little domain then, and that really just was like that's it.

I'm never sleeping again.

I'm just going to work on this all night forever, and i would do that quite often actually, like especially like sort of when friday would roll around and there's no school the next day.

Um, i remember like being like to my dad, like hey, can you just like make me a flask of coffee.

Like i just want to stay awake all night and just make this game.

It confused the absolute hell out of them, but they were just like so like happy that I was enthusiastic about something.

And I didn't even really know at the time that I could even turn that into a career.

So I went through college, I did my fine art degree, and I was applying to universities.

And I ended up at the University of Hertfordshire doing like an animation degree.

Again, mostly because I didn't think games were a thing.

It just never occurred to me that I could go into that as a career.

So I did animation and rendering for a while, made some films, did some arch viz, that kind of stuff.

And then I graduated and just fell straight into the games industry.

I didn't realize like how much of those skills were transferable.

And especially if you've got like the art background.

At that point you're just kind of like working with the limitations of how games are made.

Of course.

So that was fun.

Yeah.

And I went from sort of like making films which have, like you know, half an hour frame to render, straight into like a Wii game.

And it was like, oh, wow, like that is a crazy difference in thinking about how to make things.

Yeah.

I remember when I first started in games and you know we're working on platforms like the 3DS or the DS and stuff like that.

And then there'd be the Xbox SKU of the same game being made in the building and watching how the artists like would break something down into the DS model with, like you know, 40 tries or something like that is just crazy.

It's such a beautiful skill, that kind of efficiency and application to the craft.

It's really cool.

Hmm.

And so, Sean, tell me about how you come... So you're in college now, you're doing some stuff.

I mean, you've come out of college or you're heading into uni.

Are you studying games in uni?

Like, are you studying comp sci or art?

And then tell us about how that then led to your kind of first gig in games.

Yeah, sure.

I guess also while in that second college there.

So I've already got all of my A-levels from the first and that second college.

I remember um, you get that email.

I start then having a sense of direction.

I want to do this when i work in games.

So what do i got to do to get there?

So i started to apply to a bunch of different universities, saved up uh, money from my part-time job to get myself a cintiq uh, which was, you know, that was huge.

So i'd go home every evening and just learn the hell out to use this um.

And i remember my art teachers in that course telling me basically that I was cheating that Photoshop and using a graphics tablet.

That's not real art.

The kid at the back of the room who's covering himself in paint and taking pictures in the bar fully naked.

He's going to go to Goldsmiths.

But no, Sean's not going to go to university.

He's not good enough.

So I remember, because I did feel like as if this was new, it was looked down on.

It was not seen as an art craft, at least in that college. so i i didn't really take too much to that uh that advice so i left i said you know what i f it i'm gonna leave and i'm gonna show you so what i did and i that's a little bit about me anyways if you tell me i'm not gonna be able to do something i'm gonna show you in about a year how i did it and and then kind of go so anyway so it is a great motivator isn't it back then when you're when you're 18 yeah so um but it was because I remember getting a proper talking down to so no and I eventually got my way into university really not thinking I would even want to go to it even a year prior so I'm glad I made that decision because I got not just what was an opening for a games arts degree at De Montfort University which is in Leicester was very close to going to the same university as Mark actually it was between the two yeah yeah and so went to the university inside of a year I'd met Um, my now, uh, my now wife.

So that's also a huge boon from the same visit.

That's it.

And then, uh, yeah, we inside of, uh, 18 months had my first job while I was at university.

So I'd work in pretty much while at uni.

So I'm, you can see I'm pretty young guy.

Uh, so I've been doing this for now coming up on 10 years.

Uh, so.

Yeah, and that was my route from then college through to university.

To get into that first job though, it went from working in jobs at Architectural Visualization in London, going even to Munich working at BMW for a stint.

I saw that.

Cool.

And then, yeah, into video games.

The first company was for a company called Bulkhead Interactive in Derby, who gave me my first shot.

So, yeah, huge props to that.

Amazing.

Pause there and we'll come back to your path in a moment, after we hear how Mark stumbled into games, you know.

I mean, is it similar as well?

You got a similar path.

Did you say fuck it to someone who gave you a talking down to, or how'd you get into games?

I definitely don't think I had the confidence as an 18 year old like Sean had.

I wish I did now in hindsight, but no, I just like I kind of mentioned before like I really wanted to do animation.

I didn't.

I didn't actually know at the time that I wanted to do games, cause I just didn't think it was an option um, so i did animation and i really, really enjoyed it.

And then um yeah, like i think i was one of the lucky few that uh did incredibly well out of university.

Like i got a job offer um, before i graduated and it was just like hey, when you finished, come work for us.

Um, and at that point like, and again, you know i'm graduating.

So i'm like yes please, like i don't care who you are, i just want a job.

Um, and it was only afterwards i realized it was a company called eurocom.

Um, up in uh, up in derby as well, weirdly enough.

Um, And yeah, so I stumbled into my first game, which was GoldenEye on the Wii, which again I thought was incredible, after playing GoldenEye on the N64 all through my sort of like teenage years.

And then GoldenEye on the Wii being my first ever game, I was like Life cannot get better than this.

Weirdly enough, you soon learn in the games industry that actually it's ebbs and flows.

So that company had some real issues.

They're no longer with us.

That sounded like they died.

They went bankrupt, sorry.

Well, it's kind of like a company dies when it goes bankrupt.

It kind of does, yeah.

But I remember specifically that company being like such a trial by fire, especially like at an early age as well, where you know I'm all big and bright eyed and I've got these, you know, thoughts of what the games industry is going to be, and how quickly that got beaten out of me, shall we say.

You know we made six games in two years, which like is just a crazy turnover.

And then after that, I was like, you know what?

I kind of want to see if I can progress my career a little bit further, doing a whole bunch of stuff in my spare time portfolio-wise, and then applied to Rocksteady and got a job at Rocksteady.

So I was at Rocksteady for nearly six years working on Arkham Knight, Arkham VR and a little bit of Suicide Squad in the early days.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, how far through my career do I want to go?

I think this is actually the perfect segue into Sean's path, because you guys just narrowly missed each other at Rocksteady right.

We certainly did, yeah.

So Sean, was that your second gig in games at Rocksteady or something?

That's right, yeah.

So if it was me and Mark narrowly missed each other at Hertfordshire University because I remember being parked outside the same uni which now Mark does talks at I've done talks at.

And so being there almost like, what was it for the interviews?

So Mark, if I would have said yes, I probably would have also met you there.

But no, we missed each other there.

And then years later, yeah, it's at Rocksteady.

So what was my old boss was also Mark's old boss.

We would have worked inside of the same team, because my first few years in video games was also, like Mark, as an environment artist.

So I worked in the art department.

Um no, now they missed each other.

In fact, how we got the chance to meet one another was um, so mark's wife also worked inside of the art team, and that's how i met mark.

We have, um so alex basically worked a desk behind me uh, and so yeah, everybody there in the art team was all very, very close.

So i spent a lot of time, you know, together looking after each other, because it was a long project uh, but i was also there for about five years so yeah, and that's how we met you.

I mean, these narrow misses are amazing.

If it was, you know it basically reads like the script and no country for old men.

Except you're a couple of game artists trying to get a job, as opposed to like an assassin tracing, tracking someone down.

I love it.

Okay.

So let's, let's stick with you for a while here, Sean.

And now just like take us right up to Void Interactive and how that sort of came about.

Sure.

So when I was, as I mentioned, I've been at bulk ads there for, uh, I think was, yes, it was a year.

I'd actually still while studying work with them.

So that was quite peculiar where I've worked full time for them, because send my work that was for my degree back uh, to the university.

And, um, so my work at the, you know, uh, the company back to the university.

But then what I did is I took a little bit of a gamble.

I said, I wanted to work on my final major project.

So I actually said, thank you.

I'm going to going to leave full-time work.

Um, i'm gonna let a bulkhead know and i'm gonna go back to uni for what was like six months.

So i basically quit and that was then for the first time pretty much since i was 16.

But i didn't have a job for six months.

Uh, every other week between 16 and then i was working.

So this was balls to the wall.

I worked unhealthily.

I don't think it's even right.

I'm gonna tell people now what happened and how that was, but i can't recommend this.

