MONTREAL — Contrary to what you might think, the creators of upcoming Star Wars games are not just waiting to get the scripts handed to them by the makers of the new episodes of Star Wars movies. The video games are not going to be carbon copies of the movie experiences.
Amy Hennig, creative director at Electronic Arts’ Visceral Games studio in Redwood City, Calif., and Jade Raymond, head of the new EA Motive studio in Montreal, are hoping to create interesting new experiences in the universe of the upcoming Disney/Lucasfilm Star Wars movies, the first of which, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, debuts on Dec. 18. EA’s Star Wars Battlefront multiplayer game is out now (Hennig and Raymond did not work on this game, which was created by EA’s DICE studio), but we haven’t heard much about the console games based on the new trilogy of films yet.
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EA has the license to make Star Wars games based both on the new films and other parts of the Star Wars universe. And Hennig and Raymond say they’re working closely with the Lucasfilm creative teams and are carving out their own roles in an endeavor that many video game creators have to experience: how to create something that gamers will universally like without violating the creative rules laid down by movie makers for a franchise that was created for another medium.
Hennig has been working at EA for 18 months, and Raymond just started earlier this year. Their games won’t appear for some time, and they haven’t announced any details beyond the fact that they are both working on Star Wars games.
They spoke about the creative process during a fireside keynote session at the Montreal International Game Expo in Montreal last week. Jason Della Rocca, cofounder of the Execution Labs game accelerator in Montreal, moderated the talk with Hennig and Raymond. We also interviewed Raymond and Hennig in a separate discussion here.
Here’s an edited transcript of the discussion.
Above: Jason Della Rocca of Execution Labs interviews Uncharted writer Amy Hennig and Assassin’s Creed co-creator Jade Raymond on creativity at MIGS 15.
Jason Della Rocca: Whenever I think about creativity, the creative process, a lot of developers tend to think about the creativity, but not the process. Certainly going back a decade or two, as designers and developers, we didn’t even have a vocabulary to articulate what we were doing. We just did it from our gut, from intuition, from playing other people’s games and seeing people play our games. This notion of having a methodology of design or creativity, I would say, is a newish thing. Are you more of this intuition, gut-feel type of creator, or do you have a methodology or process?
Amy Hennig: Both, right? I’m an intuitive person, but folks in the audience that know me would probably agree that I’m a pretty anal-retentive person when it comes to analyzing stuff and trying to break it down. If you just tackle problems from one side, if you’re completely analytical, then there’s no spark of inspiration. It gives you a framework, but it doesn’t give you that lightbulb moment.
Della Rocca: You can’t sit down and say, “Now it’s time to be creative. Here is my 10-step process.”
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Hennig: Unfortunately we do have to do that. Then I have a meeting an hour later and the wheels have just started turning. It’s challenging, being creative in a business environment.
Jade Raymond: I work with teams and I try to enable their creativity, get rid of their creative roadblocks. It’s less of a process about me being creative personally. There are a lot of things these days, as teams continue to get bigger and engines become more complex and the process around making games — as we become better at controlling our schedules and other things that are important, we also tend to sometimes take a step too far in a way that can impede creativity. It can get in the way of the individuals on the team.
Della Rocca: A step too far in terms of applying your processes?
Raymond: Yeah. Process is a tough thing. Whenever we make a game, we’re reinventing the wheel. That’s what’s so exciting about it. You’re not just reskinning something or slapping a new story in the same game mechanics. Every time you release a new game, you have to think about what’s new and what’s different.
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We have to think the same way about processes. Depending on the game, depending on what you’re trying to build, and most important, depending on what’s preventing the team from being creative. When we’ve gotten those magical moments in a game, where something really special comes into it, it’s often not necessarily something that was on paper. Individual people have an idea and they’re able to bring it into the game. That’s the special touch. In some cases, more recently, we’ve been putting processes in place that can squash that.
Hennig: It comes back to business processes, right? Can we tick some boxes or something to make people comfortable with a process that is by nature uncomfortable?
Above: Star Wars: Battlefront in action.
