So, any questions for Shane's, yeah?
So, what's the interview process for Insomniac like?
Sorry, what was that?
What's the interview process for Insomniac like?
Interview process?
Yeah.
Yeah, so for me,
it's basically you apply.
I applied in October,
they didn't get back to me until January and then you do a short design test,
which is basically a written test.
Some other studios like when I was applying at Sucker Punch,
they make you do an entire block out,
and then turn that in through Maya.
But Insomniac, it was just sort of paper layout of a ratchet level,
that you would walk through and explain the Gameplay beats,
and the mechanics you would introduce,
and the pacing of it all.
Then, you turn that in and then you get a phone call.
Actually, sorry, the first thing you do is a phone call,
and then if that goes well,
you have a phone interview with the game director and the lead designer.
If that goes well, you get a paper design test,
and then if that goes well,
you do another phone call,
and then they fly you out for a day's worth of interviews.
And from a design standpoint,
you have the first half of your day up to lunch is three different sets of interviews.
It's a dual interview,
so two designers in a room and you,
and they go back and forth with you.
There's three different sessions you go back and forth,
about a bunch of different stuff.
Then you go to lunch, and then you have interviews with the programming team,
the art team and then the Directors,
which is the Creative Director,
the Art Director, stuff like that.
So, you basically get to meet a good swath of the entire team.
The first half of the day is your department that you'll be working in,
signing off on you like, okay,
is this is guy or girl up to snuff, are they good enough?
Then the second half of the day is them examining you like,
are you able to work with different departments or not?
Do you know what you're talking about?
Are you able to work with art and animation?
Do you know how to speak programmer jargon, and all that stuff.
So, it'd be the same sort of thing,
if you're an artist interviewing, an environment artist,
the first set of your day would be environment art interviews,
and then maybe one interview would be me and another designer the second half of the day.
We'd go back and forth talk about block out,
talk about how to preserve design intents,
while still making things look pretty and
beautiful when it goes to final art and assets and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah, so it's basically a phone call, a home test,
whether it's written or an art test,
and then another call,
and then a day's rounds of interviews.
They fly you out, fly you in, all that stuff.
Then after that, you would get a call or
an email letting you know you got the job or not.
Thank you. So, you mentioned there's 250 people at there in Burbank,
25 are designers like yourself.
Can you maybe talk about the rest of the people,
like what other divisions,
like a title like Spider-Man,
how is it divided out?
Yeah, it's definitely a huge title,
I mean the biggest team we had,
was environment art and animation,
just because of the virtue of the size of the world and the amount of cinematics we had.
So, the animation team is broken up into Gameplay animation,
which is all stuff on The Stig,
Spider-Man score move set,
traversal combat, all that stuff.
So, if you're an animator in your Gameplay animator,
you'd be working mainly with Gameplay programmers and designers wears.
Cinematic animators, will mainly be working with writing and the animation director,
and then mainly working with designers,
just to get hooked up in the level properly to make
sure it's all blending in and out of gameplay properly and all that sort of stuff.
Then for environment art,
it was a good size team too,
it was probably like 30,
40 people, something like that.
You're either on the open world working in a tile,
which is like open world games,
and how they're structured, it's either on a hex grid system or a tiled grid system,
we use a tile system on Spider-Man.
So, we would go district by district,
like start up in Harlem,
and work our way down.
For example the first district we ever
arted out and showed to Sony and Marvel was Chinatown.
We basically brought that district to final and showed them,
this is what the rest of the city is going to look like.
All that sort of stuff.
Then we went off and did every other district,
but you have certain amount of tiles in each district,
an artist is dedicated to.
Three or four tiles, they've got to get
these buildings arted out and all the environment art in,
by the deadline and by the end of the milestone.
Then if you are on a mission,
you'd be working directly with a designer,
working inside of a custom instance,
that would only be there for that level.
So, BioTech for example,
which is the Martin Li fight,
that is all interior instance that you only see once throughout the game.
So, if you're a mission artist,
you'd be working a lot,
super close with the designer to keep the design intent there,
and keep it at its core.
Whereas, if you're just an environment artist out in the open world,
the main thing you got to worry about is
just wall crawl bugs and wall room bugs and stuff like that.
For a good leg of the last part of production,
and the only thing the artists were doing on
the open world was just fixing collision bugs,
fixing wall crawl bugs,
fixing wall-run bugs, fixing markup bugs.
Because, the city was basically at alpha at the end of last year,
all throughout this year,
they were basically just bug fixing and polishing and stuff like that.
As you can know, it's a giant city,
and if you hold R2 and Spider-Man runs into something,
he's supposed to parker over it,
or wall on it upward or something.
But there's plenty of assets,
before we shipped, where he would just run into it and look stupid.
So, if he doesn't do a cool move over it,
that means there's not a piece of markup on it,
or a markup is like a spline or something like that.
So if Spider-Man is going to run into this water bottle in part four then we need to
define a spline around it and have the right flag set on it.
So, Spider-Man knows when his collision hits that,
he's going to play this animation basically and do that sort of a thing.
So, yeah, the environment on our team's pretty damn big, animation's really big.
Writing team was three or four people decently sized.
It was broken down on John Big Cat,
did a lot of the golden past stuff,
then Arpa did a lot of that as well.
Then programming at Gameplay or Core.
Core is like the guys that make our engine basically,
because we have our own in-house engineer in Insomniac.
So, that's a team size of 10 to 15 people, something like that.
Then, the Gameplay programmers are mainly working
with designers that sort of come up with mechanics and work through traversal.