I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, for about five to six months because it was definitely my background and my family, which have Irish family, Irish immigrants coming over to the UK.

And they work, work, work, like working class family.

So I'm one of the first few of my family to go to university.

It's a lot of money over here.

It's about 40 grand or something just to pay for it.

It's all just on my back, you know, so no bank account and mom and dad, this is all on me.

So it was, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to go hard.

So I built myself a portfolio, worked myself to the bone and I got that job at Rocksteady.

So I was really, really happy with myself back at the time.

Project was super secret, the studio was just, oh my god, the uh, that opportunity was brilliant.

Get the chance to work with the folks who worked on you know, the arkham knight, like mark did.

So i was over the moon uh, and then he's one of the crown jewels of the uk, you know, and that's saying something, considering how many amazing studios you got out there and also like the work that they, that they've done and that you all did over there on those various projects just like iconic there's no other word to say it.

So the opportunity, you know it speaks for itself.

I think you know um, i don't know many of us who would have been able to do what you did, but i'm sure a bunch of us understand.

You know, sort of laying it down for that, tell us a little bit, because obviously crunch and everything is something that we, a lot of folks talk about.

There are indie devs who self-impose this stuff on us.

Did you, did you find it?

Was it impacting your health?

Like how?

How'd you go like sort of slogging, slogging through that and was it?

Was it sort of dark times or was it kind of just like the energy of a, energy of a young man, the energy of?

I mean, i did crazy hours in my first gig at taurus as well, but like that, i just literally physically could not do now.

I could not do it now, absolutely not.

I've tried to do it like years.

It doesn't work.

No, it is.

This is we're talking.

I'm 20s yeah, 21.

Yeah, 2021.

Um, I'm 21 years old, so fine body can take it.

And so it was, was waking up in the morning.

Um, when my partner would go to work, cause now I would wake up in the morning and I would start my day and I would work all the way until they got home and I would make them dinner.

Cause I'm a home look after the house as well.

I make them dinner.

We eat together.

I go back to work and I continue all the way way, all the way into the early hours of the morning again.

And I go to bed around about the time. when the sun is coming up, when I hear the birds.

And that happened for seven days a week, as I say, five months.

That was really bad on my body.

I remember starting work full time, then thinking right, take a breath now because you've made it and work can begin.

You don't need to work like that.

It was kind of a bit naive, but no.

I didn't need to work seven days a week.

You're saying something when you enter the AAA games industry and you're like, finally a chance to relax.

Yeah.

But that's the hardest thing ever.

And that was insane.

Yeah.

Right.

Um well, look as you.

As you said, we don't recommend it, but it is.

You know, it is quite, quite amazing what you know, some of us are able to achieve at that young age.

And when there's, you know, when you have a goal and a bit of determination, a ton of grit, and you know generations of Irish men who've, like you know, broken their backs before you know.

Um, so good on you.

All right.

So you're at Rocksteady.

Yeah, no, of course not.

Um, you're at Rocksteady?

Um, take us through, because that's not obviously um, Have you been at Rocksteady right up until Void?

Well, it was – so Rocksteady, I was an environment artist.

So I started there as a junior and worked my way up.

And then there was a point, a couple of years in, where I actually wanted to move into the design department.

The level design team didn't exist at Rocksteady.

It's just like a small design team that they had where the environment artists did a lot of what was like level blockouts, basically.

Your designers did some of it, but they weren't.

The designers weren't trained in that way, except one or two.

And I really was like hand in glove with their designers.

I wanted to do what they were doing and learn more about what they were doing.

So, yeah, I wanted to scratch the itch.

So what I did was I took a separate course while I was in full time work to learn a little bit more about it.

I had mentors also guided me through what was like design, frankly.

And so, yeah, from there on, I wanted to make the move.

And without getting into too much specifics, there was not a design opportunity at that company.

So what I did was I had built myself another portfolio.

I had an environment art portfolio.

I've now built myself sort of a design portfolio off of my own back while in full-time work.

And I then, I just jumped.

I went to another company.

I worked for a place called End Dreams, which is in Farnborough, the UK.

They make VR titles for the PlayStation.

Right, okay.

So I worked there with a really great team, was there for a few months.

And then I got an email and I got a couple of messages all in one day, maybe about 15 or something messages from all friends of mine at Rocksteady.

Because they all knew I only left because there wasn't a design opportunity for us.

If there was, I would have probably much been given an opportunity and maybe they would have helped me through it.

But I was told, wait for the project to come to its close.

We need you in that chair, in the environment art chair.

Then we can maybe move you across, make that lateral move.

But a designer had left.

So now there's a vacancy.

And so one guy leaves, which is a complete surprise to all of them.

Sean, Sean, quick.

This guy's left.

Maybe there's something for you.

They followed that signal, so to speak, right?

Basically, yep.

But no, well, I was back there again.

I worked there for another couple of years, this time in the design team.

So it was there long enough to see a couple of delays from the project.

The James Franco meme comes to mind first time when other people go, oh my God, another delay.

You're like, yeah, first time.

Because we'd seen that project for a few years.

And then yeah, from there to uh to voice.

So they were looking for uh, someone with experience uh, working in some of the teams that i've worked in, bring some of that experience to the team and help guide what was then some of the designers that we had.

We had a very, very small, in fact, i mean mark was one, two designers at the time right so uh, all of which worked underneath the uh, the art director here mark, We were just building a design team.

And so that's what I've been doing at void now for the better part of what the last two something years, which is uh from scratch.

We now went from uh, pretty much just two designers, as I say.

So then three, we shipped that, uh, 2023 1.0 release of ready or not with that design team.

That was a lot of work there already that was done, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

And then, since we've built and padded out that team with a lot more experience we've got game designers, we've got level designers and it's gone to at least about three times its size now, with some real experience backs behind it too.

So we've helped build that team and that's where i think we've gone from strength to strength and we've made some of our newer dlc and then finally, our console release.

So yeah yeah huge, i'm playing on xbox.

Yeah awesome, i um it's.

It's something that i've enjoyed watching from afar as well is not just obviously, like the success of the game and the.

You know the way that the game has grown and you know um, what's the word like expanded, and you know become more and more refined, and you know and honed in on your vision.

You know from day one, but also how you've gone from this you know very small sort of collection of people coming together to make this thing to this.

You know quite a, quite an interesting organization that has, like you know that's been implementing a bunch of structure and everything is is just really quite amazing to see like, how it's kind of formed up and still adhering to many of those principles like being fully remote and all that stuff.

You know flat hierarchy to a degree and not everything.

So keen to get into that, chat more about that.

Congrats on everything that you've built so far on the design team.

Very interesting.

Uh Mark, tell us about how you cause.

I know you've got a couple other stops along your path before you landed at Void.

Talk to us about those days, get us up to the point where you joined the gang.

Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely.

So yeah, so where we left off, I was at Rocksteady very much like Sean working on the Suicide Squad.

And, you know, I'd been there for a couple of years at that point.

I'd been in the industry for quite a few years at that point.

And I was like, you know, something's just not quite scratching the same itch like it used to.

Uh, you know, my passion was still there, my drive was still there, but i realized what i kind of wanted to do was maybe try something myself.

So uh, you know, instead of just making someone else's game no matter how amazing of an ip it was or how amazing the team was, or anything like that i just wanted to go and basically stretch my wings in a different kind of uh, dynamic of the games industry.

So I left Rocksteady and I teamed up with a very, very small dev team called Driven Arts.

And I was working fully remorse basically with a team of I think there was four or five, two of which are very, very important key figures because they also now work at Void as well.

In fact, one of them is the founder of Void Interactive.

So that's where I first met the founder.

I was on this game called Days of War. uh, by, uh, by driven arts.

Um, it, it didn't do very well.

Um, but we had like a good Kickstarter.

We basically got enough funding to um fund us uh, all the way through like two years of development.

And whilst I was doing that, I was effectively the only artist.

Uh, so I made all the levels, most of the guns, some of the characters, like it was really a very hands-on, like all the lighting.

If I, if we needed some VFX, I did that kind of stuff.

And I realized like very, very quickly, this is where my bread and butter is, that kind of like um, the more you put in, the more you get out of it, kind of thing.

I was very, very enthusiastic by this project and also working fully remote as well.

