We talk Wolverine with Insomniac's Head of Technology.

0:01Spawn on Me is the premier podcast spotlighting people of color. Every week we talk news, what we've been playing, and tell you who's invited to the cookout. Our show is all about talking about gaming through a prism of blackness because we are the culture. Welcome to Proconcer, y 'all. I want to give folks at home who don't know about what you do at Insomniac a little bit of information about, you know, who you are. your kind of background and what is it like to be the head of technology over at Insomnia? Yeah, sure. I'm in an awesome position at the studio where my team is the core technology department.

0:40We work on the game engine and the tools that underpin all of our games. And so I get to have my hands and everything going on at the studio, all sorts of different games we're working on, things that are early, things that are late and and really get a really awesome breadth of experience. One of the things that I think is super cool is, you know, being in the industry for as long as you have and having so much hands-on with, you know, just like the kind of base and core parts of how games are made, you know, it certainly has a huge and fantastic pedigree. And it's been something that I think most fans understand.

1:17And I get a chance to nerd out with folks like you specifically about this stuff. But I think one of the things has been really paramount and really, really dope for the past couple of games has been, you guys have really nailed down and honed in on what the superhero game is. That genre has kind of its own feeling and kind of has its own space now. What is it like to work in that space from the technology side? I think there are parts of, you know, the games that you've all have crafted that have come to fruition, that have really brought that genre into a new space. For you as a person who's kind of working probably in tandem with the creative directors and all the other parts of the team.

1:56How does your role kind of incorporate those layers together to kind of bring together some of the games that we've known to love? That's a great question. One of my favorite things about what we do here is we're not just doing tech for tech's sake. It's not like the engine team is behind some wall and then we give some updates over here. We're picking and choosing the tech that we work on to help realize the creative vision of this specific game. So when we say we're going to make a Wolverine game, we get to think about, oh, all right, what new feature in our engine or tools is going to make this feel more like a Wolverine game, not just make a different video game.

2:36So like, for example, Spider-Man hops in and around the environment on top of things. And Wolverine is this berserker who is going through stuff. That means our destruction systems need to be a lot more thorough and comprehensive than they were. You want to have a fight in a space and look back at the wreckage you just caused, all the tables and chairs that are broken, the blood spattered everywhere, perhaps. And so thinking about what technology is going to help express Wolverine as a character is the best part of the challenge for me. Ooh, I'm happy you talked about that because I have, even in our review, I think some of the things that I had been talking about were how, in my own mind, I'm still trying to pull together and separate, you know, the differences between the way that these characters maneuver, the way that they fight, the way that they kind of present in the game.

3:34I was going to say on stage, in the game. um but what were some of the kind of real pullaways and takeaways from working on spider-man one and two that you needed to not only kind of differentiate just in kind of style of the way these characters have been but to maybe not necessarily lean on some of the laurels that have kind of come from those games and say this is going to be a very different fighter this is going to be a different different character that we all know but like how it presents in game is going to be very different and very grounded in the way that it kind of presents. Talk to me a little bit about kind of the way you and the team went about kind of thinking about making sure that those differences felt real and felt really good and really, you know, connected to the characters that were on screen.

4:21Yeah, I think, I think a simpler approach could have been, we have a great formula with Spider-Man, like you're in, you're in a world and, and you move around it in a creative way and then you fight some guys and then you pick up, you know, like, and, and we'll just pop a different character in there and do a thing and i think that would have been a disservice to uh wolverine as a character his different background what makes players connect with him and the universe he lives in um so i think pretty early on we knew an important thing for us as a studio for players of these games um was going to be to try and give a different experience than than spider-man like you said there's there's commonalities in what it means to take a superhero a story and tell that in a compelling way but that didn't mean the whole game had to be the same type of game so knowing for example um you have your friendly neighborhood spider-man wolverine does not have a friendly neighborhood he is not a guy who uh you know well maybe sometimes but not often like makes a home in a place and and knows the guy at the corner store and helps him when his cat goes missing right it's like um he's going to be on this globe trotting adventure he's going to have is something important he needs to do all the time.

5:37He's going to be aggressive in how he goes about trying to accomplish that and saying, okay, well, that lets us do, that lets us have a variety of locales. We can be in the jungle for part of it. We can be in Canada for part of it. We can be in Japan for part of it. That's a big part of Wolverine is visiting all these places. What does that mean technically? And that's a fun problem to solve as well. Yeah. I love you talking about kind of those differences in not only character and style, but just like, I think Wolverine would probably cut the tree down. Yeah, exactly. As opposed to trying to pull the cat out of the tree.

