Video Game Director Answers Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

hi I'm Glenn Schofield artist and video game director and I'm here to answer your questions from Twitter this is video game support [Music] Dr Bruce Wayne why do horror games scare me when horror movies don't laugh out loud because it's immersive you are right there that is you that is great to hear because that's what we try to do we try and the more we immerse you and make you feel like you're the character the more you're gonna get scared trust me rusky bruh why don't startup Studios just make their own game engine like bro

stop being lazy wow okay well my teams have made plenty of engines and they are hard they take years and years especially for the nowadays you need to take an old engine and and rework it but making an engine from scratch in today's market is going to take you years and millions of dollars and uh you'll still get it wrong by the time I got to uh EA you know they had a lot of different engines around we were starting to build one where for Lord of the Rings and I don't know they were about

a year into it I said that what are we doing we're we're two years away so we looked around and we got creative Lord of the Rings is about large areas and then sort of a a castle on the end or or something a fortress what's like that Tiger Woods long areas and at the end is where you go get food where you're done and so we took the Tiger Woods engine and turned that into the uh Lord of the Rings engine you just have to be smart about what you do and what you use

for an engine paragama doinks I'm sure I got that wrong what steps do I need to take to be a video game director because I feel like I can be the video game Spielberg good for you that's confidence to be a video game director you're you're gonna have to move up the ranks uh you got to learn the inside and and outside of video games so you just can't come in and do it no way you got to have a lot of knowledge you can come up in in many different ways I came up through

the art field you know I started as an artist in video games I've seen people come up as uh from producers you're gonna need experience uh you're gonna need to know everything about the video game I don't need to know the technology but I need to understand it and it's changing in every game so you just can't jump in uh I'm sorry uh does semporium do horror game creators get scared of their own creation sometimes no what happens really is that after a while you've played the game so many times you don't know if it's

scary or not if in the beginning the first time that you know I say hey let's let's do this here and if the first time I see it I jump or I get scared then I know it's uh it's good hold on I've got something so this it's two head from the Callisto protocol I'm sure that the first time you see him you will be very scared we went through a lot of iterations to get to this he's morphed into two heads and you can actually blow off either side and one head will fall off

and they'll still be coming at you with half his body so he's pretty scary and uh he's really hard to kill Yoshi why are video games sixty dollars why are they all sixty dollars who agreed on that I don't know who agreed on all that I surely didn't I think that it's the console guys who uh come up with the cost but there may be uh some of the Publishers have something to do with it but I gotta be honest with you they've been like 50 60 dollars for what a decade something like that and

which Time games have doubled or quadrupled in cost and the price hasn't gone up and you can see the difference between a PlayStation 2 game and a PlayStation 5 game and you're almost paying the same price man I don't want to put the cost on on the on the fan and I don't um but they're expensive to make they really are add Spirit Destiny how do you write a video game script well it's pretty complex I don't consider myself a writer I consider myself a Storyteller so I'll write 20 Pages or something on what this

game was and once I have a story and I've talked to everybody sort of into it and through it and whatever we bring on our writers the next two three years the writers are working with me and they're writing the script and they're adding the characters and and things like that so it is a long process because a video game is a is is pretty long 10 12 13 hours something like that so the scripts are big they change a lot because this is about gameplay and something might not be fun we leave a lot

of room for change at Sea could tell who makes up these game ratings comic Mischief come on really I don't have a problem with the games ladies it seems like most games that deserve an M get an M I've never had a problem with a games rating I think maybe in the early days we had one a problem with one in Europe and we worked on that one of the European countries but at the end of the day uh we talked them into what it what it should be I don't have a problem with it

now but the critic scores oh boy I could talk to you all day about that Aika 95. I never knew that motion capture process also included with voice acting recording or did they record that separately and did a lip mimic on motion capture there's another process called performance capture or what we call pcap and that's actually where we capture the voice acting on motion capture uh it's really just about the movements the Fidelity isn't the same as performance capture which are big stages that we actually have to go down to Hollywood to do there's only

only a couple down there so we go down and Sony one and here's an example of us getting the motion of a kill scene Primo Dodges he strikes to the legs which swipes him out he comes up crack splits the head open right okay we don't really do the the lips or the voice here on motion capture but we'll get 75 of the moves for the game at least uh in the motion capture Studio sorry I'm not good at making scary things how do horror games come up with the most unnerving stuff play a lot