And sort of having a bit more flexibility of my time allowed me to go into lecturing as well.

So I was a part-time lecturer at the same university that I graduated from all those years beforehand um, and i really like that because i felt like i was coming back and then giving back to the students, like a little bit of that sort of like um, i'm still learning as i'm going, but here's the mistakes i made, so you don't have to do it, kind of thing, but also, at the same time, do make your own mistakes because you'll learn a lot from it, kind of thing.

Um, and that was like a rewarding thing i've ever done for sure, absolutely not.

Yeah, I completely agree.

It was so I really loved seeing it where you'd be explaining something and you just see the spark in their eyes when they understand it.

It was so fulfilling.

So I did that for two years and we shipped Days of War, basically died on release.

But hey, you know, we made a game.

It's like, it was such a huge success for us personally.

Like we managed to get it from nothing to something, put it out on Steam and it just kind of died.

So at that point I was like, well, what do I want to do?

So I did a little bit of freelance here and there.

And then I was like, well, maybe I'll give AAA another go.

You know, I feel like I've been, you know, outside of it.

I conquered that space a little bit.

Let's go give AAA another go.

So I went to Cloud Imperium for a little while as a senior environment artist.

And I realized, again, that itch wasn't being scratched.

I was like, oh, maybe AAA is not for me.

But also, let's give it a chance.

Maybe it's Cloud Imperium that's a problem.

Maybe I'm just not gelling with the project or the team or anything like that.

So I went to Splash Damage after that as a lead artist.

Yep.

Again, kind of had that something's not quite right.

I love the team.

I love the project.

And I love everything about the space.

But something in me is just not right enthusiastic about it, and it was.

It was then um, our founder sterling got in contact again uh, and he was like hey, mark can remember when we used to work together that was back when he was a character artist uh, and he was like hey man, i was starting a thing you interested.

And i was like yeah, you know what?

Let's, let's give this another go and immediately my enthusiasm for, for everything in the games industry, my passion for creativity and just kind of like being in that small team dynamic.

Because, like when, when i joined void um what, five and a half, nearly six years ago um, we were like 10 people and again back to that same old thing of like i'm doing all the artwork, there's just me on the team um, and anything that needs doing.

So like okay, what did we learn from the first time we did this?

How can we make this better?

Um, and that was where, very much like sean, i started growing the team a little bit uh, you know, getting in certain departments that we needed, like a lighting or vfx, or you know, filling in those gaps And really just taking it all the way up to V1.

Like Sean said beforehand, I think one of the biggest challenges that we faced was the success, because now we're like okay, we've carved out a space for us.

The game has been incredibly successful.

Now there's like expectations and the way that we were operating was so almost like borderline unprofessional because again, time zones are an issue.

We didn't have any structure like we, we weren't operating like a, like a normal team should function in some ways.

That was a big strength at the time because like, it allowed people.

But we realized that hey, if we're going to get serious with this, we need to really get some structure.

We need to get some organization.

We need to treat this properly now.

And I'm really, really proud of the team in terms of how we've managed to adapt and become professionals and be a bit more of a traditional studio in that respect.

It was a journey.

Yeah, it's a big leadership list.

How many people are you now, roundabouts?

So we're about 70-ish, but that's kind of including a little bit of everyone that might not be as forward-facing on the dev side as well.

So, for comparison's sake, we have currently four environment artists, including myself, three character artists, one lighter and yeah, that's kind of most of the art department.

Two concept artists as well.

Yeah, you know you're really getting to scope and scale when, like you have people in such specialized roles like lighting as well as just like their only job, right?

Or when you can have multiple technical artists and wonderful things like that happen.

We were at log at its peak was around 75 folks or whatever.

And there's something really interesting that happens at that scale.

Once you get Beyond, like the 50 mark, which is, you're a lot of the kind of I use the term loosely, but like you what you would call the executives of the company, then are becoming, or people in those senior leadership roles becoming leads of leads.

And that is a completely different style of leadership than if you're just like, you know, the lead.

I don't know lead artist on something and you've got like two people or three people that report to you in this smaller structure or whatever.

When you're actually having people that report to you, that are having people report to them.

It's a completely different ballgame.

And that whole leadership journey almost resets and you're kind of specking down a different tree.

And so hats off to anyone that's kind of embarks on that from going from that small scale.

You guys have the privilege of being like a single game studio.

Obviously, the other thing that's tricky for a lot of indie studios at scale is going to multiple games.

I'm not recommending that at all.

You're obviously onto a good thing, but like being able to focus on that one game but still having you know to implement this structure and everything.

Because, as you say, I'm keen to hear a bit.

You know about this Sean, because we were just talking about the way in which you can just throw yourself at something, right?

The strengths of remote can also be its weaknesses, right?

Like we've known it through.

You know everyone has fought to go remote a number of years ago, obviously with a great pandemic.

And one of the first things we noticed was like our team checking in things at like 2 am or whatever and people coming and going.

And you kind of need to actually implement things that you would have from the structure of being in a space anyway, to make sure that you've got checks and balances for looking after people.

How has your studio been able to?

I mean, you've got, like you said, you're 70-ish people all working fully remotely, right?

Sean, how do you go about managing your design team and making sure that people are, you know, looking after themselves and not falling into the follies of younger Sean, you know, in the way that he might work?

Yeah, there's a couple of places where I've been previously, like I've mentioned, where we had worked remotely, and there's a couple of like strategies or methods and practices that they had there which I just borrowed what worked and tried to incorporate that here.

So a couple of examples. because we are all over the planet.

One was even just like a kind of drop-in that you could run regularly through the day.

So by a drop-in?

It's not.

You must be here and it is a sit-down meeting and neither of us are going to work.

We're going to talk for 30 minutes.

It's we're going to sit down while we're working, and just we're going to hover.

And while we're working, you can chat.

If it was, you've got a problem, you have a bug you need to fix or you're not quite sure what the solution was.

Worked on that same problem before.

Well, we're in the drop-in.

Take me through it, you know, and it might also just be how was your weekend?

And that really does cover where it's.

It tries to emulate what would be a office environment, Because that would be the same conversation you'd be having with your colleagues when they are, you know, shoulder to shoulder and desk next to desk.

So we'd have that regularly.

That would be one, but there was a couple of others too.

So, even if it was just simply and it is nothing really to do work, but just as an example, birthdays if it's someone's birthday, you're calling that out and we're going to celebrate it together.

Like, so again, you don't feel like you just a desk. in an office on your own and you're seen.

So, but there were many other practices at work that we would have from, uh yeah, the formal or to the informal, because it was all necessary.

Cause.

Certainly what most people we find in our team miss something in the design team misses is company.

Frankly um, we've got other solutions to how people can communicate better, you know, or asynchronous meetings.

You hear this word now all the time, but it's the, you know, basically you are on your own 24 seven.

No, you got to find some remedy to that.

And so we find ways to do so.

This episode is brought to you by Excel Byte.

If you're developing an online game, you already know.

Building your own backend from scratch can take months or even years and eat up a huge chunk of your budget.

That's where Excel Byte comes in.

Their platform lets you deploy automatically scalable, fully customizable backend services like cross-platform accounts matchmaking, in-game stores and more, in just hours.

As a listener, you can use Excel Byte completely free during development.

Just click the link in the show notes or head to accelbyte.io slash promo to get started.

Mark, something interesting as well.

Actually, you know what?

Let's pause it right here for a moment, because I could just.

You know, I've got a ton of topics that I could just run off from on here.

So let's actually stop, because this is the point in the podcast where I remember those listeners who may be game developers, games executives or hobbyists that love the podcast, that haven't played every game under the sun, even ones as successful as yours.

So Mark, maybe you can tell us here or our listeners, give us the elevator pitch for what Ready or Not actually is for folks who may not know what we've been talking about or the game that we've been referencing, never heard of it before.

Lay it out for them.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So, Ready or Not, is a quintessential tactical shooter where you take the role of a SWAT officer in our version of a city on the West Coast similar to Los Angeles.

Ours is Oswinos.

And it is up to you in some of the missions to basically go in, assess the situation, kick doors down, arrest bad guys, try not to get shot in the process.

And really, the aim of the game is to not shoot people.

You are a law enforcement officer at the end of the day in some of the worst situations imaginable.

