You're Spider-Man. Look. Next time, leave the fighting to the pros. Okay, but what if there aren't any around? Uh! Good one! Hello, New York! I am the one that kept order in this city! Apparently the show's not over. Is there anyone left in New York who doesn't want me dead? The next time you get in my way, I will not be so gentle. Girl problems again. Shut up! Heads up! [inaudible] . All right. Well, I am Shane McCloskey. If you guys didn't know, I graduated in Michigan State, 2016. I studied Computer Science and I minored in Game Design and Development, gone through with the same program that you guys are going through. Then this is a picture of me and pops back in Michigan State Emmett Till gates definitely about Michigan State most. Back in college, I had a few internships before I even left college, so I had decently sized resume. The first one on my software summer was at New World Systems, it was a programming internship, super boring stuff. I was just programming software for like EMT and Firefighters out in Detroit, Michigan and then, my junior year summer, it was at Crowe Horwath. I was programming ERP software. Again, super boring stuff, but it was good things to pad your resume and was good things to show employers that you are able to learn new software and new systems very quickly. So, by the time I got into senior year of college, I then got a job at Strength in Numbers studios. They are an Indie studio out of Lansing, Michigan, you guys might have heard of them. They made a super terrible game called Toy board that I worked on. It was pretty bad, but it was a good experience because my first time working in games with a small team, getting paid to make games. So it's a really good experience and I got a lot of experience using unreal four. So, it was my first time getting out of unity, which I was mainly using at Michigan State and I got to use unreal four. So, it was another big match to my resume. I know how to use multiple engines, not just game engines but tech engines from other studios and whatnot. The Strength in numbers is a small studio, so you're responsible for a lot. I was mainly implementing hero abilities for this mobile style Reebok games so, I was mainly a generalist implementing a lot of different stuff. Then after that, during the same time; that was my senior year, I was working at Strength in Numbers, Volition was the client for our Capstone project during Michigan State. So, I was the lead on that and I had about 13 or 14 kids working under me and things went really well with that, we made a Metroidvania style game called Ginkybania and then, that went very well, so I was offered a temp job initially for three months after college from June to a few months after that and then I got extended up until December. So, whereas in Strength in Numbers I was generalist working on a lot of different systems, working on a lot of different wide breadth of tasks whereas at Volition, I was more of a specialist. I was just a little bit designer, I was part of a smaller level design team where I actually had a lead this time who was signing the tasks, or just placing loot boxes. I got to design a couple of different rooms, but for the most part, they are already ordered out. I was only just really nudging props to the left and right. It wasn't really a lot of block out because there were pretty much in the last leg of production at that point. But, it was going from super open, super generalized stuff, to super specialized tasks and then, towards the end the production mainly the only thing I was doing was just bug fixing and fixing damage, stuff like that. Yeah it was a really good experience to go from super small team in the Indie, to work in triple A and see what it's like on both sides of the coin there. And then, after that I went home to apply for a bunch of jobs. I was integrating with Rockstar, Sucker Punch, Bunge and Insomniac was the one that finally bit, and gave me an offer. Whereas everyone was dragging their feet, Insomniac gave me an offer and within a week or so. I've been at Insomniac ever since, since February of 2017. I was hired in as an associate designer, I am now a mid-level designer and I'll just break down a bit sort of design team structure we've got here. So, as far as associates and mid levels go, newer owning content and by content, I mean missions. So, golden path missions are big spectacle missions that you see at the E3 demo, the construction sites, the big escape from the raft with all the villains and sinister six, those are what we call a golden path missions. Missions that you need to advance the story, whereas open world missions are held by associates like myself, which I was during the production of Spider-Man. You handle those smaller things, and then senior and lead designers are owning systems and mechanics. So, they don't design individual levels themselves. They're owning larger systems like Traversal or combat for example, or a living world or it's like you handle all the