of scary games watch a lot of uh movies if you're passionate about anything right you're gonna get into it you're gonna be studying it you're going to be absorbed in it for years I've been like a sci-fi horror fan since I was really young I'm constantly thinking about it constantly have ideas in my head so you know I know I have some but for us you know I put it out to the team we got 200 people we're gonna they're gonna come up with ideas I'm always asking them for ideas because it's not about my

ideas always getting in the game it's about the best ideas getting in the game I don't care where it comes from so we're constantly asking the team and having brainstorming meetings and doing things like that because the second part to it and how do the creators of them not like scare the out of themselves when looking at their own assets you know sometimes I gotta tell you like with the gore system that we have in in our new game the first time I saw some of that stuff I was uh shocked not necessarily like scared

but I was really psyched because I'm like that's brand new haven't seen that that's gonna gross people out especially on the latest platforms I mean consoles man this stuff looks amazing at two fool why are video games important video games are uh I think incredibly important they are an art form It's Entertainment it's a social network they're just you know part of Pop Culture now they are part of our world video games are bigger than movies and music combined doubled they're that huge I also think that they're the next medium we're already doing it to

tell a great story I mean look at video games and the difference between where they were 10 years ago and where they are today a huge jump we're always working on next technology what's the next thing uh you know movies which I love 10 years ago to today it's not a big leap right but video games are constantly constantly changing that's one of the hardest thing about making them but it's also one of the funnest things at x24 Sonic it's a long one how the do you design levels like in the survival horror game building

how do you decide which rooms are locked or empty and and what order the player will go through them how do you come up with the layout and progression because I don't know where to start that could take me all day to answer but uh we start out with a paper idea a paper map we we have software now that we can lay it out pretty quickly and we move things around and stuff like that and this is done by the designers so the designers are laying out the gameplay when people look at it and

go hey that looks pretty good we don't know yet but well we think it looks good we'll then go into our engine and we lay it out in blocks we call it block world very simple mesh we put a character in and we run through it uh if we like that we then have the artists look at it because the designer is just something that fun so sometimes they'll have a hallway going to a bathroom and the bathroom have a second door that goes into a bedroom so we have to get it right the artist

will go in and make sure architecturally the building is correct and and tell them we have to rework it a bit as far as which ones are locked and uh and which ones are empty and everything that comes with the gameplay that's usually probably 50 percent is uh uh has got on your uh paper map over the course of making a level and making a level can take two years because you're working on it working on iterating putting the enemies in so it takes a long time these things change at Angelo's end why are the

simplest games always the best I hear what you're saying but I don't necessarily agree some of the simplest games are great right it's easy to get in easy to understand and you don't have a lot of startup time right to get into it you know rocket league and even Call of Duty to an extent is easy to get into these days I mean it's hard to play against a lot of people but um I like games that take not a long long time to get into it but they build up the mechanics a bit it

takes a little while and you're learning the story and all so I'm not always about the simplest game but I understand what you're saying at Jeff Whitmore one what is the scariest video game ever very good question and I'm sure a lot of people have different answers but mine has got to be one of the Silent Hills probably Silent Hill too I mean when that horn went off and I knew Pyramid Head was coming at me I just ran and that was terrifying or you're in the fog your little geiger counter goes off and you

knew something was around you just really frightening so great game scared the heck out of me um I wish they would make more portable G some great names here what makes a good hard game Well I obviously one that you keep wanting to go through it right because you know you're gonna just get scared but if you want to play the whole thing that's a good horror game but what makes it good well I think story is important I think story will pull you through right obviously tension and Sound and Music will get you through

not being frustrated that is a fine line when we're when we're making a game you know we can make something then that kills you 10 times but you'll you'll just throw your controller and blame us but if you die like three times you're kind of blaming yourself and you want to get through it again so we are really careful about how hard you make it um we get analytics and and watch people play and and all sorts of things so we don't want you too frustrated somebody said to me once they're like what I loved

about dead space was that every level I knew you were gonna show me something new and exciting and different whether it scared me or not and I couldn't put it down at Adele Pinot music how important is sound design for a video game wow right up my alley uh especially for a horror game sound design and music and everything else is 50 of the game right it's 50 of the horror I consider uh music and audio in a horror game a feature it's a mechanic it's that important and you know for all my other video