And you've got to be incredibly tactical and really very patient with how you play this game.

If you're just running into rooms, Guns blazing.

It's not going to be good for you.

It's not going to be good for the game.

It's not going to be good for anyone.

So really, this is the thinking man's shooter.

Yeah, love it.

And I will tell you as well it took me about six missions to realize that I probably shouldn't be shooting everyone.

Like I knew it was an option and I knew that, but then, when I was finally the therapist said, intervened for like the 12th time on, like my crew and like sidelined them for extreme stress.

I was like maybe I should switch out to some less than lethal ammunition and see see what I can get out of compliance from some perps.

Uh, so yeah, it really, it really is.

And I mean, it really follows in the footsteps.

So I'm keen to hear about this and dive into it, because it is the million dollar question for so many folks who ask.

Um, It really does follow in the footsteps of some giants like the SWAT series.

I wasn't big on SWAT 4.

I mean, like I didn't spend a lot of time with SWAT 4.

It ruled, but I didn't spend a lot of time with it.

But I played the early ones, especially SWAT 2 to death.

And then obviously, the Rainbow Six Vegas series is just like.

I actually hate Siege, Rainbow Six Siege only because Rainbow Six Siege means that there will not be a Rainbow Six Vegas again.

As soon as the success of that happened, I was like, okay, cat's out of the bag now.

Well, they're not going back to Vegas for us.

So thank you for picking up that baton there.

Talk to me a little bit about how much those predecessors actually influenced the design.

Maybe we'll start with you, Sean, because obviously you're coming on and designing the game.

There's obviously been a ton of work there done already, but leading up to the V1.0 and everything.

Talk to me about how much those predecessors strong what other people would see as strong influences actually are influences, or how much you're trying to carve out your own space.

Yeah sure, because you're right to name a few.

You'd even go so far as to bring in a couple of other genres, because this is a uh mark was perfectly right and all the things he'd mentioned there.

Um, but it's, it's a cooperative experience as well, so you've got other things you can pull in from other areas there.

You've also got um, there is This kind of cosplay, this Millicent cosplay that people of our community also enjoy, where they want to play a role.

So I get to not just look the part, I get to also play the part.

So you get people coming in who are, you know if it's veterans who just want to enact almost that fantasy.

Um, that might be the gun play.

It could also be the actual squad formation exactly what you got to tell them all and drill drill, drill that same.

You know procedure and so on.

Or some people could just go into it.

Where are you?

Well, Oh no, I've shot you.

Uh, everybody has a very different experience from one end to the other.

Um, so yeah.

As for its influences, of course, video games, for sure, there's a bunch.

You've known a few.

I would call even a couple of titles in the Milisim space as well, because of that gunplay, which is also really important.

So you have old school things from like even Operation Flashpoint.

You've got Tarkov finds its way in there too.

But not necessarily.

Yeah.

Yeah, especially because the game is difficult, is one component of it.

So yeah, really going at its roots of what is a shooter, and rather poignantly so but the actual environments, the stories that you're seeing that yeah, you're calling back to titles like your old SWAT, and we try to push that further and try to really examine what um stories we can tell, what situations we can put you in that are very much based in the real.

So there's a lot of direct influence from our world uh, in terms of what stories we're putting you through, the actual uh the.

The interesting bit that i find, especially in our department is, and was for for a good time and still is, the level design space and how you can take those real uh spaces and actually make them enjoyable.

So yeah, i could build you a hospital, but how fun would it be from walking from one wing to another, floor by floor up up up, all the way.

We make that fun and enjoyable, or if it was even a camper, so on.

So, trying to take the real and make it interesting in a game setting, and so for ours it there's, of course, some challenges, but thankfully, a lot of ours focuses on doors, kicking down doors, stacking up on doors, as you said at the top of the call.

So we've kind of got our metric there, thankfully.

And you'll find, because of that though, the age old kick down the door and who's the first through the room, like how many times you might have played that in a multiplayer environment.

You have a bunch of randoms and the first person through the door gets bumped into by the second.

Oh no, you first, oh no.

So because it's you've missed that crucial moment.

You've got to establish that order.

You've got to plan who's in the door.

First you mark's in, because he's got the shield, then i'm right behind him with the ar.

I've got the beanbag shotgun behind me, flashbang first, then you're in.

All of that's really, really important.

So we have also then, when i say about the real, talks about level design, but in terms of um, the experience we're trying to craft, We listen very much, very closely to a lot of consultants.

We have people who are in the forces themselves, whether it's special forces, people who are in SWAT units, who are SWAT commanders.

And we have a channel in Slack and we used to be in our socials as well that we would engage with regularly to get their perspective.

So all of that directly influences what we make.

And building upon that as well if you don't mind for a second as well, because this is where me and Sean work very, very closely together is obviously from the design side.

Everything that Sean has said super, super critical and very, very informative to the player.

What I then do after that is I take everything that Sean's built up in that kind of space, and that's where we start going right.

What do we want the player to feel in this moment?

And Sean mentioned a good example there of stacking up on the door.

And you know, after talking with all the SWAT officers and you know, looking at all the references like Heat is like a real big experience.

Sorry, an influence to us, the movie Heat, sorry.

And just that tense, that kind of like right, you're on a door, okay guys, are we ready?

And you can almost like feel the tension in the airs, you know light flickering or whatever the case would be, and and, like sean said, we take that real and we add 20, 30 of like our ready or not spice on top of it to really build up that kind of like tense atmospheres.

All right, we're ready guys, okay.

And then it could either go amazingly or it could go horribly wrong, and it's it's, it's that split second, just as you're about to breach the door of.

What I really want to make the player feel is just that tense unsettling, what's going to happen, sort of thing.

I remember when I first got into the game, like there are some games like Tarkov or KCD2 or you know these games that are a little bit more punishing or hardcore that I put yours into in some ways.

Where I will go, this is my personal opinion, this is my own personal categorization of games and I will go and Google before I or search on YouTube before I start playing, just things to know.

I don't want to catch any spoilers, but I don't want to spend the first four hours learning shit that someone could have told me, like how to check your ammo in Tarkov or something right.

And one of the first comments or the top comment on one of these Reddit threads I think it was about this was someone just said fear every door.

And...

I was like, it's so accurate.

Yeah, it's exactly how I feel playing this game, because I'll get a little bit ahead of myself and I'll just walk straight into a shotgun when I open a door.

I'll get confident that there's not actually anyone in there on the second or third run of this level, because I haven't been in there before.

And it just really has taught me, like time and time again, to slow down, to utilize all of the tools in my arsenal and amongst my team to really ensure that I'm going about this the right way.

Yeah, so much of what we do is to really oh sorry Sean, go on.

I was going to say to that too.

You have not just the watch.

Every door is in.

Every door could hide a threat, be it there's a guy with a gun behind the door, but even when you find you know if it is Person, you've got a suspect or a civilian question.

Are you gonna hurt me and not all the time?

Is that person gonna be carrying a gun in their hands like this?

It might very well be in their back pocket.

You can't see.

So when you get close to them, They've got their hands up, as if to say I'm no fret, I'm no fret, and then quick, they might try to switch one up on you.

So I

That's the same experience that you'll have as a police officer or even a SWAT officer in these kinds of environments.

In those situations, they're not always going to present themselves as a threat nearly immediately.

It's very easy to deal with that threat.

It's much harder to work out the room when everybody's surrendered, but there's guns on the floor.

And when you turn your back, they might pick up that gun and try to escape.

So those moments, that ambiguity is not just then, about reading your environments, reading the characters in the scene too, and trying to study their behavior and see what they're going to do.

Definitely and it's my job at that point as well that you know you're moving through these spaces and really what I already wanted to do at that point is to create an environment in which you're already on edge, like you're moving through these spaces and you feel a little bit tense and you feel a little bit, you know, like something could happen at any moment.

So you're already a little bit twitchy and then something like that happens.

And that's really the kind of like the quintessential experience of Ready or Not is just those split second decisions that you as a player have to make.

What is it like?

Let's just keep following this thread because i really like this idea of it's something.

I was speaking to nikita you know one of the creators of tarkov just recently and he was talking about surprise being a big element in his design, and there really is this genuine like tension that you're talking about.

Right, it's there.

Everyone who's played ready or not knows what you're talking about.

