- 2 days ago
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GamingTranscript
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.
00:51It's about a freedom to approach the world in any way you want.
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.
01:11If you want to change the 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 games should be all about.
01:35A meeting I had with Peter about three years ago.
01:39And he said he was working on this new game idea, Masters 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.
01:52Dungeon Keeper, Fable, Black and White was a big inspiration.
01:57So he wanted a mixture of all those games in this one game.
02:02It was almost like a legacy type game.
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.
02:25So 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.
02:55There has to be something fresh and innovational about what we present to the player.
02:59And that's what I believe Masters of Albion is.
03:21So I think, you know, one of the things that I kind of obsess about a little bit, and that
03:26was what I kind of wanted to bring to the project when I joined, really, was sort of emphasising the
03:32culture.
03:32The kind of miniature feel of it, although you can go in sometimes and possess the characters, so you're in
03:37the 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, no, you're kind of missing the point of what the idea is here.
04:06They're supposed to be like sculpted characters, not, you don't have a sculpted character with like real hair on it.
04:12If you turned up to your Warhammer night with like, you know, your human hair sculpted on your barbarians, you'd
04:19probably get kicked out for being some kind of weirdo, wouldn't you?
04:21I don't know. I mean, there's some examples of I was doing some of the action blocks for the game,
04:28which are like 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.
04:44So that's kind of fascinating. Creativity in general tends to be born from restrictions, I would argue.
04:52You know, like I've got, I like music, I've got my music studio, but I can boot up a sound
04:58package 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 just playing the game as a as a God.
06:15You're also watching this story unfold. Each of those story elements obviously needs script based music.
06:22So how we blend between the ambient bed I just I was just talking about into the script based music
06:28is one of the biggest challenges for me,
06:30because I don't want it to feel like stop that piece of music, start this 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.
06:46And then I try to achieve that with 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.
07:02I'm not sitting there pondering on a chair beforehand what my idea is.
07:07Always starts with imagination and imagining what something what you're trying to achieve.
07:13And if I don't have that, I 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.
07:26So the idea of contrasting a very cute kind of cosy chilled thing with sudden extreme violence and utter chaos.
07:37This 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.
07:48It depends on which sound you get in the game.
07:50But obviously all these are 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.
08:21You know, freedom to be up there.
08:31Here we are at St Martha's Church just outside Guildford.
08:36This beautiful place I find really inspirational especially when thinking about God Games
08:42because you can see over there there's a little village and 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 to from the intimate from you know going to where you can see a leaf on
09:16a tree up to this God view.
09:18And nothing more inspirational than this for you.
09:29Are we all here? Are we all alone?
09:31Daniel, do you want to start off current editor 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.
09:40Are you anything worried about?
09:45I mean I'm always going to be worried about the quantity of things that are on there still obviously.
09:50With a little time left.
09:52I think it's just making sure we understand what's most important and order everything correctly.
09:58But yeah, that's not my inquiry.
09:59And the other thing that I've, it's always been a little bit of a mystery to me.
10:04But I'm making up the coders in the room.
10:06I've got an idea of how I, I don't remember when it's supposed to be locked with the April date.
10:10But when it's going to be the lock, the lock isn't it?
10:13Like no one's there to change anything now. It's just pure bug fixing.
10:16That was last month, Mark. So, that was last month.
10:20If we, if we are forced into...
10:22Well, that doesn't want to be fair. Obviously we're not, we are not doing that though.
10:25Well that's because you keep, you keep adding stuff to the game Mark, you and your team.
10:28You keep adding stuff. We can't stop, we don't lock until you stop adding stuff.
10:34What am I adding?
10:36Well, the chicken building.
10:40Oh yeah. New Braille Lake Mountain, that's changed by that.
10:42The new armour. It's just, it's just more and more stuff and more and more stuff keeps going in.
10:47And we can't possibly say we're locked until more and more stuff is not going in.
10:52Yeah. Well, okay. Well, we're almost there with that.
11:05So the last time I was here was, I think, at the end of Black and White.
11:12And it was six o'clock in the morning, round about that time.
11:17This is the only place to open.
11:18And we, 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, probably 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? Do you enjoy croissants, do you?
11:45Do they 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, you know, what you do and everything that you do is
12:09of amazing quality.
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.
12:23And certainly 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 disruptive 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, it's just horrible.
12:44I have got the ultimate defense strategy for my time.
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 the 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 beat in the game, actually, when we were doing the playthrough before, because I found the
13:22giant rubber duck.
13:24Yeah.
13:24And that's really powerful.
13:25Yeah, and I was using it just to crush it.
13:27Yeah.
13:28It 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 turrets.
13:39I don't have standalone turrets at that point.
13:41So with the combat music, that's my big push for March.
13:44That's going to be, because I think that's going to be the big win for the game, is make 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 it 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.
14:15It's ready, and it builds up in five levels, so I'm just going to do that.
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.
14:35And you put your hand up your trouser leg, and you pulled out a sock from the previous night.
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, you don't care about the time, you just want the best you can possibly
15:13get.
15:14But an entrepreneur, you realize that you've got limited resources.
15:18And 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 long 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, Masters of Albion, that was brilliant. I loved that. I 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.
17:25Because 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.
17:36This creative vision to shepherd through from start to finish.
17:41What happens if you don't have that?
17:44I don't know, maybe 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.
18:32Maybe I'm lucky I leave with him oversatlete at the ceiling on the piano?
18:36Maybe I'll go on some tropical kanela.
18:36We're just falling off.
18:36Now look at that goat horribly, man.
18:38I'll go on some
18:46I don't know.
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