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00:00Let's be clear about this. Ideas are cheap and they're simple.
00:04You know, I can sit down and think of an idea and it takes me that long.
00:09But it's only the implementation of that idea, only the skill of the people that you work with,
00:16that really brings that idea to fruition.
00:46For me, a God game is about freedom. It's about a freedom to approach the world in any way you
00:55want.
00:56There are no limits. You never say, I can't do this and I can't do that.
01:02It feels like a big sort of clockwork machine in a way, if that makes sense.
01:06That's nice that you go in there and tinker with things and change settings.
01:09If you want to rip a tree out of the ground, you can do it. If you want to change
01:12the weather, you can do it.
01:14And see how that sort of affects the sort of ecosystem of everything.
01:18And that is the heart of what God game should be.
01:21It should allow you to do things, to experiment with things, to experiment with approaches.
01:28But that freedom gives you a sense of power.
01:31And that's what God game should be all about.
01:35A meeting I had with Peter about three years ago, and he said he was working on this new game
01:42idea, Master of Albion.
01:45And he wanted this to be like a mixture of all the previous games we'd ever worked on.
01:50All the big hits that we'd done. Dungeon Keeper, Fable, Black and White was a big inspiration.
01:57So he wanted a mixture of all those games in this one game. It was almost like a legacy type
02:04game.
02:05I mean, it's interesting to be working on a God game that's obviously mixing genres.
02:09So the God aspect, I guess, is like the wrapper for it all.
02:13But the fact that you've kind of got what you'd consider traditional God-like mechanics,
02:17where you're sort of, you know, looking down on the landscape.
02:19But then you can go right in there and actually literally possess a hero or a character or a chicken.
02:26So there's two things to say about the God game genre.
02:29The first thing to say is it's a withering genre of game.
02:35You know, it's a small percentage of that pie chart of all games that people play.
02:42And for me, that would be incredibly sad to see it wither to nothing.
02:47And if we're going to reinvigorate it, then there has to be something special,
02:53there has to be something new, there has to be something fresh and innovational about what we present to the
02:58player.
02:59And that's what I believe Masters of Albion means.
03:21So I think one of the things that I kind of obsess about a little bit, and that was what
03:27I kind of wanted to bring to the project when I joined really,
03:29was sort of emphasising the kind of miniature feel of it, although you can go in sometimes and possess the
03:36characters so you're in the world.
03:38When you're more in God mode, I like the idea of it almost feeling like a sort of Warhammer style
03:43miniature or something that's on a table that's animating.
03:46When I'm talking with other artists, we sort of use, you know, nicely sculpted figures and things as the sort
03:53of reference point rather than realistic looking humans.
03:57And sometimes it's a bit of a struggle because, you know, someone like Pete would be like, okay, let's use
04:02realistic looking hair.
04:03And I'm like, you're kind of missing the point of what the idea is here. They're supposed to be like
04:07sculpted characters, not, you don't have a sculpted character with like real hair on it.
04:12If you turned up to your Warhammer knight with like, you know, your human hair sculpted on your barbarians, you'd
04:19probably get kicked out from being some kind of weirdo, wouldn't you? I don't know.
04:22I mean, there's some examples of I was doing some, some of the action blocks for the game, which are
04:28like the sort of machine part of the buildings, you know, like for the windmill, for example.
04:34So I had to go and research like, how do you actually make flour from wheat and stuff?
04:39So I learned all about how millstones work and had to invent my own mini version of that. So that's
04:44kind of fascinating.
04:46Creativity in general tends to be born from restrictions, I would argue. You know, like I've got, I like music,
04:54I've got my music studio, but I can boot up a sound package like Logic or something.
05:00And there's so many buttons and so many things to twiddle. You can just get lost in that and end
05:06up doing nothing.
05:07Whereas you give me like a basic tape recorder and a microphone and say, right, you've got to make a
05:11song.
05:12Probably going to have more chances of making something with that, to be honest with you, because there's a lot
05:17more limitation and restriction.
05:32Every game that I ever do, the first thing that I do is get the ambient sound bed sounding realistic.
05:38So that's all the birds tweeting, all the countryside sounding good, all the rivers and streams, everything that makes a
05:46world come to life.
05:48That's the first thing that I approach.
05:50The big challenge is going from music, which forms the bed of the game.
05:54So you've got all your ambient type music moving between different regions.
05:58So that's all your sort of your bed of ambient style music.
06:03This game also has a very script led storytelling way of taking you through the game so that you're not
06:12just playing the game as a god.
06:14You're also watching this story unfold.
06:17Each of those story elements obviously needs script based music.