You've absolutely achieved what you're going for here, but like What is it that you think actually builds that?

And you've spoken a little bit about it now.

But do you have kind of like a codified recipe amongst the team of like the kind of level or the kind of situation or the kind of scenario or ingredients that can actually deliver?

You're already, both of you are nodding.

So like yeah Sean, like what is it that you think enables you to manufacture this tension across levels, like so successfully going from room to room?

So it then depends first on what kind of level you're trying to make, because you could make it so that it is trying to tell a story first and foremost.

That story might not require a lot of that ambiguity, or if you might still feel that same level of tension, but in a very different way.

So we have a level called Edges of the Earth.

Internally, we have called Beachfront.

It's just a residential house in the suburbs, and it's a family.

It's just two parents whose children basically, are trying to build little guns using 3D printers and are trying to sell them to make a little bit of money to help their mom who is very frail.

Now that situation is difficult, but it's not the same level of difficulty as it would be, for example, a club shooting, which is a terrorist-level event.

But tension will be then played out in a different way is my point.

So one might not require that level of difficulty.

And the complexity could be different, be it how the level is arranged or what challenges or barriers sort of blockers are presented in front of you.

Might look or can you be communicated differently.

So that's one.

Certainly this, the first point is depends really on the context and what we're trying to do, and because each of these missions are all unique and there's a story to each mission.

That really is what we'll talk about uh, when we are trying to build out a new experience, so what in this dlc, what in these levels are we trying to do?

So this time it's an active shooter okay, but is there a story?

No, actually we want it to be this experience first.

So it could be It might take a narrative bend first of all, or a gameplay bend.

It could be an artist.

It could be that the art director here might say I really wanted this to look this way and we'll build from there.

We've tried different ways of working throughout.

So every level has a different starting point.

But then that recipe or a question about the recipe.

So from there on, what do we do?

So everything would have its own use or function.

So you have doors which present themselves, we would say thresholds of doors and windows.

They're always regarded as threats.

So doors are always something that I can walk through or engage with in the same way for every door.

Windows can be very different.

You can present doors differently as well.

Some that are always open, some that are always closed, double doors, single doors.

Um, you know color corridors as well, how you might have been corner fed rooms, corner fed corridors.

All of these have their own use for creating and constructing ambiguity.

What's on the other side of this door.

If I can see it.

From the point where I'm standing in that threshold I can see every corner of the room.

The complexity of that room is pretty much near to zero.

It's very easy.

I can see there is nobody in the room, but if I have a corner fed door on that same room.

I can't see every corner.

Maybe there are more than four walls.

Maybe there is a very big room, lots of obscuring pieces in there.

The complexity goes up, the difficulty goes up.

So we play with that almost like an equation, with level design and the artists, both of us working together, making sure that if we're intentionally building difficulty, it is because we're intentionally doing so.

Not because it is, oh, forgot about that.

Like, no, there's a real solid reason why we built the room in this way.

And also what it needs to include.

But we also don't want to step on anybody's toes if, like I said, the art director or also the artist want to create something visually unique.

So that's where, really early in the process, you have level designers artists, working pretty much like that together.

I hope that goes some way to answer your question.

We can go into it where it goes into some gameplay mechanics particularly, but that's certainly where it would be with level design.

It definitely does.

I was really.

You kind of answered the question beautifully, because I was really thinking about just like from the inception of an idea or of a scenario or of a room or of a level.

So you answered it perfectly.

Mark, you mentioned something that I've also heard you say before in some interviews that I've read of yours and everything, which is this notion of, like the void interactive, 20 to 30 of spice on top of things, right.

I even you mentioned at one point, you know, talking about the Dark Waters DLC, which is, you know, is obviously out there for folks to engage with.

But like the, these notions of like, you have these realistic you're moving onto these ships, but ships have these tiny little spaces that how do you have like these characters moving through them and how do you utilize them in a gameplay sense?

But then there's this other whole element that Sean spoke about too, which is this milsim realism, right?

So I'm just kind of tapping you now to talk to us a little bit as generally as you want about realism in the game and like one sort of like your responsibility as developers to deliver on a particular fantasy or role play, whether it be the Milsim stuff or the grittiness and the you know the sort of horrific offense that some of these you know first.

Well, maybe not first.

I don't think that's what people call first responders.

They're kind of like second responders almost as you call them in.

I don't know.

But anyway, you know, like what teams or something might encounter.

But then even just like the technical things that are interesting, in regards to when you've got to issue realism for like, to just have a good playable space on a boat, you know, if you want to have some SWAT team roll through there in a video game, how do you and your train your team kind of treat realism through the void interactive, ready or not, lens?

Yeah, i mean you nail on the head there.

I mean, there's definitely some challenges when it comes to and here's the thing, i think every game kind of suffers from this a little bit as well of that kind of um, transposing design mechanics into effectively realistic art.

Like, like you mentioned, bots are, generally speaking, really really difficult because of like how um, The stairs are narrow and curved and all that kind of stuff.

But if we did it one-to-one like a real board, quite frankly, you wouldn't have an enjoyable play experience.

So there's definitely some liberties that we have to take from the art side to try and make sure that the design works exactly how it should.

Because at the end of the day, it's a game.

It's got to function like a game.

Art really is there to support that.

Now, does that mean it's less important?

Absolutely not really.

We're all about the feels, we're all about that mood and, you know, tense atmosphere that we're trying to effectively almost like um gosh, how do you, how do i even start describing this?

Um it's, it's layers on top, so it's like we're there to almost like distract you from the game side of it.

So you, you should kind of like stop seeing the game mechanics and we're there for, like you know where, the spice that goes on top of it, to give you that atmosphere, to give you that tension, to give you those kind of emotional responses.

And just to kind of pull it back to the kind of the realism side of things.

So realism comes in so many different forms.

And I think You know one of the big factors as to why we get described so often like a horror game even though we are attacked at the shooter, we definitely fall into that horror category.

And I think it is because we deal with so much that is just real.

It is just close to home.

We all have loved ones.

We all have, you know, people we care about and imagining some of the scenarios that we have purposely crafted in, ready or not, and putting the player in those experiences.

It is genuinely quite harrowing um, and it is something that we never, ever wanted to glorify.

That was never the goal um, and it still isn't by any means like we are not glorification of this kind of stuff, but we want to shine a light onto these horrible things that happen in the world day in and day out and yeah i, i think it's just like We deal with some really horrible stuff.

And it's... Yeah.

Sorry, Sean, do you want to build on that?

I'm kind of like struggling forwards here a little bit.

You mean on the realism side?

I mean, the scenario is you're right.

Yeah.

The horror aspect too.

But it's like where you mentioned about Tarkov.

There too Trent, you say about that surprise.

We have also ambiguity in that sense too.

So I keep returning to that word too, because we think of it.

The best description I had then of tension I've heard was from Tarantino talking about a scene from like Inglourious Basterds.

I think he talks about it like taffy.

So that's pulling, pulling, pulling the experience apart.

And to the point where he can't pull it anymore and he might go maybe another 10% to test it.

And then when it snaps, there needs to be a big explosion.

And like a Tarantino film, there's gore.

There's also relief from the audience.

Oh, we did it.

We're here now.

So that also can be described like if it would be for a thriller, it could be described like horror.

So I think we four was like really not into either of those categories too.

We do tell those stories which really pull on that tension for the story, but also in the experience.

Like you described earlier Trent, from when you're stacking up on a door, not sure what's on the other side of it, even if it was in a very you know, everything's white, all gray scale boxed in you still feel tension.

That's the same feeling.

It's because well, what's on the other side?

I don't know.

I need to answer that question.

But let's first stack up, plan you, slow down the experience, the way you talk might now be very structured.

You're planning everything out to the death and then, just like the old adage, the plan might be perfect but it fails as soon as it meets the enemy.

And then whether or not you can execute, and that big bang bang bang go go go, that's the rush moment, those really, really slow moments and those nice rises in action and that come right back down again.

Hopefully, through the experience, you have a nice flow, aided by the level design, aided by your AI, everything else, just sort of building you up, up slowly, down again slowly, until you get to the very end of these missions.

You might have that Oh, I've heard you take a big deep breath and then it can just relieve itself.

How did you do?