pedestrians and all the traffic or, another system could be progression for example. To break down a little bit the difference between golden path and open world, I was an open world designer on Spider-Man and then once DTNS, City that never sleeps came around, I was promoted by then, so I moved up to Golden Path. On Golden Path, it's all sort of, it's using core mechanics but there's a lot of custom gameplay and a lot of giant set piece moments like you would see in Uncharted and Spider-Man, where the crane collapses in the construction site and there's the big storm sensor six moment at the raft that is all custom geometry, sort of custom scripted gameplay. Whereas, in the open world, the main thing I was responsible for was all of the faction basis, and those are basically just core mechanics used for the nth degree. So they're basically just giant combat setups six waves. What I mean, so it's basically everything I could do with the system we've already got an RN, I didn't need any support from other accounts. I could just crank out of content on my head. So, going back to a golden path, you got unique spaces like heavy narrative full cinematic. You work with animation during production, to makes sure blending in and out of cinematics is working as intended, and you work with writing during pre-production to make sure you're hitting all sort of narrative and character beats that you want to hit throughout the golden path. Because, open world is just core mechanics, but, there's there's a lot more structure and requirements that go into golden path mission. It's not just, 'okay we need to have fun'. There's a sort of interest curve you need to hit throughout the entire game where it's like, you have this giant at a ten construction site level, we need to bring it back down to something a bit maybe a of five or six or something like that. So, Peter's going to dig through his trash to find his old flash drive or something like that. So, there's a lot more consideration to story and narrative in golden path whereas, open world it's basically just has a story wrapper. So, for faction basis, it was me and the writer John and Crystals Gage, who was a Marvel writer coming up with, contextualize things of why the fist guys were taking over these construction sites, and at every base you can call from Urie, "These guys are running weapons, they're running drugs" So you get to be the same basic formulate pattern, every time you land on a base you would get a phone call, "Hey Urie, found a base ball blah blah." And then halfway through the mission, he'd call or she'd call him, "Hey the running drugs" he's like, "Not hearing, I'm a little bit busy," and they go back and forth on all sort of stuff. And then, you'd have the cinematic wrap-up at the end and all the guys would be whipped up and you'd be like, "All right, take them all out boom boom boom." But that stuff is super low rant and really easy because by far, the cheapest narrative thing we had is just B0 which is all what corporate world stuff is, it doesn't have any actual cinematics. Open world stuff is mainly just a story wrapper and writing just contextualize why you're here and doing this things. Why? It's a super gamy, like six waves of combat you know what I mean? Stories there to make it. So, it's more than just a media, basically for open world stuff. And then, as far as the meetings and the oversight goes for golden path missions, you have, we call them dailies. They are not actually daily, they are like every other day. So, it depends on how behind the mission is, how big the mission is. But, in our daily meetings, we were with Ted Price and every other lead and director. So it's 30 people packed in to a camera or a big conference room all playing through the mission. All pointing out things from different apartments, "This needs to get hit, and this needs to get hit. Why isn't this done? What do we need to do here? Do we need to shift? Do we need a pivot?" So, it's basically all the sort of tests getting worked out throughout the week to make sure things don't fall behind. Whereas, the review meetings for open road content, it's basically just you and your lead, and maybe a writer once a month, and maybe a QA guy. It's like, "All right, are things on track?" Since it is a bit lower rent style content, you don't really need a big giant group of people there to support that. You can basically just said to you in your lead. Yeah. What I was responsible for during the production of Spider-Man was the factual basis. Yet I came online around the time, early summer of 2017. For the first ones I prototyped or the Fisk Basis and Greenwich Village one was as the one we move to golden path and then the Upper East Side base is where I prototyped all the scripting that would be used across all basis. So it's all systematized, it's all running on the same thing. So, if another designer needed to design his own base, he could basically copy and paste the scripting and systems that I've set