Then UI.
UI is like five or six people, yes.
UI artists and UI programmers make sure
all the stuff is being implemented properly and working well.
So, yeah, I think that's all the departments. I believe.
Thank you. When you joined there,
did you feel like you were the new guy and didn't really know what you were doing?
Or did you feel part of a cohort of fresh employees,
eager to make a contribution?
When I was hired, I wasn't hired in with anyone else.
I was hired in with one other temp artist.
So, I was alone by myself there.
But yeah, for a while there,
I was the youngest designer on the team and yeah,
it is quite intimidating,
I'm not going to lie at first, but once you get your feet under you,
and learn the systems and learn the tools,
you're off to the races,
once they give you your first piece of content,
you just really want to prove to the team,
that you know what you're doing and that you can run with it.
So, once they gave me faction bases as a game type I just ran with it,
and worked a lot and got it through,
and it became the best open world game type we had, there were reviewed really well,
a lot of people like them at the studio,
they had a lot of buzz around them,
the pacing of the combat was good.
So, yeah, it's intimidating at first but,
if your work can show for itself,
that's a good way to bring your name up to the top of the list and get promoted quickly.
Yeah. It is basically paraphrased.
It is intimidating at first, but you'll get used to it.
Don't worry. You'll be fine. I mean, everyone at
the studio is super friendly, super cool.
We are a big giant family here.
So, it's intimidating at first just because of the legacy of the studio.
It's been around since the '90s.
I mean [inaudible] spiral ratchet all that sort of stuff.
So, it's all very sort of intimidating at first, but once you get used to it,
you will be fine and it's like it's insane to me that Ted Price knows me by name,
it' super weird yeah, like we walk by each other in
the hallways all the time we get lunch together, it's super cool.
Yeah, when we came and visited I thought it was super
impressive that we came into the room and Ted Price came in
and he talked about you and how you are
a grade higher and he wants to get more people like you so,
and he spent like an hour with us.
Yeah, he's a super nice guy man, he's a great CEO,
he knows everyone's name, he's super sort of forthright and straight forward.
The one thing I asked Brian [inaudible] the creative director when I was interviewing, am like,
because you go back and forth and like why should I choose this studio X,
I told him I had an offer from sucker punch at the time
am like why should I choose you guys over Insomniac,
or over Sucker Punch,
and he said Ted, exactly,
he said Ted is the main thing he's like,
he's the best CEO,
he's always going to put the company first before himself,
he's never going to sell us out.
He's always super sort of forthright
and people friendly and making sure that we're all sort of taken care of.
Because even during the times when we didn't have a lot of big sort of
giant Triple A games and sort of feed the beast and keep people employed,
he went out and signed deals all over town like with Oculus and mobile games.
He sort of broke the team often sort of smaller teams,
and kind of make sure that we didn't have to let it any [inaudible] so yeah,
Ted Price is definitely a great boss.
Are there questions? So it's seems that you have a lot of experience in the game design,
and the theater work.
If we wanted to get to that for a career,
what kind of path would you suggest that we follow?
If you want to get to a designer in the industry what sort of paths should you follow?
On one thing I would say is
my computer science degree definitely gave me a leg up on the competition, because yes,
coming in as an associate at least working on these sort of
games like Ubisoft games or open world games in general,
there's a lot of sort of eight-year content and
B2 content and like for the eight-year content,
which is like golden past stuff high budget,
stuff you're going to see for an E3 demo they want
sort of experienced designers to work on that stuff,
they're not going to hire a kid fresh out of college to
come in and work on the giant boss fight or anything like that.
They're going to have you sort of start small like I did working on faction based,
working on an open road crimes or whatever it is.
So the difference between open road and golden path is that
golden paths need to have a good sort of sensible local design and
pacing and scripting on top of that,
but for open road,
the only thing you really need to know how to do,
is how to just build stuff and implement,
and you have a good sort of technical background like,
what we need you to do as an associate if we hire you is like
just to hit the ground running and build constant basically.
Like you're not going to focus on one mission that's
super tight and intricate and kind of have an entire milestone to iterate,
you're going to have one milestone and make like six missions basically.
So for me at the first base,
without any help from any other designer,
I prototyped the entire system and systemized it all,
and did the geometry on top of that.
So for all of the overall content in Spider-Man,
the only stuff that actually had geometry was
the faction basis whereas the taskmaster challenges,
the backpacks the pigeon challenges,
research stations that was all just scripting.
So and there's a lot of it.
So basically I would say the thing that's going to get you in the industry
quicker as a designer is to good to have a super sort of strong technical background,
and to have a good sense of logo designer is also very important but,
I'm not going to lie like I learned a lot of sort of
my logo design mentality sort of here on
the job from people that have been doing it for years you know what I mean.
So if you can sort of show in your interview,
is not going to give you a paper design tester,
should of know the language of logo design and
side lines and how to guide a player through level and all that sort of stuff.
They're going to do the same thing when you do your interview on site,
but if you can sort of hit the barrier there and get over the pump
and you can prove to them that you know how to script and do content,
they can always teach you how to build levels.
Because logo design is super quick and easy to iterate on,
and kind of like a lead consider your desk give you some high level feedback and like,
this is too high I move this down to metric is six meters,
make this hallway shorter, do this do that,
like lighten out these angles a bit more whereas a lead can't sit
with you all throughout the day and figure out why your script doesn't work.
You'd basically need to be self-sufficient and scriptive.
So the one thing I would say for entry logo designers is to have
as strong as a technical background as you can, basically so.