So we do that throughout and we would try to plan that to answer your original question as well.

Try to plan that, but it needs to pay quite close attention to the nature and the context of the situation too.

Yeah, it's really interesting how some things that occur in real life, like whether they be systems or jobs or events or activities or pastimes, can lend themselves just naturally to like really great game loops.

And I think, or even like tension and pacing loops.

And I think this the experience of being, you know, in a SWAT team and stacking up on a door, like you're saying Sean, and the pacing that comes with that, and then clearing the room and bagging the evidence and going to the next one just has a really natural fantastic like pacing chart or loop to it.

That like really translates well into a gameplay loop.

But i think it doesn't.

It's not going to do that on its own.

I think your team has done really well to actually bring out the elements of that that really bring it to the surface and really make it feel like the best version of that that it can be in an interactive sense.

So what i'm interested in knowing now is and feel free either of you to dive in on this one It's clear from Ready or Not to obviously Sterling and some of the crew that were on earlier.

Like I mean the first trailer that came out and blew up.

It's very clear from that point that there was a clear vision for this game, that there is a clear kind of tone, and not message is the wrong word, but like vision.

It's just the easiest way to put it, right?

Tone and vision that is very creatively sincere on this game.

And it's carried through to playing it now, right?

Like you really get that.

What are some of the things that, didn't make the cut do you have any stories of stuff that kind of feels like it might have been you know there's the classic things that i go to in a game like a mini map obviously that wouldn't work for you guys because it pulls it pulls sucks out all that ambiguity of who's in the next room or whatever Terrible example, but do you have any things that kind of were in the game for a while or that you were on paper or you wanted to try your cut that kind of detracted from that vision or that experience that you were going for once you got them in there and were playing?

Maybe even had some feedback from crew in the early stages or early access?

Yeah, I mean, we've definitely cut a whole bunch of stuff.

And here's the thing.

I don't... I personally, and I think we collectively as a team can agree on this as well.

The things that we did cut.

It wasn't because it you know, put it this way we made the decision to cut it because it made the game better at the end of the day.

Um, so i, you know, just thinking off the top of my head uh, some of the first levels that we made that were in the early access builds, like the old hotel level, the old farm level uh, the old port level don't get me wrong like they were amazing um, as they were back in the day.

But we, we evolved, we got better as a studio.

We grew as a studio and we got better.

We upped the quality of everything that we were doing.

Just the old maps were just not up to the standard that we were happy with.

We were no longer proud of them.

It created a slightly different dynamic, a little different of a game than we envisioned.

But they were super critical and super important building blocks for us to get to where we are now learning from our mistakes, which I think is super critical and super important for every game to do.

And it's quite frankly just not uncommon that the first kind of you know, maybe your development or however long your timeframe is, you're always going to throw away the first things you kind of do.

Cause that is really the the iterative process of learning what you want.

Learning what doesn't work is is vitally as important as learning what does work in a lot of cases as well.

So I wouldn't say that it was like a detriment by any means, us removing that kind of stuff.

I think, if anything, the decisions that we made to either cut content or change content, or however you know, the change happens um, I think we did it very, very specifically to get a better product out of it.

Yeah, of course.

Editorial is one of the most important processes, right?

Exactly.

And I'd add to that as well.

Sorry if to say this is where I feel some of my experience really helped the team.

And while also a lot of other people who have come in from a similar sort of background as myself is, we had lots of people who were really, really talented and were really creative and they could push the experience in so many different directions.

And while also there was not really a mechanism or a good structure for us to recognize what was not working faster, because there was some aspect of it where it was either some fear of failure or even fear of success that we talked about earlier.

But like port as an example, as talking about level design, that maybe went for about seven to eight iterations of port, the level port, and that took months and months and months.

On some of them it might have even gone from so far as about six to eight months.

That's in my view.

It's a waste of time, because it just means we could have got there much, much sooner had we been able to recognize what worked and what didn't work earlier.

So that's why I feel again, some of us were brought to the team that experience.

Yes, it might be that we come from teams that that worked in AAA or otherwise.

But a lot of our team here at Void, some of them come from modding backgrounds.

They have no idea really about that same process.

So we've had to share with one another and find something that works for all of us, so that we can find what works faster and then get rid of stuff that doesn't work sooner.

But also to Mark's point yeah, cutting some things has been important, not just because it made the experience better, and in some cases we've had to make cuts because we just can't support it in terms of development costs, and I would say the very easy example would be for folks that played early access and the version of a game that you wouldn't see now, Trent is.

We had all of the missions across the game.

This is prior to 1.0.

All of them you could choose from a list of game modes.

You can choose.

I want to do active shooter, I want to do barricaded suspects or I want to do bomb threat etc.

Now, we moved away from that when we got to 1.0 for many reasons.

It meant we couldn't fully commit to a certain story.

We couldn't really craft and make sure that that one experience, that one game mode, was at the quality that we needed it um, and if we wanted to make every single mission adaptable across four different game modes, there was a lot of time, energy we needed to spend doing that and, at that point, probably had about six to eight months to do so and, like i said remember, that team was about 40 people back then, we had three designers.

It's not happening.

So we had to make a decision.

If we want to do this, which we want to do, but not now if we're going to be able to commit to this, it means no, we're gonna have to make sure that we get the right quality of that one level with that one game mode ready for 10.

So that's what we did.

We had to make that decision to you know instead, focus which missions will be using what game mode um, so that would, and it did, make for a better version of that game, still with all that emergent gameplay um, but catered and much more focused.

Yeah wow yeah, it's mustn't have been a mustn't have been an easy conversation to have some of these decisions.

Like that's a huge one.

I mean, when I asked this question, I wasn't expecting anything that big.

That's, that's like a big sweeping change.

How obvious was the?

Was it just kind of like ones and zeros, very obvious, like napkin math could sort of lay it out that this wasn't going to be a possibility.

Or did it take quite a bit of like back and forth, like checking, like whether you know, can we make it work?

Can we not? know it pretty early on simply you've got a game mode and to be fair as well and if i really would now heavily look at what these gamers are talking about you have barricaded suspects which is predominantly the one we use all the time and you've got active shooter we see a lot of those examples too and you've got bomb threat too uh so bomb threat typical it's go find that bomb disarm it active shooter there is a suspect in the scene hunting down civilians stop them So bring the focus to you.

They act very differently, those suspects.

Barricaded Suspects, though, is just our bread and butter.

There was a hostage rescue game mode and frankly, it was indistinguishable from Barricaded Suspects.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah.

So fourth, basically, it's like, come on, we can condense that.

Let's just take some things that worked there, pull it over to Barricaded Suspects.

So that one gets moved.

Then you've got what was Raid, and that's pretty much heavy investment on suspects and very few civilians.

And it is just guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.

And then again we took some of the feeling of well, I know what players were looking for in that experience.

We tried to take that into some missions.

So it felt like you were in a raid.

Literally, you've got more suspects to deal with.

So we've done that across so many missions.

And then we've even done that in a more recent DLC.

Kind of brought that back.

You've got like 20 plus suspects and one civilian for like a raid game mode.

But those two, that's really the two I'm talking about.

So it's not like we ripped entire experiences out of the game, which were like hugely fundamental.

We just focused them.

So you've got pulling raid and what was hostage, rescue and those lessons and what worked into the others.

So that now we've got a real focus on the three.

So that was hard for sure.

It meant that we're going to just have to make a compromise, but it did mean that the quality went up.

So we've got really some really strong um, you know feature work on those free game modes.

So our active shooters were.

We're pretty happy with you know.

The same again for our barricaded suspects.

Yeah, i heard um, i heard sterling say in an interview recently that you know, like you may not be an indie size company anymore, but there's still the realities of like we can't do this thing because if we have a console launch coming up and that person needs to go on holidays and like there still is, it's still human people making a video game.

You only have a certain amount of bandwidth.

Even with 70 people and, however many you know, tens of millions of dollars in the bank account, you just can't make things happen, which kind of is a perfect segue into my next curiosity here, Mark.

Um, You've been around at the company for what, almost six years or something now.

You've seen it grow from 10 people to 70 plus.

You also have been there prior to even the early access release.

So you've also seen the sharp spike in cash rolling into the company and everything as well.

How does a company kind of keep its head?

And I mean we even have this.