up, so he could be up and running on his own. The reason why we have so many bases in the game, is because it is all systematized. It's not handcrafted like a golden path mission is. So, Fisk bases were the ones I did first, Demon basis- yes Fisk Base I did all geometry, all scripting. Demon basis, I just did scripting on because we had an intern come in last summer, who I oversaw and give feedback to and signed off on his bases. Once he left, after the end of the summer, I took his bases from alpha to final. So, I saw that through ship and then, Sable basis I did all the layout geometry worked for and then scripting. Prisoner basis, the initial block out was done by one of our leads. And then he got to caught up with something, so I ended up taking over all of those. Whereas, when we started production, I was only supposed to handle eight bases or something like that; which was Fisk and Sable. Once the intern and left, and once the lead got overloaded with stuff, I had basically had to take over everything. So, I saw through to the end 19 total bases. We ended up cutting four of them. But it was for the best. We believe it had sorts of all killer no filler versus just a strenuous bases just to have extrasolar content. Another big thing that I focused on during production was, the golden path base. We moved the Greenwich Fisk base out of the golden path because initially, gadgets weren't on the golden path, you can just unlock them whenever you wanted. Then we moved gadgets to the golden path. Throughout certain missions, you would unlock these gadgets, and we have a cool cinematic moment to show or to tutorialize it. So, the first time you unlock gadgets was at this fashion base here. After you craft a new suit at Doc Ock's Lab, you leave, you get a call from Urie about Fisk hideout, still using his construction sites. This served as an introduction to the faction based game type out on the open world, but also served to teach you how to craft gadgets and also tutorialize the impact web mechanic. Then at wave three, we also tutorialize superpowers. A lot of that stuff was custom scripting, that was just for Golden Half mission that sat on top of what was already there for the open world stuff. So, then for E3 and the Game Informer demo, there were two bases that we had to get done basically six to seven months before we actually went gold, which was the Greenwich Fisk base and the Demon base over in Chinatown. These were both playable by Game Informer. A few months before E3, they did a big giant write up on it. So, we had daily meetings on these bases because they could swing around the open world and basically do whatever they wanted to do. For Game Informer, when they came in, we did a directed gameplay playthrough for them, where we had the sticks and we were playing through the intro to Fisk Tower, where we played through up to the boss, right up to Fisk, and we cut it off there. Then we gave them the controller and let them run wild on the [inaudible] for the first time. So it was in a sort of locked-up district area, but the two big set pieces were like, all right, open-world crimes, you can do some towers, you could do a couple of research stations, but the things we put POI's or points of interests on were the two faction bases and then the Shocker bank. So, these are the super big showpieces, and that was a really big honor and super cool to do to bring these bases up to final and have them be talked about in the magazine. Basically, these two bases would be the first impression the press and anyone that went to E3 would get of combat. So, I think they were good showpieces and a lot of people got a lot of hype of it. So yeah, it was a big moment for me and it was super cool. Then after E3, shortly after that, we shipped and we shipped within Metacritic at 87, which is higher than I thought we're going to get so I was pretty happy about that. It was super cool with fans and press reaching out and all that sort of stuff. We got Game of the Year nominee. We're probably going to lose, but hey, it's nice to be nominated. Then here's the team out at E3. Super cool. Good times, yeah. It's sad Sony's not going to be at E3 this year. Because I would say, if you guys ever get in the industry, E3 is a great time, but who knows if E3 is still going to be around any much longer, so there. Anyway, after E3, we went gold. I moved on to the City That Never Sleeps or CTNS, and I was moved to Golden Path. Golden Path is sort of always been my goal because I have always been super passionate about story and gameplay kind of on a stick together, because some of my favorite games are like the linear style, [inaudible] games, Uncharted games. Where I wanted to work since day one is me, sort of, drawing Golden Path missions, so working with writing and animation and all this sort of stuff to drive character and gameplay forward. So yeah, I was on the pre-prod team for Hammerhead. I skipped, what's it called, Black Cat altogether because I was on the