06:22So how we blend between that ambient bed I was just talking about into the script based music is one
06:29of the biggest challenges for me because I don't want it to feel like stop that piece of music, start
06:34this piece of music.
06:35I want it to actually blend in so that it feels like it's all part of the same story.
06:40I always approach anything that I do based on what I'm imagining first and then I try to achieve that
06:48with the software and the tools that I've got.
06:52I never like to just sit down and play.
06:56When I feel like I'm coming up with my most creative ideas and things it's just because I'm playing with
06:59something and the ideas kind of pop out of that.
07:03I'm not sitting there pondering on a chair beforehand what my idea is.
07:07It always starts with imagination and imagining what something what you're trying to achieve and if I don't have that
07:13I have nothings.
07:15The process of doing and playing where the things emerge so I think that's really important.
07:20You know I like slapstick kind of humour and brash kind of things so the idea of contrasting a very
07:28cute kind of cosy chilled thing with sudden extreme violence and utter chaos.
07:38This one is a catapult.
07:40This one's a trebuchet.
07:43They're all different depending on which top you put on top of a turret depends on which sound you get
07:49in the game.
07:50But obviously all these are given 3D values.
07:54I can actually tell it at what distance it starts to fade out and at what distance you don't hear
08:01it at all.
08:04I like the places by the babbling brooks if you like.
08:09I like those areas where it just feels peaceful and calm.
08:13I also like the areas up in the mountains where it just feels quite cold but also just free.
08:20You know freedom to be up there.
08:31Here we are at St Martha's Church just outside Guildford.
08:36This beautiful place.
08:38I find really inspirational especially when thinking about God Games because you can see over there there's a little village
08:45and that's full of life.
08:47It's full of bustling life but I'm up here.
08:49I've got this God's view and I can imagine reaching out with my hand.
08:54My hand can almost cover that whole village and plucking a little house up and moving it over there.
09:01And that is the essence of what a God game is.
09:05And it's views like this that have really inspired me about that scale.
09:10That scale of going from the intimate from you know going to where you can see a leaf on a
09:16tree up to this God view.
09:18And nothing more inspirational than this for you.
09:29Are we all here? We are all right.
09:31Daniel do you want to start off coming in a ditcher so you can run through the mandate board?
09:35Yeah I mean you added a lot of P1s recently so this list looks a bit bigger now.
09:42Anything you're worried about?
09:44I mean I'm always going to be worried about the quantity of things that are on there still obviously with
09:51the little time left.
09:52I think it's just making sure we understand what's most important and order everything correctly but yeah that's my main
09:59worry.
09:59And the other thing that I've, it's always been a little bit of a mystery to me when many other
10:05codas in the room have got an idea of like I don't think when it's supposed to be locked with
10:09the April date but when it's going to be the lock.
10:12The lock as in like no one's there to change the thing now it's just pure bug things.
10:16That was last month's Mark.
10:18So that was last month.
10:20If we are forced into.
10:22Well that's the last month too.
10:22Obviously I'm not doing that though.
10:24Well that's because you keep adding stuff to the game Mark.
10:28You and your team.
10:29You keep adding stuff.
10:29We can't stop.
10:30We can't lock until you stop adding stuff.
10:34What am I adding?
10:35Well, the chicken building.
10:39Oh yeah.
10:40New Braille Mountain.
10:41That's changed by there.
10:42New Armour.
10:43It's just more and more stuff and more and more stuff keeps going in and we can't possibly say we're
10:49locked until more and more stuff is not going in.
10:52Yeah.
10:53Well okay.
10:53Well we're almost there with that.
10:55Yeah.
11:05So the last time I was here was I think at the end of Black and White and it was
11:13six o'clock in the morning around about that time.
11:17This is the only place that opened and all of us came down to celebrate the game going Gold Master.
11:24Yeah because we'd worked through the night.
11:25Yeah we worked through the night.
11:26I had probably bacon, sausage, eggs, chips, fried toast, ham, mushrooms.
11:36Probably the full works.
11:37I probably did as well.
11:38Yeah.
11:39Or I had a croissant or something like that.
11:42Do they do croissants here?
11:44Yeah like croissants.
11:46They used to laugh at you when you ordered it.
11:48Yeah probably.
11:51It's like we've never been apart.
11:53No it's true.
11:54It just slotted in so easily coming back together.
11:57Yeah.
11:58And I think it is just the trust.
12:00I have absolute trust in you guys and in what you do and everything that you do is of amazing
12:10quality.
12:11Yeah for me it's just nice to better work in that way that, well I've always worked for most of
12:18my time in the games industry but it's becoming rarer and rarer I think.
12:24Certainly if you go to like a big corporate company or something they can't embrace this.
12:28They can't.