Della Rocca: As a creative director, I’m guessing you’ve worked with managers and bosses who served more as unblockers, like Jade is saying, versus people who are trying to put more processes in place.
Hennig: We’ve all had good and bad experiences with management. Sometimes there’s a necessary tension between a production role and a creative role. You don’t want either one to run rampant over the other. There should be a good supportive tension between the two.
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It’s been interesting, in my career — I was at Electronic Arts early on in my time in the industry, then Crystal Dynamics, then Naughty Dog, and now back to EA. It’s been a journey across that whole spectrum. At Naughty Dog we didn’t have any managers per se. We often described the situation as organized chaos. It works, in a way, but the chaos part could be pretty difficult.
Della Rocca: Jane, how do you deal with organized chaos?
Raymond: It’s always a fine balance between how you make sure you’re allowing a light enough process, where people have the ability to bring up new stuff that isn’t planned, but how you also make sure you’re managing things well so people have a decent work-life balance. We’ve discussed this before, about your time at Naughty Dog and just in general. You have to be careful of people’s time and make sure you’re managing the schedule properly.
But there are all kinds of different things to consider. For example, the tools we give people. A lot of things take away creativity that we don’t really question. Does anyone ever feel creative when they’re sitting in a car in traffic trying to get somewhere? No. If you think about what a lot of developers struggle with day to day — waiting for builds, waiting for data, all this wait time — those kinds of things steal creativity too. You need to look at all kinds of things.
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Della Rocca: Do you have specific techniques to unblock creativity? Particularly in the context of accountability or a sense of ownership. When you’re managing much larger teams, it’s hard to find a sense of ownership when you’re one of 500 people working on a massive IP.
Raymond: If I were to distill something down to basics about ownership and empowering teams — creating a flat enough structure, so there aren’t a million layers of assistant to the assistant. That doesn’t work. The other thing is, how do you divide up what you’re trying to do in a game into small enough pieces such that smaller teams can have ownership and operate within the larger team?
Any time there’s one bottleneck, one person making all the decisions that everything has to funnel through, whether it’s a creative or a production decision, you’re choking up the team as far as their ability to take ownership. How do you look at what you’re trying to accomplish and divide that up around the team? That can lead both to creative ownership and the ability to actually deliver.
Above: Jason Della Rocca, Amy Hennig, and Jade Raymond talk about the creative process at MIGS 15.
Hennig: It’s a hard balance. You want to give people enough direction, give them the necessary constraints, so they understand the goal they’re trying to meet. The problem is that if you give them too much, they become dependent on it. They’re waiting on you for everything.
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One of the things I’ve said a lot of times to people who aspire to a job like mine is a little warning. It’s actually not about getting more control. It’s about giving up control, the willingness to delegate ownership so people are invested in the project. Understand that what that means is it’s not always necessarily going to be your idea that comes through. If it’s someone else’s idea, and it’s just as good, then that’s better. The passion in the work comes through, as opposed to having everything authored from the top by some auteur.
Della Rocca: You’ve had great success in your job. Is there a sense of pressure now that comes from that? Does that hinder you in any way.
Hennig: It’s probably a razor-thin line. On one day I might be falling on one side of it in terms of becoming a bottleneck, and other days I might be able to put together enough information that I’m able to take the constraints off. You just keep correcting. But I find that people can be the most invested when you give them a problem to solve.
It’s the same thing as good game design, right? You don’t want to lead the player by the nose. You want to give them a problem and let them be creative in solving that problem. The same is true of the people on your team.
Above: Amy Hennig, Scott Probst (both of EA Visceral Games) and Jade Raymond of EA Motive in Montreal.
Della Rocca: What about working on new IP versus developing within a franchise? Both of you have done amazing work both in creating new franchises and servicing existing franchise. Is there a different mindset to how you manage creativity in those different contexts?
Hennig: Not basically. Making a game is making a game. The processes are different. It’s different working on something like Uncharted compared to Star Wars. There’s a lot of people involved in Star Wars, you know. Biggest IP in the world and all that. But Lucasfilm has actually been a great partner. They understand this idea of empowering your creatives and letting them go and then just tugging the reins gently if they go too far.