pre-production team. So it was basically me and a writer in a room coming up with the overall macro of the narrative, and the game play beats, and the mission beats, to break it down and figure out what our pacing is and what the missions are, and how we're going to dole out new mechanics, and where do we want to do character introductions, and all this sort of stuff out. So we had a big sort of giant macro laid out on the billboard by the time we exited pre-production. Once we went into production, I handled the opening mission, which if you guys saw the new trailer and a lot of those shots from that opening mission for Hammerhead. Then I took the third mission to alpha as well. Then once everyone rolled off from Black Cat, all the other designers, we went down to one mission a piece, and then I took the opening mission to final. Then the other comes out next week, so you guys can check that out real soon. Yeah, that's basically where I'm at now. I am now on pre-production for the next game, which I can't really talk about too much. We can go into a bit of questions and whatnot about the industry, and how to get into it, and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's basically been my journey from computer science, working at Michigan State, working in India, working at Volition, and then my experience at Insomniac thus far. So, any questions guys? So, can you just maybe start by talking a little bit, you sort of alluded to it, Spider-Man was I think your first actual ship title, right? That you were [inaudible] ship. So what was that like after putting over your work into it, in that sort of thing, and having big parts of the development? It was great, man. It was super surreal. I remember all the big milestones hitting and seeing it on a PlayStation store for the first time, seeing ads for it. I've got a bunch of pictures saved on my phone. But yeah, it's super surreal. If you guys all make it in the industry, you only get to ship your first game once, so cherish it. Because nowadays, it's like, "Spider-Man's out. It's not that big a deal." But I remember a few months back just seeing it on TV everyday, geeking out people with only pictures and stuff like that. People reaching out, press like Jason Schreier, he's a big industry journalist. He DMed me and talked to me about the game and all that sort of stuff and we went back and forth, and just getting hit up by friends and family back home and other colleagues from around the industry. So, yeah. It's a super gratifying, vindicating, surreal moment to see your first game get out the door, especially coming from such humble beginnings like you guys are at Michigan State making small Indie games in Unity and working in small teams. But going from that to working in AAA and shipping a big title like this, it's like it's a big honor. I'm quite proud. So, yeah. It was super cool. Awesome. You said you got a decent Metacritic score and I don't know what sales have been like, but what's the sense at the studio? It's been great and we're all very happy. We're super happy with where we ended up Metacritic-wise. I thought we're going to get like an 85, so an 87 is pretty damn good. I'm pretty happy with that. We were at an 88 and then the damned Guardian came in with a 60 and tried to [inaudible] an 87, but I'll take it. Sales have been good, so that's been nice. The sentiment around the studio has been super positive. We're all really riding high. I mean we just got nominated for the Game of the Year nominee at the Game Awards and like seven other awards, so it's been great. Sentiment at the studio has been really awesome. It's all been really good because this is the first game at Insomniac at a long time that has been successful. Because as you guys know, Sunset Overdrive was on Xbox One, which never sold out well so we didn't get a sequel on that. Then previously to that, we were doing Fuse which was a bomb. It's the first game we've done in a long time that has been successful, so things are really great on the studio. Can you tell us a little bit about the studio, like location, size? Yeah, sure. We're located in Burbank, California which is like 15 minutes north of LA. Technically, it's sort of is LA, but same sort of thing. In Burbank studio, we've got about 250 people working. It's like the design team for reference is about 25 people and maybe like 10-15 are leads. So we've got maybe three to four associates, and then five or six mid-level people, and then the rest are all leads and seniors and what not. The studio has grown quite large. Even since I got hired back in 2017, we have grown even more. We've got more projects coming online in the future, so we will definitely be needing more help. So if you guys are eager to apply, I definitely encourage you guys to apply because we will have internships coming online pretty soon here for next summer. So, I encourage you guys to all look into that. We do have a sister studio as well over in North Carolina. They mainly focus