A potential in any other scenario could be a clashing of cultures of, like the indie scrappy modding crew who started this thing off coming together and then the AAA invaders like you and Sean, you know, coming in wanting to like chuck process on everything.

Tell me how...

You do keep the spirit of the company and do make those decisions about what's right for your culture and what's right for the production of the company and for maturing as a studio and you know any challenges that you've come through or like little bolts of wisdom that you've seen Void Interactive go through.

Absolutely, and what a fantastic question that is as well, if I must say.

And you are absolutely bang on right.

It has been a real challenge.

Thinking back of where we were when we first started.

It was very much that grassroots.

If we make it, let's just make a great game.

We didn't care about money.

We didn't care about profit.

We never set out doing this with the idea of being as successful as we are in mind.

And that's why I mentioned earlier that I think really, the success of the game was a real honestly, our biggest challenge that we had.

Because like you said, it had to change.

Now, has that changed us as developers in terms of how we approach making this?

Yes, but that's more like the logistics around this rather than the mentality of who we are and how we work together and what our drive and what our goal is.

Because I think we've always had this mentality of Small team just making a really well-crafted, focused experience.

And that really is our kind of bread and butter.

We never wanted to grow into a 500, 600-man studio and take down Battlefield or anything like that.

That's not our goal.

And it's just not what we want.

We want to make, essentially, the games that we wanted to play.

That was really the origin of what Ready or Not came from was hey, no one's making these games.

We love vegas and swart and all these other games that you mentioned.

No one's making them.

Well hell, we might as well do it ourselves.

Then, and you know it was it.

It really came from that passion of certain individuals, like you said, from the modding community, and you know people who just wanted to make the game.

Now, with that, of course, with all the passion in the world, tends to come a lack of structure.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did this?

Oh yeah, wouldn't it be cool if we did that as well?

And before you know it you've got a list as long as your arm and no one's planned anything, no one's scoped anything.

People are throwing stuff in that's causing breakages and conflicting with this and no one's talking, and things like that.

So It took a certain amount of effort from sort of like the higher leadership team, like myself and Sean and other people, to really corral everything in, to make it a bit more focused.

We never wanted to crush the passion from the people.

Absolutely not.

It's more about, right, what can we do and how is it achievable?

And then focusing it.

So, instead of trying to do everything, bringing it down into a much more contained thing again.

I love how passionate our team is, but it really does every now and then.

Um, it's hard to say no sometimes because everyone's just like oh, it would be so cool if we did this and it's like, i know, but we can't.

Um, and you know, we've been making this for going on seven years effectively.

A lot of people maybe, who aren't necessarily on the game dev side facing things, a lot of people don't realize that when you've accumulated sort of like seven years of tech debt, it's really hard to just like start like make like, like you're just piling bricks on top of bricks and bricks and bricks and bricks.

So it's, it's a challenge.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

Yeah, we've got quite the design philosophy as well.

That, i think, really helps to tackle some of that too.

Um, and i mean though, when I say that it's inside of our department, because we find the game designers.

We've got level designers we have they're not just creatively very, you know, they're looking for all sorts of ways to push the boundaries of the experience, but also technically they're very adept to, but they also need to be really good communicators and need to understand a lot of things that a lot of our project managers will also be doing.

So, from our producers myself.

They understand the cost of some of these things.

So if they have a really good idea, the philosophy follows that really not just be able to come up with the idea, but you can see it through to delivery.

And that doesn't mean that you just sit there, code it for two hours and go cool, it's done at a prototype level.

You need to understand all of the connecting pieces from all across different departments, who is needed to see it at the quality that we'd be happy with, and i've have that understanding, so be, I would say, all of the designers across that team.

We've made sure that they understand who works with them and what is required of those teams to get them to the finish line.

That really helps, because it means that you're not really you're not dictating, you're just directing.

In that way.

You are saying here okay, we'll point you in this direction, and so trying to help them then along the way getting to that finish line ashore, and this was really helpful for the vision of the project.

But No, that philosophy is very important.

Recruitment as well.

So there's another thing I'd add to your answer would be we really do spend, I'd say, the right amount of time necessary to find the right staff.

So yeah, looking at the AAA, we will take your best.

If they won't value them, we do.

And if you've also got indie teams who are just also wanting to be a little bit more serious about their work in some cases, or also just love the stuff that we do particularly, we'll take you as well.

But I mean a lot of the AAA developers we have.

I mean maybe I'm speaking for us Mark, but I can say this pretty comfortably we're people also that are just jaded of that same industry and we've learned a lot of bad things from that space.

We are not here in this space to take over and to now start to apply what went wrong there.

Here we identified what went wrong.

Maybe it was out of our control then, but it is now something that we can actually rectify here.

We will not repeat those steps, so it is one.

We know what to avoid.

We also know what works.

We'll try to, yeah, to find the path through.

So a lot of team members from AAA, I think would say, yeah, that is a measure of my experience too.

Yeah.

Building on that as well, Sean.

I think honestly one of the biggest core philosophies that we have as a studio is really the trust.

So what I mean by that is we're working all around the world in all different time zones.

We operate in a way where again, thinking back to the AAA industry and how, not always but sometimes it really felt a little you know big brother office cultures in some ways, where maybe you weren't treated like an adult, in certain scenarios, where you know hey, I've got to walk the dog or, you know, I'll take my kids to school.

I'm going to take some time off.

Great, don't even tell me.

Like, as long as you're hitting your deadlines, as long as you're doing the work.

At the end of the day, you're an adult and you want to be here and you're clearly very, very passionate about the game.

So we have so much trust in each other.

And really that is the only way that we've ever been able to do what we've done at Void.

Interactive is just the team of people that we have.

I know that I can trust them to get the job done and it's because they care and it's because they want to be here and they want to make amazing games.

And if there was ever scenarios where we ever felt like we had to chase people up or tell them to do things, it would never work.

And fortunately, that's only ever happened on a few very, very rare occasions.

And, like sean said, we we spend a lot of time in our recruitment process really just trying to find effectively, the right people for us.

Um, you know, talent aside, they have to have that kind of like, um you know, self-driven motivation and, weirdly enough, like sean said, a lot of that comes from just being jaded by the triple industry in some ways, where it's like no no, i want to be here, i want to make amazing games, i'm tired of all of that stuff.

Yeah, just do you know it.

I just came from dice Europe and I can tell you that some of the people I was speaking to there who are signing the checks that pay for these AAA games are also tired of the AAA industry.

You know like it's.

It's a very um expensive and um It can be a very expensive and wasteful endeavor.

And so to bring it back to like my time at Dice Europe, a lot of the conversations were about AA.

There was a couple of talks on AA.

There were some roundtables on AA.

And what is AA?

What does it mean?

What are the hallmarks of AA?

Chris Charler of Xbox led a great roundtable conversation that I was part of on you know kind of.

I forget the title of it, but it was like what are the hallmarks of AA?

Um, and I would say that your game is obviously started off as indie as it gets, but like it's almost like the quintessential AA project.

Now, like you guys are doing hundreds of million in revenue at least a day.

You've got, but you've got a team of seven.

You know like which is the old?

Funnily enough, the old AAA numbers.

Um, it's.

It's quite interesting what you've been able to achieve, and at a level you know, with obviously leveraging tools like Unreal Engine 5 and stuff like that, like what you're able to do with such few people.

And it also seems like you're not a studio that, with all of your success, is now just trying to solve a bunch of problems with cash.

You know, and like you say Mark, scaling up and being this big company, that's not in your interest.

So talk to me a little bit about.

You're talking about recruiting, you're talking about trust.

You're talking about autonomy.

You're talking about believing in your crew and giving them the ability to do great work, having a results-oriented environment.

But what's enabling you as well to kind of Cause this is.

I think there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this podcast who either run game studios or at publishers or fun games or whatever it might be.

Um, that are interested to know, like how are you punching so high above your weight?

Like with such a small amount of spend relatively to you know other games and you know publishers or developers in the shooter genre are there.

How do you focus on this?

Um, or how are you focusing on delivering such great content and such a quality?

Uh, effectively and efficiently.

I think I have my answer.

It might be very different to Mark's.

There's two that come to mind.

One, the term white space, which is certainly one.

Our audience and our community is then a second component of it as well.

