Aligning Game Chi on Deadspace & Battlefield, with Ian Milham

Playmakers - The Game Industry Podcast

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Selected Links for the Episode

Naughty Dog

Dead Space

LucasArts

Grim Fandango

Tell Tale

Ubisoft

TitanFall

Battlefield Hardline

Bethesda

Featured Show Highlights

• It’s imperative to ensure clear communication when working on large game development teams.
• In a AAA process, your plan needs to appeal to everyone in the market
• The key is to make people “feel” something with your game trailer
• The best alignment or reference for chi is real world
• The role of a director is to draw a treasure map for the team and then creating faith for those who do not see it.
• My career as an Art Director was not spent improving people’s art, but rather aligning there are to make it look as if one person created it
• They key in game maker audience is focused and presents a powerful promise to the player
• Ripomatic Demo Reel - Chris Weakley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7y5YmTvSGk
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Episode Transcription

Jordan (00:03):

You're listening to Playmakers podcast. I'm your host Jordan Blackman. And on this week's episode, we've got Ian Milam. He is the game director at crystal dynamics over in Redwood city. Before that he was the creative director, an art director at Redwood shores, electronic arts, working on games like battlefield hardline, and of course the dead space games. And before that, he worked at Lucas arts. This man knows this stuff. We talk about that stuff on this week's episode of Playmakers. So I am very excited about this interview that I'm sharing with you today. I was excited before the interview has excited. As soon as we recorded it, I felt that it was something special and listening again, to prepare this intro, I had the same feeling. Ian is in addition to being clearly an incredibly talented GameMaker, he's also a great interlocutor and somebody who is able to explain the concepts of game creation and the processes and his own opinions on it in a way that is unique.

Jordan (01:08):

Before I even interviewed him, I had seen his GDC talk about doing the art direction on dead space two, and we'll put a link to that on Playmakers podcast.com. And that talk was so good that I knew I had to have Ian on the show. And I recommend watching that talk. We do cover some material that's a little bit similar, but it's largely separate and it's incredible. So you're definitely gonna want to check that out in. And I had, I would call it a wide ranging talk. We had a great conversation covering just a lot of meaty stuff around making games. So we talked about the history of the dead space franchise. We talked about why sometimes you actually want to squint at your work, and that's not just an art thing. It's actually a metaphor for all sorts of stuff. We talk about some of the differences between working on big AAA projects with huge budgets and smaller indie games.

Jordan (02:02):

We talked about why maybe your studio's first game, shouldn't be the big Opus that you had in mind when you created the studio. And we talk a lot about cheese, and I know that sounds strange, but we talk about the games chief. This is a concept Ian has, and it is well elucidated in this episode and in this interview. So what she is, how to align it across the game. And we talk about the role of different tools and doing that. And one of the ones that was interesting to me is the rip amatic. So we talk about that and we talk about how you do all that to cultivate this game feel and to, you know, Ian calls it a promise between the player and the game creator about what kind of experience you're going to have. So, you know, this is an episode about that promise and about how to deliver on it and about studios that have the values to do it in an exceptional way in was a great person to interview. I'm very excited to be sharing this week's episode. So let's dive with Ian

Jordan (03:02):

And thank you very much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to have you here. I'm excited to be on glad to be here. I love dead space and I loved your GDC talk. I think your approach to that work was so thorough. It was inspiring to me.

Ian (03:15):

Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. You know, you work on talks like that and stuff, and I've always found them no matter how you end up delivering them or whatever, just the act of creating one, especially in that case, right? At the end of dead space to it was a good chance to sort of codify what, what we'd learned and how it had gone. And so in a way I just made that talk for myself just to sort of really think about how things had gone, but I'm happy to hear other people got some use out of it too.

Jordan (03:43):

One of the things I was curious about is kind of from dead space, two to three, where you went from there,

Ian (03:48):

The straight shooting idea basically is right. We made dead space one, we loved it. It was a good expression of why do we wanted to do, we thought we could do better? And, you know, it had come out at a very crowded time. It came out in October of Oh eight, right before like modern warfare and, and a bunch of other big, heavy hitting games that fall. And so I think a lot of people found dead space later and it was sort of a, a critical hit, but not really a giant seller, although it's proven to have some good legs over time. And then we were like, Oh, well, if we really, you know, we'll just, let's do a great one. And so Jen spaced to, you know, obviously we expanded and improved the formula and worked a lot on it. And we, you know, it's probably the, my favorite game that I've made, but the sales didn't really expand that much.

Ian (04:36):

And in that intervening time from Oh eight to 11 games got a lot more expensive and making games that were getting more expensive, but not selling more was not a, not an appetizing, you know, a prospect to anybody. So the real challenge with three was, well, man, that's phase two, it was already a 90 Metacritic. We could, I think there's ways we can make it better this formula, but just making it better is probably not going to, you know solve this problem. So we need to think about how we can evolve it. You know, that was, that was a big time challenge. The idea there was well, let's see if we can, you know, it's always a challenge with some of these straight nine or 10 hour single player focused games, although dead space two did have a competitive multiplayer mode you know, in the age of rentals and everything else, it, it, it, they just have some real challenges.