on our Oculus titles. They are working on Stormland right now. It's coming out real soon. But yeah, they were established around 10 years ago now and they're basically a sister studio out in North Carolina. It's like 50 people mainly working on smaller titles. Kelsey Beachum, who's one of our alumna, she's in Barcelona. Yeah. Kelsey, great. She came out to Burbank recently. I got to meet her face to face. Me, her, John, and other writers went out for drinks. She's super cool. She's doing great over there as we all read just online. She worked on Outer Wilds as well with my buddy Andrew, and yeah, it's a great game. I got to play a bit of it, so yeah, it's super cool. You guys should definitely check that out as well. Yeah, I'll do. I don't know if you know her brother was here. He got his undergrad here and then went to USC for his masters. Yeah. I knew about that. Yeah. Super nice guy. Great designer. 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. My name is Ian, first thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate us having someone from the industry talking to us. No problem. My question is about Marvel, since it is an original IP how much influence did they have on like directing the art story and the general environment? Yeah they had a good influence, I mean it is their character, I mean when we had a bit more sway when it came to sort of game play and mechanics and what not but, yeah the thing Marvel really cared about is the character and its IPs, like every sort of UI element and every sort of scripts, anything like that, anything that had to do with narrative, like anything that came out of the characters mouths or anything that represented the character, whether it's suits, a UI element anything like that it definitely had to be run through Marvel and it gets signed off by them. Like there were a few things we had to kind of go back and forth on and there were some battles we lost, but for the most part they were a great partner and there were super eager to sort of work with us like that you'll notice that we've got our own sort of iconic suit with the white spider something that's never been done before, and we've kind of brand Spider-Man out into multiple different areas but, they are going to look up for their IP and make sure we're not going to make Spider-Man like a zombie or something like that or do something super off the wall insane and make it ridiculous, because they want to keep it grounded and sort of make their own Marble games universe as it were. But they were super great to work with them and the same thing goes for Sony. Sony was a great partner just like Marvel. So yeah, it really wasn't too difficult to work with them at all like as an open world designer, I never heard from them at all. I'm sure when I worked on golden paths release on CTNS it wasn't too bad. I mean I had a few things we had to go back and forth on. It's really not that bad at all. So did you guys drive it, like meaning like you're coming up with scenarios and or are they saying okay, this is the story that we want played? No, no it is definitely they wanted to let us make our own story and do our own thing. Like they would definitely get feedback [inaudible] and you guys might have seen those guys on interviews are super tight and they go out to lunch together all the time, and the Marvel producers would definitely have as much influence on the story as our lead directors and creative directors and writers were, but it was definitely our story from the start and they kind of put their influence in on it. It wasn't like Marvel came to us like "Hey, make this game. Just go build it." It was our sort of pitch like when Marvel came to us initially, it was Sony saying "how about do you guys want to work on a marble game?" Then we went around the studio, and it was basically unanimous that we wanted to work on Spider magnate. So it wasn't even Spider-Man that it was guaranteed on at first, but there was some pitches for war Marine and a few other characters but, basically after working on Sunset and having traversal be such a core mechanic we figured we could translate that to Spider-Man super well, and if it's the Insomniac DNA really well to just having the character being sort of very quickly an off the cuff, and having the humor to him as well. So yeah it was basically, all of our pitches from the get-go and then Marvel sort of giving their influence and giving their blessing throughout production. So, when you were designing the city layout, did you reference New York City or the actual streets and everything? How did that work exactly as you were building it up? Yeah. We tried to be as true to life to New York as possible. We definitely have all the landmarks in there. But in terms of the metrics of New York, we definitely made things narrower and taller just to work from a swaying perspective and our traversal mechanics and whatnot. All the big landmarks are in there. But all the surrounding buildings, we just did