Raymond: When you’re working on an existing franchise, you think about what it was before and what it is to all the fans. That’s the main thing. When you’re starting from scratch, you have an audience in mind — you’re always making games for players and thinking about what players are going to want — but when you have an existing franchise there’s this legacy of what your fans are looking for. They’re the number one player and customer you have to consider.
Hennig: The pressure is a little different. On the one hand, yeah, you’re trying to make sure you satisfy the fans and the stakeholders in an existing IP. When you’re trying to make something new, you’re trying to convince people that it’s going to last. You’re following your gut. Are people going to like this? Is this going to be a hit? You don’t know until it ships.
Della Rocca: Amy, you talked about how different the process is working on Star Wars, given the extent of the brand and the franchise. Can you elaborate on that?
Hennig: There’s so much regarding this project and this collaboration and this partnership that people wouldn’t expect. All of these companies are going through a lot of really good changes right now, and have been over the last couple of years. Lucasfilm is under new management, which has brought in a lot of new life. Kathleen Kennedy’s a rock star. Her team there are just the best. I’ve been working with them for a year and a half. That’s not PR. It’s true. When I went up there before I took the job and talked to them, it was a kind of revelation to me, what this relationship was going to be like.
Add that to the fact that there’s new management at EA under Andrew Wilson and it’s a whole new vibe that’s been evolving over the last couple of years. With Visceral Games we have new management taking the reins. We’ve been restructuring to put our money where our mouth is and say, “This idea of creative ownership and empowering leads is critically important.” With Motive starting up under Jade’s leadership and sharing that same philosophy and co-developing this game as partners, even though we’re miles away, it seems like this perfect collision of everybody being in the right mindset at the right time.
Della Rocca: With the studio you’re building in Montreal, Jade, can you give us some insight into what that collaboration looks like?
Above: Amy Hennig also talked about messages versus fun in games at MIGS 15.
Raymond: It’s a similar approach to what we were talking about. The same ideas of flat structure and empowerment, and also just making the part of the game that’s going to be developed into Montreal and the part that’s going to be developed at Visceral clearly defined. Each team can have ownership. We’re not stuck in approval loops or whatever. We’re collaborating and each delivering our own section.
Della Rocca: What about DICE, back in Sweden? Are they going to be involved?
Raymond: One good thing about everyone EA being on the same engine is you can obviously build on all that stuff. All those assets for Star Wars, all the tech for spaceship battles, we can leverage and build on top of that. It’s the same with stuff that’s done for Dragon Age or any other games. That’s a difference for me. I feel like the kid in the candy store. All this stuff made everywhere is in the same engine.
Hennig: It’s always baby steps, always a learning process. That’s part of this change too. Studios used to always use their own bespoke engines. Now everybody’s on Frostbite, which has been a learning process, but the fact that you can leverage the know-how of all these people across the company. If we’re working on a piece of tech that benefits Mass Effect, or we’re working on something that benefits them, we can have those conversations at the ground level.
Della Rocca: That sounds great in theory, but….
Raymond: It’s just that easy! No, it’s never that easy.
Hennig: The point is that Patrick Soderlund is the head of all development for EA. He’s very much holding the reins of the Frostbite team. He wants to make sure that game teams, as customers, are getting served, and he’s encouraging collaboration between teams so people aren’t reinventing wheels. It does require good communication. But as long as we encourage people to do that at a grass-roots level, as opposed to making them go through some long process….
Della Rocca: You said before that sometimes tech and tools can hinder that sense of creative ownership. That’s not a critique of Frostbite, but there is this sense of it’s a tool that’s trying to serve many games and many needs.
Hennig: Well, there’s different versions of it. There are different branches throughout the company. Things that are useful to everyone get folded back into the main branch. But it has to be shepherded, of course.
Above: Scene from Assassin’s Creed II.