6:15Yeah. One of the parts that I think really came through super well, and I think is also, again, a big part of what I think Insomniac brings to the table that is very special, is how well you all do PCAP and performance capture stuff. and how you're thinking about the balance between the stylized versions of how characters are kind of being represented and presented with matching and kind of pulling in a really fantastic cast that you can see within the game too. For you and the work that you do, how is that also kind of an interesting wrinkle of how to kind of keep up with the times and say, like, how are we bringing these characters to life in a way that is very different than what we've seen before?

7:01Yeah. Our writers do an incredible job of finding and understanding these characters and making them speak the way you'd expect and act the way you'd expect. At the same time, Spider-Man, very talkative guy. Won't stop talking. Logan, very much not that much more silent guy. And we knew we're going to have to tell a lot of this story through his face, how he emotes. Maybe he's saying something and thinking something different. Like, is that something we can express in a cinematic or through the motion capture that we do? So part of it is the writing. Part of it is casting the right people. Liam, I think, has done a fantastic job personally as Wolverine.

7:43He really understands that character and knows how to bring it across. And then we got to investigate how we scan heads, how we do motion capture, how we remap the facial animation back to the faces we redid. Not to get too into it, but like skin shaders on the face, how they propagate light. If you stretch out your skin, does it turn a different color? Does it gain a glow from blood flow? Does it have some extra wrinkles? Like expressing that across the face all the time, redoing eye shaders and tear lines and things like that. And not to say, look at the eyes, look at how amazing they look now.

8:24but more we can use these tools to tell a story in an effective way. And I think as a studio, we're trying to get better at telling stories game to game each time. I think, thank you for sharing that. Cause I think one of the pieces that I also spoke about in our review was technically how brilliant this game is. I think I've not seen a game kind of pull together this kind of level of deformation in a way on the body that the way that this game is doing that and especially as a big photo mode fan seeing how you plugged all of those pieces into the photo mode part of the engine and part of the game talk to me a little bit about what the kind of ridiculous task it was to make sure all that stuff kind of also is a part of the storytelling process and giving fans this level of you know of control that we don't necessarily see that often in a mode just like even in the photo mode because i was blown away by that thing i spent i'm spending so many hours in that alone uh i'd love to hear your thoughts about about some of that stuff for sure photo mode uh is amazing and has been amazing for us as a studio um our fans have had such an amazing time you know using it to be creative in ways we don't expect um it was a it was a huge benefit to the first spider-man game and sort of sharing what this game was about and what you could do in it um and then the downside of it is that players can get arbitrarily close to any bit of work you've done full screen so look at this thing so it's a bit of a check on us in that way Like you got to put a ton of detail into these outfits.

10:10Like every suit he has, every stitch on, on every piece of it needs to look right and come together. And then yes, as you damage Logan, as he takes damage, how can it, it has to sit right. It can't be faked. It can't be like a painted slash. And it has to actually take some geometry out and like, give him a different shape. The skeleton you see inside has to be real. It has to have metal materials, not just anyway, these layers of things we had to. No, nerd out, man. Like I want you to nerd out about that stuff as much as you can, but I get it. I get it. No, our character teams did a fantastic job digging into that.

10:45The damage he takes is related in gameplay to, to where you're taking damage. You can control a ton of stuff in photo mode. It can all heal back up dynamically. And then, yeah, it works across every suit in the game, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Sometimes it's torn flannel. Sometimes it's leather. Sometimes it's this, this material on that. But Hey, it's Wolverine. Like that's his, that's his deal. Like that's that's exactly why we choose to invest in a specific piece is because it's it's for Wolverine. It's for that character. How fun was it to kind of be able to piggyback off of so much fantastic and kind of well-known lore to kind of pull together these pieces of this game?

11:27I mean, everything from, you know, characters and Easter eggs that get talked about in the game for for some folks that i hope hope to see at some point in a hopeful sequel but like how fun was it to kind of be able to poke through some of that you know years and decades of stuff to be able to pull together a game like this it's so much fun man i can't tell you what y 'all have with this and part of it is like especially wolverine space i don't know i thought i'm a kid of the 90s like like this is my zone man so all these characters i love and i think that's true for all the hundreds of people here.

12:04So everyone shows up and is like, all right, it's my first day on the project. Kick the door down. Here's the 80 things we're all going to do, right? And then everyone shows up with a different 80 things because we all have stuff we love and are excited about. So it's a process to maybe be okay with some things not happening that you yourself would love to see in the game. But if we can keep doing a good job of these and they keep resonating with people, then we get a lot of other shots to do some fun stuff for sure. I mean, I mean, hopefully again, knock, knock, sequel, sequel. I did want to poke at that a little bit too, because I think you did talk about the kind of collaborative effort that happens when you're kind of starting a project like this.