whatever we needed to work with gameplay and work with our direction. But yeah, some neighborhoods aren't really true to life, like all of Harlem is a bit different compared to the north side of Manhattan. It's a bit more gamified, but we tried to be as true to life as possible and capture aesthetic and vibe of every different neighborhood, whether it's the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, Financial District, Upper West Side, Harlem, all that stuff. So, yeah. We definitely took into account, and tried to take in, and make it feel, and be the most realized beautiful New York on next-gen as possible. Is Insomniac a Sony studio? We are still independent, but Sony has been our main publisher for years now, besides the one stint with Xbox for, what's it called, Sunset. Yeah, Sony's definitely been our main publisher. We've known their producers for years, whether it's Mark Cerny, or Grady Hunt, or Connie Booth. All those guys, they've all been really great and they've got a great relationship with Ted and all of leadership here. So, yeah. They've all been really great. Yeah. So, how was it moving from Unity and Unreal to a proprietary engine and going from PC to console that [inaudible] . Yeah, it's different, man. It's weird going from Unity where like you're working in an indie game and you've got to do everything and you've got to know every system in and out, back and forth. Then it's kind of the same thing with Unreal, and then going to Volition where it's like you're just doing super small intricate stuff, working on your end, just working in the open world. The same thing at Insomniac, you're just working in your editor. You know what I mean, you're not making animations, you're not making cinematics, you're not making art assets. So, it's like you know you're very specialized. That's the one thing I would say. Whereas when you're an Indie Dev, you have to know the ins and outs and the nuts and bolts of every system, whether it's lighting, animation, all that sort of stuff. Whereas here, it's like I can just go talk to someone and be like, "Hey, how does this work? Can you help me out with this?" Or I could just request an asset from them personally and like, "Hey, do we have time in the schedule? I need this asset, I need this thing lit," all that sort of stuff. Usually if you're working on a Golden Path mission, all of that stuff is built into the schedule. You're going to get up to Alpha in your first milestone, after you do blocking, you're going to get an art pass, you're going to get a first lighting pass, and then when you go from Alpha to Beta, everything is brought to final, so, it gets an audio pass and fx pass, all that sort of stuff. But I would definitely say, it's like you become super specialized in your editor and you know the ins and outs of it like the back of your hand. So, you really get into that flow state and really can get going, especially if you put some music on and start jamming. But yeah, it's definitely a big adjustment going from Unity and Unreal to your own proprietary engine. But the one thing that's great about having our own tool set here in-house is that I can just walk down the hall and go across a new feature from Alice, something like that. It's like I requested a feature literally yesterday. It's how to organize actor groups alphabetically so you don't have to do it like sort of hand drag and drop things one-by-one. Yeah, it's super [inaudible] right now, if I have a group of actors in the outliner and I add them to a script node actor group, they all get disorganized. So, I have to drag and drop each one into order. I'm like, "This is ridiculous. This takes forever. Can we please get a sorting option?" So, I just walk over there and ask for it. Then a ticket gets put in the Jira, and it's going through production right now, and I think by next week they'll have it up [inaudible] . It's super cool. In your proprietary attacks, is it similar to Unity, or you can do something then test it right away right there on the PC, or do you actually have a DevKit at your desk? We've got both, so we can run on PS4 as well as PC. So yeah, I've got a DevKit on my desk. I usually run on PC just for the sake that it's super quick. But when I'm doing final playthroughs at my desk with my leads, we usually play on a DevKit just to have rumble on all the sort of stuff in full audio. Sorry, Bryan. What was the question again? You answered it. It was just about if you can do it in the editor right there on the PC or if you have a push if you have a DevKit. You mentioned Jira, can you maybe just talk briefly about project management stuff there? Like how projects are managed? Yeah, sure. So, we've got PMs or project managers here at Insomniac. Where at Volition, when I was there for six months, they had producers, they had a bit more power and a bit more say and sway over what went down the pipe and what went into production or not. Whereas at Insomniac, it's basically up to the designers and the leads, and the PMs are just making sure it fits into the schedule. They don't really have any sort of creative influence or anything like that. So, the PMs are mainly there just to create schedules and make sure things get done on time. So, they're tracking all the bugs, working with QA, make sure our builds get out in time to Sony, and all that sort of stuff. Working with Jira, this is something we've switched to recently. Before we worked with DevTrack, which is Sony's proprietary engine for tracking bugs and tasks and whatnot. It's okay but it's sort of outdated compared to Jira which is a bit more modern and a bit more easier to use. Yeah. So, Jira, if you don't know, it's similar to Trello. In fact, I think the company that owns Jira now owns Trello. But Trello is kind of lightweight for your kind of project management, where Jira is what a lot of industry uses for this sort of thing. Yeah. So, you do like burndown charts and all that type of stuff as well? Do you do like Scrum development there? Not really. We sort of have burndown charts especially towards the last leg of production when we were working from Beta to Gold. We have burndown charts of all the bugs, like we have a counter on the kitchen of all the bugs we had, it's like we start with like thousands of bugs and it ticks down every day, and like how many bugs we've got left before we got to ship. But it's mainly when we got burndown charts. But in terms of like stand-ups and stuff like that, like in other sort of Agile development schemes, you don't really do that sort of a thing. So, we just have dailies and meetings and it's like, if you need to go talk to someone, you just go over their desk. You don't really need to have a 10-minute stand-up meeting every day to kind of walk through what you're working on because everybody already knows what you're working on. Like, "All right, I'm on this mission. You're on this mission. Let's just get to work. You know what I mean? You know what we've got to do." Okay. Cool. Any final words of advice for people? Yeah. I would say stack your resume as much as possible, get as much varied experience as possible. If you're working at the same spot for multiple years, it's not bad. But I think having different notches on your resume, showing you can work and adapt to different tool sets and different teams, might be a bit better. Also, just hit the ground running, man. Like I started super slow when I got into 445. It wasn't until my second year where I got up to speed with things and I became a good game dev and good designer. Early days, man, it was kind of rough for me, like I never used Unity before. I started out in 445. So, slow days going for me, but yeah, I would dive in. While you guys are still can and kind of learn, read up all the documentation, watch as many tutorials as you can. It's like there's really no excuse nowadays because there's so much stuff online where you can learn from. So, if you're really passionate about it and you really want to go for it, man, just go for it. I mean, watch GDC talks, figure out now what sort of games you want to make and want to work on, and tailor the games you make towards that. Like if you want to work at Naughty Dog or Insomniac or any sort of AAA action adventure studio, follow them on Twitter. Look them up and watch their GDC talks, read the articles they write. Make games in college now while you still can that are going to sort of tailor your portfolio towards that stuff. Whether it's the art style, the gameplay style, anything like that. So, you have to figure out the sort of games you want to play and want to make now, and make sure your vocabulary is up-to-date. Especially as a designer because when you go into an interview, we will expect you to have played not just our games but our competitors' games and kind of know what's going on. Red Dead just came out and we had our design meeting this week, and we literally spent an hour just talking about Red Dead. So, we all got to keep up on that stuff. So, yeah, I encourage you guys to do the same sort of thing and know your genre like the back of your hand. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming in, given some time to us and some advice. Yeah. Of course, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I was telling them before you got on that it's awesome having along like yourself out there at places like Insomniac and Rockstar and et cetera, et cetera to come in and come back and kind of give back as well. Of course, man. Yeah, MSU is a great program. You guys got a lot of resources. You guys upgraded when I left even more. You guys got more stuff now than [inaudible]. So yeah, you got a nice new room. So, guys, take advantage. It's a great program. Don't let it go to waste because the two years are going to go by super fast before you know it. So, enjoy it and have fun. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Shane. We'll be in touch. Go on, Bryan. Take it easy. See you, guys. Bye, guys. Bye.