Raymond: The indie scene is booming in Montreal, so I imagine there are indie developers in the audience. If you think of Unity, that’s an engine that services — how many game teams are on that? Millions? And the community is pooling things together. People are making their own modules and you can buy the ones that are useful to you. That’s working great. I don’t know why you couldn’t do that within a company as well.
Della Rocca: While we’re on the topic of indies, obviously a lot of work that the two of you have done has been with much larger franchises, much larger teams, much larger budgets. Do you see any of your approaches or processes as relevant to a four-person or five-person team?
Hennig: The same philosophies of working collaboratively apply whether it’s four people or 400. It requires humility. All these problems are hard to solve. Sometimes the stars align and things come together easily, but sometimes they don’t. That idea that you have to distribute ownership, the one-plus-one-equals-three idea.
A lot of the philosophies I would take to the stage, working with actors, are the philosophies I would apply in the workplace. You might have four people, five, a little indie team, and you’re working together. You come in with a script, throw pencils on the table, and say, “This version is crap. Let’s make it better together.” Everybody checks their ego, if possible. We elevate the work together.
You should also build a safe space. There should be a freedom to fail. You can try something and have it not work. It’s okay to show something ugly. It’s okay to have an idea that isn’t fully formed. We’ll fully form it together. Taking that philosophy from the stage into the workplace has always been an ideal.
Above: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Raymond: Before starting at EA, I did some consulting with small indie teams, friends who were working on stuff. One thing I found is that there are a lot of similar questions that happen on small teams as on bigger ones. Especially on teams that have had one success and they’re moving on to the next game. They’re still a small indie studio, but now that it’s no longer a question of, “Are we gonna be able to buy food?”, what’s the new structure?
When you start an indie studio, you have the pressure of everything being new. Then you finish your first project and maybe the pressure goes down a bit. What’s the motivation now? How do you hold the team together? All those question surface. I found a lot of commonalities in the types of things you need to put in place to support bigger teams.
Della Rocca: It’s interesting, this notion of having some success and what that enables you to do, or prevents you from doing, on the next thing. It goes back to the franchise question, but indies face it as well. They get some momentum and it feels like a big risk to deviate from that initial success.
Raymond: Or, for example, the team that put out Monument Valley, what’s their next game? Can it be as impactful and artistic? You were asking Amy about the pressure of success. Indies feel that too.
Hennig: It’s almost paralyzing to have something so successful. “Holy shit, I don’t know how we did that. Can we do it again?” I’ve often said, too, that everyone worth their salt suffers from impostor syndrome. Everybody thinks they’re a fraud and it’s just a matter of time before they’ll be found out.
I talked to Jenova Chen after he finished Journey. He was trying to figure out what would be next, and I think it was a little paralyzing for him too. “I don’t just want to turn the crank and do something people expect.” That’s a lot of pressure, to feel like you have to outdo yourself.
Above: Amy Hennig, center, talking about creativity in game narratives at MIGS 15 (with Jason Della Rocca and Jade Raymond).
Della Rocca: I want to go back to something you said, Amy, about creating safe spaces and enabling developers to feel it’s okay to fail. I strongly believe in failure as part of an exploration process, as part of discovering what is successful, but not everyone takes that view. They’re paralyzed by a notion of failure. How do you create that space?
Hennig: You talk about it a lot. It needs caveating all the time. When we show each other our work and say, “This is the bad version.” It loosens you up to say, “But I’m going to show it to you and then we can all make it better together.” And often the bad version is actually the really good version.
The challenge in a larger company sometimes — a good development culture for a team, where you create that freedom to fail and embrace failure as a movement, because it’s learning and leading to success — when you’re part of a larger organization, that can be viewed as antithetical to creating a successful company. But those of us in management positions, we can keep applying pressure upward to say, “This has to be okay. We’re going to show you stuff that isn’t done yet.”
Raymond: I agree that it’s a matter of talking about it. If you always say things, “Look, we’re going to try these five things so we know at the end we’ll have at least two good ones,” if you always approach things like that, then people understand that it’s part of the culture. It’s what’s expected.