Ian (05:32):

So the idea of, of bringing co-op into the dead space universe, we thought would be actually pretty cool. The number one reason why people loved dead spaces, cause it was scary, but the number one reason why people said they didn't buy it is because it's scary. And the idea of the whole co-op was, you know, it'd be like maybe going to a scary movie with your friend and you could, and it could sort of bring people along that way. And I actually thought the implementation of go up in that game is pretty clever and pretty successful. So there's aspects of that, that I, that I'm proud of. And I think, you know, it was critically a lot more mixed than the other two, I think, because critics over time, just w you know, they thought they, they had an idea of what dead space was and dead space three was different than that. But, you know there you go in the end, I, I think it has some, it has some real stuff going for it.

Jordan (06:19):

One thing that I noticed in your GDC talk that I thought was very interesting is you talked about this quote from one of your art school professors who had said squinting can replace four years of art school. And I kind of wrote that down. Like, that's a really interesting quote. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means for you?

Ian (06:35):

Well, you know, it means a lot. It means a lot of, a lot of different things. I think, you know, it's a good, you can kind of, in his case, he was talking about, you know, two dimensional illustrations. I was an illustration major in school and that's, and that's what he was talking about. And that idea was just when you squint at something, it needs, it needs to work that way. It needs to work in its bones. It needs, you know, details will not carry the day for you if your core composition color theory and everything else isn't successful. I think that applies for, for games in a lot of ways to where we, especially as game developers can get so caught up in implementation and, and, and the way things are being made and all these little details. But the, the real key is, is being able to squint at your game and still, and get it.

Ian (07:27):

And is it, and is it strong? And, and so often you can also, when you squint at something, see what's wrong with it because you're, you're taking away the superfluous details and things, and that's sort of, it's always a challenge. Cause you, you get, you get down really into the weeds of your game and you're working on this little texture or this beat or whatever it behooves us all to take a step back and squint at it every once in awhile and, and really see, is that, is it paying off at the, at at the top of it

Jordan (07:56):

Sort of like specifically visually, you know, if you, if you're squinting, you can kinda, you can kind of like, are the colors working? Is the contrast work? Is it still, is there still something cool there? What I like about the way you express that is that there's, it sounds like there's kind of a deeper level, like squinting the metaphor of squinting at whatever you're doing the story. Can you squint to the story and still have it

Ian (08:18):

Right. If you can't, then you got a problem. This happens a lot in, in, in this particular, in the art context, right? It's because you can make fundamental compositional errors or biological errors if you're drawing a person or something, and it doesn't matter how nicely you render that skin tone or the hair, if you didn't lay out that face, right. It's not, you're not going to save it. It's not going to work. And also as you're laying in light and, and shape and form you should be able to squint at it and, and, and still get it. And I think it's the same same thing with code or story or design or any of those things. It needs to work at a detail level. And at a squint level,

Jordan (09:02):

I want to ask you, I noticed that you started back at LucasArts. Is that kind of where you feel like you've got, I mean, I know you did some work before that

Ian (09:09):

Didn't work before that. So I, I, my first gig was doing AR back in the, sort of when the PlayStation came out in 96, that's when, you know, CD rom was sort of a part of the package for the first time. And we all remember what a leap sort of final fantasy seven made in terms of graphical storage and that kind of thing. And being able to move around all these background paintings. So that was my first gig was working on an RPG. That was a lot like that, that was just fine. And then in November of 98, grim Fandango came out and it was technologically very similar, moving around a sort of relatively crude, 3d character on a, on a two D background that had had some elements cut out and stuff like that. So it kind of had a full three D effect. And I just, man, I just loved every part of that game. I loved the vibe, I loved the originality. I loved every part of it, talking about it,

Jordan (09:56):

Where you can squint at it and it still works.

Ian (09:58):

Yeah. In terms of like, what are they incredibly strong concept? And so I went to Lucas arts about six months later after grim Fandango had come out, unfortunately, I kind of felt like the guy who got to the party that was kind of lame and there was a couple of people to party that were like, dude, you should have been here an hour ago gazing because right as I was getting there was during that year is when nihilistic infinite machine. And DoubleFine all got started by Lucas arts, people who had all just made stuff I loved and then decided to leave. I got there only just in time to see the bus pulling away with the loop starts that I knew what year was that this is 99 and I would turn into other fabulous opportunities. And I, and I had a great time there. It just, wasn't what I thought I was joining up with.

Jordan (10:51):

Amazing how many great studios came out of that.

Ian (10:54):

And double find still going strong and really sort of delivering on the same mission that Tim had when he struck out to do it in early 2000. And then a lot of the guys that I came into and worked with for a little bit, just after that they left and formed telltale and man were they ahead of the curve with their episodic model? And what they'd been doing and telltale has been a, quite a machine ever since actually did a few games with them when I was at Ubisoft.

Jordan (11:20):

Oh yeah. I know that crew pretty well, amazing talent over there. And they're doing their V the way their vision has become their reality is just

Ian (