12:46From a technical standpoint, as an old IT guy, I know that there are the things that you get asked to do versus the limitations that you have, right? And I'm curious to know, like there are some moments where I think we as fans and we as players have this sometimes a little bit unrealistic expectation to have the moon every time. But there are technical limitations for all of that stuff. When you're kind of sitting down with the team and saying, all right, here's these folks, here's the CD, here's a creative director, here's the kind of full scope of what we're trying to pull together. How early are you kind of involved in that process?

13:23and what are the things that are maybe being pulled from, not necessarily other projects, but other ideas that you've already had that maybe didn't make it into a game prior that now you're like, oh, that thing that we built four or five years ago, let's go back to that and see if we can potentially use some of that stuff for a game like this. How often is that process happening? And did any of that get a chance to happen on Wolverine in any way? Yeah, I would say we get involved very early. But here's the funny thing is like our involvement at the beginning, I think people expect to have the tech guys in early and have the tech guys be like, oh, can't do that.

14:01No, that idea is too crazy. We can't do that. But the reality of it, I think more is we show up there to say to keep people from being worried they can't do something, to be the voice in the room that's like, oh, yeah, let's do that. We could do this. We could do this crazier thing. Like, don't be afraid of that idea. Like, keep pulling that thread because that sounds cool. and then we'll figure out how to solve it later. Now, you can back yourself into a corner sometimes with that a little bit. But I mean, man, we're blessed. Like the hardware we have, the PlayStation hardware these days, like there's so much you can do with this stuff.

14:35There's still so much potential in there for what we can do as a team that we just want everyone to have big ideas all the time and say, wouldn't it be amazing if, okay, well, let's figure out what version of that like is realistic and try to accomplish that For sure. Yeah, that's always great when you have a team who is an enabler as opposed to a blocker, right? You're like, oh, man, if we can do this, we can do something even cooler than even what we originally imagined, which is always fantastic and super fun. We're almost out of time, and time has flown by. I'll steal you for like an hour, man, just talk about all the madness that goes along with making games.

15:15but is there something that you and the team, when you think about, because now you've shipped, the game is about to come out, the game is out as a time of this recording, what's the thing that you all feel like you can really hang your hat on that you're like, damn, we knocked that out of the park and we did a really good job of that? The thing that we were like, we shot for the moon and we got pretty close. In Wolverine? Yeah. Oh, man. That's like, which child do you like the most? of all your kids um oh god honestly some of the shots i would say some of the shots of logan's face um he's like a weathered guy a hairy guy um he's got anger in his eyes and maybe something behind them uh he's got some you know crazy suit on or outfit on there's chaos going on behind him Like sometimes I'll just pause the game or like pause some video.

16:15I'm reviewing the game and be like, how do we pull that shot off? That shot looks amazing, man. Like, is this really did we really do this? That's that's what it is for me sometimes, I think. And that and that to me, the amazing part of that is that's not just tech. Oh, it's in there. And the tech is good. That's the lighting artist coming in and lighting it super well. That's the visual effects artist coming in and making this beautiful looking stuff behind him. The whole scanning and acting and character process. it's everyone's work coming together for just this like fraction of a second shot where you're like oh yeah that's the thing right there i have to say man um this has been one of my favorite games of the year uh something as a big x-men fan as a big as a huge wolverine fan i've been dreaming for a game like this and see you all knock it out of the park makes me very very happy um and it speaks to again just the the ridiculous amounts of talent at insomniac and all the folks who you get a chance to work with on a daily basis to bring these games to life i gotta thank you for uh the work that you do uh we talked a little bit about this pre pre-record but you worked on one of my favorite games in drop mix as well over when you were doing work at harmonics uh you know big big huge fan of the work that they all did there but there are those moments for me too as a player where i get a chance to kind of roam around in these moments and spaces and say, damn, we're in really cool times, man.

17:37Like, I know a lot of discussion happens where you know, we try to think about what games are and can be, but you know, we are eating pretty good in terms of where we are. Yeah, remembering every day, like, just feeling lucky to be here and getting to do this kind of stuff and play these type of games and talk with you all about it. I feel lucky too. Man, my old behind, I remember playing Pong. Anyway, that's a whole of the conversation. It's been a very long time in this space, and it's been a beautiful ride for all of us in this gaming industry. So I want to thank you again for your amazing work and all that good stuff.

18:11And again, I would love to talk to you more at another time, because I think the work that you all do is super, super cool and really fun. Mike, thank you so much, man. Appreciate the time today. I really do appreciate it. And again, very excited for everybody else to get their hands on the game and take their time with it. And I'll send you some photo mode shots, because there were some really good ones that got in there. Everybody at home, we're going to take a break, but thank you so much for watching and we'll talk to you soon.