When people from outside the game industry talk to me about what it’s like, to me there are parallels with something like comedy. You don’t ever know a joke is going to be funny until you tell it to an audience. If you’re trying to create something new and different, you don’t know if it’s going to be fun. That’s where we get into trouble. If you’re not planning for any failures, you don’t make time for the possibility.
Hennig: Failure is such a loaded word. You don’t want to say, “We should absolutely fail before we succeed.” But we get to good by showing the not-good. Some things maybe just never jell and you have to be willing to make that call. But the point is, these things take iterations. It’s the nature of our work. It’s invention. It isn’t just execution.
Trying to balance out the needs of a large organization that requires some degree of knowability when what we do is by its nature unknowable — I always talk about how what we do is like charging into a void blindfolded on a tightrope. “Follow me!” It’s a big, sustained act of faith. It’s an internal act of faith and a shared act of faith with the team. You need philosophies within the company that share that faith and extend that faith.
Della Rocca: I’m guessing that working with Lucasfilm, they follow a similar philosophy. Dealing with a licensor like that, there must be immense pressure to never show them the not-good stuff.
Hennig: It just doesn’t work to hold it too close to your vest and say, “It’s not ready yet. It’s not ready yet.” People will revert to that, too, if they ever feel like their vulnerability led to a bad result. We have to make sure it’s always safe.
When I talk about a safe space, I don’t mean that we’re going to coddle everybody and handle them with kid gloves. But we have to feel like there aren’t repercussions to saying something stupid or showing something bad. It’s the way to doing something good.
Raymond: Because you’ve been there and collaborated with them from day one, there’s also this idea that they’ve been part of the creative process, and so they have ownership as well. It goes back to the topic of collaboration and ownership. They have ownership and buy-in and more passion and all that stuff. You have people on Lucasfilm’s team who are part of everything you’re doing.
Above: Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens on Dec. 18. EA is making films based on the movies.
Hennig: Exactly. It was very wise of them to set it up that way. That’s how they deal with people in their own company as well. They try to give them lots of space, even though that might involve change and unknowability too. It wasn’t what I would have expected, coming into a situation with a couple of big companies like EA and Lucasfilm and this giant IP that applies so much pressure. They’re absolutely collaborating with us.
One of the challenges — there’s this great opportunity in the fact that the galaxy is so much bigger than the films we’ve seen so far. They’ve worked very closely with their creatives to say, “Don’t just fall back on what we know. Our job, working together, is to explore and make more in the spirit of what’s dear to us. Show how much bigger the galaxy is with new characters and new stories.”
Della Rocca: The notion of perfectionism — as you say, some people keep their work close to the chest. They have ideas, but they may not want to show them yet. I tend to see that as a signal of fear. It’s not that they’re actually a perfectionist. They just don’t want to show their work because they don’t have that confidence. They don’t feel that it’s safe enough to reveal what they’re working on.
Hennig: Right. And they’ve probably suffered consequences for doing that in the past. That’s why we have to protect folks from that. But again, with Lucasfilm, because they’re creatives — because they’re filmmakers and writers themselves — they’ve embraced us in the story group. We’re developing the story with them, bringing in raw ideas and saying, “What about this? What about that?” And they say, “Well, not that, but…” We bounce off each other.
Working with Doug Chiang as our art director has been amazing. It’s not just, “We did some art. Can we get a rubber stamp?” We just bring all the raw artwork to him, lay it on the table, get out a Sharpie and say, “What’s working for you? What’s landing? What isn’t?” To be able to do stuff within the Star Wars canon and have it not only blessed by them but have them as collaborators — it’s honestly kind of mind-blowing.
Della Rocca: I liked your comedy analogy. It makes me think of playtesting, taking our games and putting them in front of real players and seeing if the joke works, if the gameplay is fun. Ubisoft in particular, with the Assassin’s Creed franchise — that was heavily developed through the playtesting process, leveraging user input for a big part of that. I’m curious to know to what extent you’re taking that into current projects and leveraging playtest methodologies and user research.