games I've been sitting in the booths with the audio directors for 20 years it's that important to me but in a horror game it's a mechanic let's say you're doing a uh a machine well for a scary game the machine should sound scary and so we make sure that everything we kind of put in even though it's relatable it's gonna have a weird or an off-putting sound and then we get the music in and when I say music it's not music as you know I mean it's scary it's got weird instruments sometimes it gets a

little abstract and the whole idea here is to add that tension and that's the key to a horror game because then you can make your scares much better and much bigger because they're already sort of dense and then at that point when we do a scare what we call a stinger here's an example of a stinger from the Callisto protocol thank you It's gotta be on point It's gotta be right there right on the money or it's not going to be good so we spent a lot of time uh getting the timing right at the

one for DJ ytf is Elden ring so hard bro well I guess that's subjective but uh yeah from what I hear I haven't played it all right pretty busy right now with this video game from what I hear yes it's very hard but uh that's sort of what's going on in the video game industry right now and I've seen it go up and down over the years sometimes they get a little bit easier and then they get a little bit harder we're going through that period right now and matter of fact uh we're gonna make

ours pretty tough too I just think it's it's sort of that point in video games and uh just keep playing you'll get through it at tdsn 19. how well does a finger Mo cap work well I have one right here it's awesome we used to have to animate the fingers and it was a lot of work you know you've mooc out the whole thing then you got to go in because the hands got to look right they got to grip the guns they got to grip this they got a punch they've saved us a lot

of time a lot of energy and a lot of a lot of headaches well worth their money and uh they work great at Nick Gage one I always wonder how long does motion capture usually take to finish by having a motion capture stage here at uh Striking Distance Studios we're able to capture motion every day if we need to get a run we can do a run in the morning by the afternoon the run is in the game might need a little tweak here and there or or maybe uh you know something to get it

from one animation to the other we do it in real time and then we just take that motion and we uh put it in game so it's it's uh it's really quick and that's what makes uh quality for us being here in the studio gives us the ability to have quality because we can do something over and over and over again and the key to video games is iteration it's hard what is your favorite monster design in a video game is there any obscure ones you think deserve more praise wow I have seen some great

ones uh I mentioned Pyramid Head uh before Pyramid Head is is just weird right and so I gotta hand it to them for that that one I like nemesis from Resident Evil I mean Resident Evil over the years just has some really good ones but I I think I'm gonna stick with those two for now ah big ass Luigi how the hell do game physics work do you have to give the program the formula for gravity or what I'm not an engineer I'm an artist but yes we've been working with physics for you know 20

30 years now um so game physics some of that is when the character Falls they hit the ground right that's gotta look good and that's game physics in in itself that is a huge thing that we have in games and it's very expensive that's why sometimes when a character is dead on the ground you go to kick them they don't move in some games because if they move you're talking about just using a performance and things like that so that's why you see that the formula for gravity or no that's that we don't have to

do that now zero g which we had in uh in one of my games that space we had to take it because you're floating around and that took a lot of work it was like uh when we have to do swimming and put them in them in water it had to feel something like that and I'll tell you when uh one of the secrets of uh Dead Space was you know when you're in zero g you're kind of moving differently well we put it in what was we thought was real zero g timing it started

feeling sluggish so we did was we gave it the same amount of speed as the regular walk but we made the animation look slower and so we never got that sluggishness and uh no one ever knew that it was the same size no uh same speed no one ever got back to us at Hannah marief can someone explain to me why I get actual anxiety when I'm playing a video game as if I might be shot in real life well let's hope that doesn't happen Hannah the anxiety uh is of course you don't want to

die you don't want to you don't have to start over everybody whatever you've uh accumulated whether it's going through the level or you know upgrades and stuff you don't want to lose that you've earned that so I think that's part of it in a hard game the anxiety is what we want you to have all throughout it anxiety and tension because then we can scare you more so that is something that we try and manufacture if a game isn't manufacturing it like on purpose like we are it just comes from and I want to start

over not wanting to go to a checkpoint not wanting to die I think well that's all the questions for today uh I I appreciate you sending them in and uh I hope you learned something [Music]