12:28There's a level of paranoia there that is destructive as well.
12:32And everything has to be like pre-agreed and pre-backed up by data and all this sort of stuff
12:39and by the time you get to that you've forgotten what you were even talking about anyway.
12:42Yeah.
12:43So it's just horrible.
12:44I have got the ultimate defence strategy for my town.
12:48Is it turrets?
12:50If you feast yourself on turrets you're just being very lazy and you're not losing the game.
12:58I did embrace the idea of just moving my turrets around.
13:01I'd sort of almost forgotten that you could do that.
13:03And you can, you know, you see all these creatures coming towards you, just put a wall in front of
13:09you.
13:09Yeah, that's the problem.
13:11Well you know you're done, especially with the walls part of you.
13:15That is such a unique element in the game I think.
13:18I actually thought I'd beaten the game actually when we were doing the playthrough before because I found the giant
13:23rubber duck.
13:24Yeah.
13:24And that's really powerful.
13:26Yeah.
13:26And I was using it just to crush it.
13:28Yeah.
13:28And then it blows out of health and dies so I was really going with it.
13:31That is very satisfying.
13:33I mean by the time I get to some of those bigger fights I've already combined my buildings with, like
13:39I don't know, stand alone turrets at that point.
13:41So with the combat music that's my big push for March.
13:45That's going to be, because I think that's going to be the big win for the game is making the
13:48combat feel more dramatic.
13:51Especially, and you're brilliant at doing this Russell, if we start to telegraph the end of the combat.
14:00Yeah.
14:00You know, so if we can get a little bit more dramatic as you get towards the end and then
14:06as you're mopping up the last few creatures then maybe the music.
14:12The code is all there, Gary's done all the code.
14:15Yeah.
14:15It's ready and it builds up in five levels.
14:18Yeah.
14:19So I'm just going to do that.
14:21Yeah.
14:22I remember sitting around a meeting talking about Syndicate and you felt your leg and you go, oh my god,
14:32you said I've got this huge bump on my leg.
14:34Okay.
14:35And you put your hand up your trouser leg and you pulled out a sock from the previous night.
14:42That's great.
14:47Being a designer, being an entrepreneur, being a person that talks in the press, being a person that looks at
14:55the accounts is like being a multi-personality schizophrenic.
15:02As a designer, you want to, you know, you want to put everything in the game.
15:07You don't care about the money.
15:09You don't care about the time.
15:11You just want the best you can possibly get.
15:14But an entrepreneur, you realize that you've got limited resources.
15:19And there is one resource that trumps everything else.
15:25And that resource is not money.
15:29It's boredom.
15:32If you develop a game for too long, the team that you're working with just get bored of it.
15:38And no one is creative when they're bored.
15:45I use games to escape this world, to escape the pressures and turmoils in this world.
15:55And to do that, you need to relax players.
16:01Yes, it's important to have a game with exciting moments.
16:05But if it's too button twitchy all the time, there's not going to be a relaxing experience.
16:10And there is this, the psychology of getting the brain into an alpha state.
16:17It's a highly relaxed state where you don't have the voices in your head saying,
16:23Yeah, what about the bills?
16:25What about the kids?
16:26What about the school?
16:27You just have the focus on the game.
16:30And I've strived to do that in almost every game I've done.
16:35One of the big, my big motivations is to give everyone at 22Cans the experience of releasing a game that
16:46brings joy.
16:49That's really what we want.
16:52It brings joy to people.
16:54If we can bring joy to people, then I'm sure the game will be successful.
16:58And I want everybody here to get that feeling of when they're sitting on the bus and talking to a
17:06total stranger and they say,
17:07I've worked on Masters of Albion.
17:09Master of Albion, that was brilliant.
17:11I loved that.
17:12I loved it.
17:15There is this, it feels like a brick wall that I'm approaching.
17:21I have no idea what's on the other side of the brick wall.
17:25But what will happen to my mind when it doesn't have this thing to obsess over?
17:31This thing to send me to sleep every night thinking of an idea.
17:37This creative vision to shepherd through from start to finish.
17:41What happens if you don't have that?
17:44I don't know.
17:45Maybe I'll go a bit crazy.
17:47Maybe I'll go on some tropical beach somewhere and have my last few days sitting in the sun.
17:56I doubt about that.
18:17I am feeling so, but...
18:32didn't know what to do so?
18:32What kind of a brick wall?
18:32I need to know what to do so, but I need to know what to do so.
18:32You know the thing that's gonna do is to rip it out.
18:34I know when it comes out.
18:37You know what to do so.
18:45I don't think I'm afraid to do so.
18:46I just want to know what to do.
18:58I'll see you next time.
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