Raymond: It’s key. One thing that’s interesting as you go through testing at the end of a game: No matter what game you’re working on, there’s a very strong correlation between getting the difficulty level right and fun.
The challenge is, as games become more and more mass-market and the audiences become more broad—Especially with a Star Wars game, where you’re going to bring in everything from core fans to someone who doesn’t necessarily play games often, how to you get difficulty right so that everyone is having fun? That’s the kind of thing that can playtesting can help highlight.
Above: EA is making games based on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and other Star Wars stories.
Hennig: We were big believers at Naughty Dog too, and also at EA. We bring in people on a frequent basis. You might bring in 10 or 12 people. You should make sure it’s on site. Make sure you can watch them. Make sure you see what they do. Also, make sure you’re getting metrics out. That was the most useful thing. We could collate all this stuff and look at where we had difficulty spikes, where people were stuck for too long.
You could see it in people’s body language, too. If they’re into it and leaning forward, and then they pull back, take a note. Some of this stuff is almost anthropological observation when you’re sitting in the room with them. When we got things right, on the Uncharted games and on The Last of Us, it was because we went through such rigorous testing to make sure pacing wasn’t getting sacrificed.
Della Rocca: This is one of the major challenges for indies. They tend to use themselves or other developers as testers. Often when we play indie games for the first time, they’re super hard. I’m not a pro gamer, but I’m still a gamer, and I just die.
Hennig: Some designers pride themselves on punishing the player.
Della Rocca: But I think in most cases they just don’t realize, because they’ve played and tested it themselves for so long. At Execution Labs we instill a rigor around testing on a regular basis. We video people. We have surveys. It’s a core part of the process, even for small indie teams.
It’s a humbling process, when you take a game that you think is so amazing and you put it in front of players. They’re frustrated. They don’t know where to go or what to do. We see it all the time.
Raymond: They almost always don’t play it the way you thought they would.
Hennig: Sometimes they seem like they’re getting stuck, but in reality they’re just enjoying being lost. If you ask them, they say, “Oh, no, I was having fun.” In the metrics it shows up as they were in the level way too long, but they were just dicking around and enjoying it. “Were you having a hard time?” “No. Just looking at the bricks.”
We talk about a lot of high-level philosophies up here, but that’s kind of what it comes down to. It’s not just a matter of, “Here’s a bunch of tips and tricks and things you can do.” It really is the attitude. One thing I’ve talked about before in terms of making that analogy to how I work with actors. People have tried to emulate our process, but they didn’t emulate the why of what we’ve done, only the how. Then they don’t get our results and they don’t understand why. It’s because they weren’t carrying the philosophy with them.
Above: Jade Raymond (right) answers questions at MIGS 15 session moderated by Jason Della Rocca. Her colleague Amy Hennig is in the center.
This section includes questions from the audience.
GamesBeat: Jade, how do you deal with questions of cost versus creativity? Sometimes people ask for more time, but that’s going to be very expensive. As a manager, how do you deal with that dilemma?
Raymond: Cost is a very real thing that needs to be managed, whether you’re an indie or a big company. We love making games, but ultimately we do need to pay bills.
These days making games is pretty expensive. You have to start with the right product. You can’t start with a budget and then cut your game to fit that. You have to start by thinking about what will be an amazing product for players. That’s been something I’ve been happy to see EA focus on with “player first.” If you focus on that you’ll see a good result.
When you’re looking around at teams that have done well and successful games that have come out of small studios, that’s a common thread. Watch your costs and be conscious of them, but as long as you’re making decisions based on what’s best for the player, then you should find success.
Della Rocca: Part of it is having a clear vision of what you’re making. What ends up happening — we see this on the indie side — is that if you don’t have a clear sense of what your game is about or a vision of what you’re trying to deliver, an extra cost is just an extra cost. As opposed to, “This will cost extra money but it serves the vision. It’s justifiable.”
Hennig: Part of it is the crucible of having a team you have to answer to, or management you have to answer to. As frustrating as it can be at moments, it’s the grit that’s going to make the pearl. You have to put limits on yourself and challenge yourself and assure yourself that it’s okay to debate things and challenge yourself.
Raymond: Going back to creativity, where are you putting your emphasis? To make a 90+ game, to make the best game possible for a player, it doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be an A+. Sometimes the best experience could result from pushing to innovate in certain areas, but not all the areas. It’s making choices and recognizing that our goal isn’t maxing all the sliders to the top.
Question: You mentioned how crucial playtesting can be, and you emphasized in-house testing. What about online testing, in a situation where you can’t gather testers in person? How would you draw metrics from them and engage them?
Above: Scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Hennig: Betas are great because you get a big sample set. The data coming out of that can be very important to see what mechanics people are using, what they aren’t getting, where they get stuck. Unfortunately you do lose out on that observation aspect, which is huge, the anecdotal evidence.
Interviews are semi-useful anyway, because you have to interpret what people mean and not take it literally sometimes. They may not be articulating what’s really bothering them.
Raymond: Different types of testing are good for different phases of development. Also, it depends on the product. With smaller indie companies and early access on Steam, there’s different approaches for bringing bigger testing to a smaller product, as opposed to the type of game we’re working on, which has a different focus. You have to pick the right format for your playtesting given the game you’re working on and the phase it’s in.
Della Rocca: There’s no excuse not to fully instrument your game, regardless of the platform or business model. The teams we’ve worked with, everyone’s put in analytics for tracking player behavior. It’s not just for mobile free-to-play stuff. Every game we do, we’re able to instrument and have data to analyze player behavior.
Question: You talked about reinventing the wheel when you make a new game. When you’re building a sequel, though, what’s the process for re-creating the formula that made the first game a success? When might you not use that formula again?
Hennig: You want to see if you can do it better, right? When we made Uncharted 2, we actually threw the whole engine away, pretty much, and rewrote it. Which, in hindsight, was pretty crazy. It obviously improved on the formula quite a bit. For developers there’s usually a ton of stuff you wanted to do the first time and couldn’t get to, so you’re kind of champing at the bit to get to the sequel and try all that.
Some of those changes can be misguided. You think it works, and with some testing it still works, but when it gets to a wide audience it doesn’t work as well. Sometimes you wind back. But I always describe what we do as moving the ball down the field. We’re experimenting with every game we make. It’s not like we’ve got it nailed and done and perfect. It’s an evolution. We see how people respond, as an industry, and then we adjust accordingly.
Question: Have you ever run into the issue where every playtester playing your game has a different problem, and you’re trying to fix every single thing and getting bogged down in details?
Raymond: You have to avoid that. There is a tendency — often you have to remind people that these are specific players. Sometimes it’s a bit random who you wind up using, compared to the larger population. One person’s opinion, especially if it’s about a very particular thing, might not reflect what you need to fix for players in general to be happy. We hired a playtest analyst at Ubisoft Toronto who was great. He helped put in place a methodology to make sure that the teams weren’t paying too much attention to outliers.
Hennig: There are themes that come up. And then you do have to interpret feedback and not just take it completely literally. It’s almost like reading forums. If you do trudge through that, you’re probably going to be able to see certain themes coming back again and again, versus one or two people grousing about a particular thing. You have to let that go. But everything is saying something similar, you have to find out what’s bothering.
Above: Jason Della Rocca takes questions for EA’s Star Wars game creators Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond.
Della Rocca: It comes back to your comment much earlier on about the tension between methodology and intuition. We’re not slaves to data, even though it informs creative choices and decisions.
Question: What’s your recruiting process like? What do you look for in applicants and candidates?
Hennig: The philosophy of hiring should be to look for potential, not necessarily experience.
Raymond: Passion and potential. Those are two key things. Do people care about the product, care about games? Do they want to make something great? That counts for a lot.
Question: When you start a new project, it can be daunting. You have an idea of what you want to do, but you how do you get over that block when you start?
Hennig: My advice would be, we live in an age of distraction. It takes a while before the wheels start turning. You have to have the patience to wait out that horrible feeling of, “I have no ideas and the page is blank.” But if you go, “Oh, I’ll just check my email, let me go look at Facebook,” you’ll never get into that mode, because you reset every time. You have to push through and keep thinking. That’s my best advice.
Della Rocca: I’d say, go do a game jam. That’ll keep you moving. There’s one coming up in January, Global Game Jam.
Question: Video games engineer or create systems that themselves create other things. When you’re creating those systems, do you think there are differences in that process compared to creating other sorts of things – story, art, environments, things like that?
Hennig: This is the ideal, right? In some ways it’s the Holy Grail, a game that’s fully systemic and has all kinds of surprises in it, where player agency is rewarded in all kinds of unexpected ways. The challenge of designing systems is all that unpredictability. It’s both a benefit and a challenge. That’s why it’s so tempting to just script something up so you know what’s going to happen. But we should never default to that if we can help it.
Question: Amy, you mentioned checking your ego at the door. What do you do manage that issue for both yourself and your team?
Hennig: We all have egos, right? We’re human beings. The thing is, especially if you’re in a leadership role, it’s incumbent upon you to not engage on that level. If someone is sort of bristling, if their ego is reacting and they’re feeling challenged, you have to just barrel through it. And you have to check yourself.
Sometimes you’ll look at people’s work and they do something you didn’t expect. You have to, in your head, before you say a word, think it through. “That’s different than what I asked for, but is it just as good? Is it better? Can I put my ego aside and determine that it’s even better than what I imagined? Or is it not as good as what I asked for and we need to readjust something?” The muscle you develop it the ability to do that as quickly as possible before you speak, and not just have an awkward silence while you go through the process.
It’s having the ability to say, “Okay, I can look at this more objectively.” If it’s better than what I can come up with, I shouldn’t feel threatened. I should get excited.
Above: You ever notice that it hurts more to get shot when its cold?
Raymond: It has to be a part of the culture you’re trying to build. Everything has to be aligned. For anything you’re trying to instill in terms of culture in the workplace, you have to make sure everything you’re doing is aligned with that.
If part of your culture is humility, does one person have a corner office with leather couches? Does everyone have the same desk, or do leads have bigger desks? You have to watch out for all of that. If you really want to create certain values in your culture, everything has to be aligned. Lead by example. Check yourself. Make sure other people feel comfortable checking that as well. Look at all the things you have in place in terms of team structure and workplace. Is there anything there that treats someone like the rock star? If so, you should address that.
Hennig: “Thank you,” “Good job,” and “I’m sorry” go a long way. In any relationship you have to be able to swallow your pride sometimes and praise people and apologize, if an apology is needed.
Question: When you’re exploring a new IP, is there a process that you go through to decide when to set a deadline on that creative process? Is there a point where you say, “We’re not satisfied with what we have, but we’ll run with the best idea we’ve got”?
Hennig: Sometimes you can table certain things and take more time with them while you move forward on other things. I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. You want to work with people who have enough combined wisdom and experience that you can gut check it together and say, “Yeah, this could stand some time marinating.” Rely on your team to check that.
Question: Jade, you mentioned developing an organization that’s flat in structure. Are there any particular challenges to keep in mind when you’re doing that?
Raymond: It requires everyone having a certain amount of ownership and autonomy. In some cases it can be retraining the way people think of working. If people have been on bigger projects where they’re used to having three layers of project managers putting in each task one by one—If that’s what they’re used to and all of a sudden it isn’t there, how are you retraining those people to think about their jobs around taking more ownership and taking up more space?
Question: As someone who’s in school right now with ambitions of eventually working in the game industry, is going into graduate work a good idea, or is that a waste of time?
Raymond: As long as you feel like you’re learning something and doing something valuable, no. Do you think you’re wasting your time? That would be the barometer. We’ve hired great grad students who’ve come with a wealth of knowledge and experience. The only case where my answer would be yes is if that’s what you feel. There are teams doing a lot of research around analytics and genre and the way players are playing. There’s research into new technology and where that could lead. That’s part of planning for the future.