But then I think there is the boring bit, which is also the third.

We could explore any of these subjects, which is almost like that equation.

Mark, do you remember we had we'd look to some of our earlier levels, and certainly at the time where I joined, looking at right?

Here's why we feel it works.

Some of our data suggests and so on.

What we could do then going ahead, that would be something as well we could explore.

But yeah, any of those three, I think they're all really important.

There's no single thing here, of course, that's going to be the answer.

But the first would be about that white space.

Now the tactical genre, the first person shooter genre, shooters as a genre hyper saturated, the most saturated genre in the entire industry.

So how is it that this shooter works?

And it's because it's a very specific type of and there was a crowd there I think we can see now that really wanted that experience.

So, listening to that player base, it's maybe some built on nostalgia maybe, but it's improving and it's expanding and it's innovating on what they would have had 20 years ago 15, 10 years ago and trying to deliver that now at this quality.

And doing that from a very early point in development as well, right?

Yeah, exactly so.

We listed out titles when we started and we talked about games that are now some of them like 15 something, plus years old, 20 years old some of them.

You know people who grew up playing those games and they haven't seen them again, so not to enjoy the game in its own way.

But it's a very different game now than what it was you know, some years ago of rainbow six siege.

You know so people who would have looked at that first trailer and gone ah, and got really excited.

And now the game is very different and whether or not that's that same player's cup of tea, it's not that the game is bad or good, it's just that it's not for them.

And so this game occupies that territory that others don't uniquely occupy And it surprised, I think, a lot of people, including ourselves, how many people were in that community and were looking for that type of title.

And then it just builds up on word of mouth, quality is there, so they bring their friends.

Brilliant.

And then it just gets better and better and better.

That's one component of it, for sure.

But Mark, I don't want to take up too much space.

What about yourself?

Do you have any answers there for that question?

Yeah, i mean absolutely like uh, and again, i think you hit a real good point there mentioning the, the fans of the game.

Like really, i don't think we would have ever been able to do what we do without the support of the community, whether that be, you know, even just like the, the moral support cheering us on hey, go on guys, you can do this kind of thing but also the valuable feedback that we get as well.

Like you know, for so long, our qa department was effectively the discord you know people playing it who just wanted to help us out as well, and we're genuinely, eternally grateful for all the support that we've had.

And I'll be the first one to say it.

I think we got incredibly lucky.

And I think we all know this as well that we just happened to be doing the right thing at the right time.

And we had the passion and we had the grit and we had the determination.

But my God, was there an element of luck in there?

And we're incredibly grateful that we were able to carve out that space in the industry again at the right time.

And it was lucky.

Now, does that mean we're going to rest on our laurels?

Absolutely not.

So, like a big part of what we've been doing, once we, you know, effectively triggered that success or, you know, when we started building that momentum was really looking inwards and just being like okay, what needs to change?

Like, how can we make this better?

How can we evolve?

How can we as a studio improve ourselves?

Because, quite frankly, we owe it to the people who have supported us, who have bought the game, who's made Ready or Not as successful as it has.

Like we feel like we owe it to them.

So a big part of, I feel like, where our success has come from is just that drive, that drive to be better, to make a game that no one is making, or at least, shall we say, make the game that we want to make because no one else is making it.

And then just give it back.

You know, listening to the community and receiving the feedback and addressing it and things like that.

And, you know, I'll be the first one to say as well that we've made so many mistakes.

Well, I share mistakes, but again, Every mistake we've ever made, it's been a building block to learn from and grow.

And so many of those mistakes might have killed a different studio in a different time, in a different place.

These things happen all the time in the games industry.

So I feel incredibly lucky and privileged that we've managed to make it as far as we have.

I appreciate your answers.

We are going to wrap up because...

We are approaching that point that I said.

Our partners are probably going to breach and clear the rooms that we're in right now.

But there is just one final question that I want to go out on.

Now, as I mentioned to you guys, this isn't the Hot Scoops podcast.

We're not trying to get, like you know, fantastic takes or the breaking news on what's coming next for Void Interactive.

But what I would love to hear from the two of you is just kind of what you're thinking about at the moment as you apply yourselves to your work.

Like what is kind of on your horizon?

Like whether it be something in the way that you're leading your teams, a way that you're applying your craft, something that's happening in the industry, a problem, or something that you're wrestling with.

And we also take, in fact, we love semi-formed thoughts as well.

So it can get as kind of Charlie Day at the whiteboard mind map as you want.

But Sean, is there anything in particular that you're thinking about right now?

That's kind of a little bit of a mind puzzle that you're working your way through or something you're focusing on.

Yeah, which is we really care about this game first and foremost.

This is...

The game that I wanted to work on from years ago before this game was even out or announced.

So this for me especially is also a passion project.

But so saying that it's not something that we're going to let go of. or just sort of see it sunset.

We want to continue and to support this title and to make sure that those players who've also enjoyed it get more of the you know, more of that experience.

It might be some cases, some more of the same.

If they're looking for the same, if they get some more in different ways, then we could explore those spaces too.

So it's also trying to work out what is fun for the players.

What's right for the experience.

So that could be the context, the scenarios.

You mentioned maritime.

You're a SWAT officer going on an oil rig.

That's pretty crazy.

So where could we find the boundaries of that experience?

Where haven't we explored elsewhere so that we can test that, test those spaces?

But that's for me, I'd say that's really.

What I would be really keen on doing is to continue to support on Ready or Not so well, that would be me see what else we can really get out of that experience 100.

And if you want to see malformed ideas, we could maybe get there.

So what other roles of a SWAT team have we not yet explored is open question, you know?

So it's not just five dudes all the time.

Yeah.

All right, Mark.

What's getting you out of bed in the morning at the moment?

Uh, weirdly enough, that question well, not a question, but a statement you mentioned earlier is actually circling in my brain uh, which is.

You mentioned sort of like where we sit in the games industry itself, and you mentioned double a and i i was thinking back sort of like when i first started the industry in effectively, a double air capacity, working at eurocom and, you know, during the 2010s and 12s, that was a perfectly viable option for korea.

You know a film has come out or Something like that.

Hey, we'll make a game tie in.

You know it's effectively a double A game, relatively small score, small team, small budget.

But you don't have to sell that many to make a profit.

Perfectly viable sort of like industry career.

And then over time, and especially like sort of where we sit now, that divide of what is indie in AAA is a huge chasm where i feel like there's just nothing there anymore, like it's you don't really see double air games these days, yeah.

So i found it really interesting that you said that we're effectively occupying that space, and i think really what is going to get me out of the bed in the morning is like right, how do we enter that triple air space then?

Um, and more importantly as well, do we even want to?

And i suppose that's really the question, and and now we're into okay, but what makes triple air?

Is it team size?

Is it the quality of the game?

Is it?

You know, the whole experience is how much it costs.

So I definitely struggle with that in terms of a question that keeps me awake.

But it also gets me out of bed in the morning is just really, who are we?

You know, we've ready or not in void.

And how do we just make it better and just keep it going forward, you know?

Hell yeah, man.

I love it.

Thank you so much, gentlemen.

Your passion is infectious.

And, you know, I felt it through my Xbox controller when it was very sweaty breaching rooms.

Not a pretty picture, but I did feel the passion and I feel it right now talking to you both.

You've been wonderful guests.

I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Congrats on all your success.

Please pass on our congratulations to the rest of the team.

And thanks for joining us.

No, thank you very much for having us.

Really, really a great pleasure as well to talk to you.

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 Tactical Tension: An In-depth Look at Void Interactive and 'Ready or Not']-[How Ready or Not Creates Tension Behind Every Door]

📋 Summary

The Evolution of Tactical Realism: Inside Void Interactive

The Origins of a Tactical Sim

Designing Tension: The "Fear Every Door" Philosophy

Scaling a Remote Studio

The "Double-A" Renaissance

Future Horizons

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Art of Tactical Tension: An In-depth Look at Void Interactive and 'Ready or Not']-[How Ready or Not Creates Tension Behind Every Door]

📋 Summary

The Evolution of Tactical Realism: Inside Void Interactive

The Origins of a Tactical Sim

Designing Tension: The "Fear Every Door" Philosophy

Scaling a Remote Studio

The "Double-A" Renaissance

Future Horizons

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning