Ben Retan | Lead AI & Encounter Designer @ Hangar 13 | Ep 31 - Out of Play Area

Episode Transcript
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John (00:02):
On episode thirty one of Out of Play Area, the game developers podcast,
we sit down with Ben Retan a lead AI andencounter designer at Hanger 13, Ben.
And I go way back to my first gigin the industry at Midway Austin,
as well as he is a Full Sail alumni.
He has had a super interestingcareer in development.

(00:26):
Both in and around gamedesign, computer science.
Science robotics engineering.
You name it?
He's had a hand in it or somegreat thoughts to break down.
On this episode, we talk about.
Going Full Sail.
Dave Arneson the creatorof Dungeons and dragons.

(00:48):
We talk about what it'slike working at Lucas arts.
We sit and talk about.
The transistor and the giftthat was to modern society.
We definitely go deep on AI andsome of the advancements and where
that's going to take us and whathe's excited about into the future.
And in particular on this one.

(01:08):
A major initiative called dream week thathe had a big hand in bringing to fruition.
For his company.
coming to us from the bay area.
Been Raton.
Let's fall the fuck out.

Catherine (01:26):
Bienvenido Bienvenue Welcome to the out of play area podcast, a
show by video game devs for game devs,where the guests open up one-on-one
about their journey, their experiences,their views, and their ideas.
No ads, no bullshit.
Join us as we venture far outof the play area with your host
seasoned game designer, John Diaz

John (01:50):
You've lived many lives.

Ben R (01:52):
I'm Jack of all trades, but a master of none.

John (01:54):
Some people need to be that way, man.
You know, there's two ways to maximize

Ben R (01:58):
Well, you can go deep when you go wide.
And I go deep on certain things like AIand game design, I go wide on things.

John (02:05):
It's been a minute, man.
The last time I saw you wasdown in the 30 ATX the legendary
midway days, rest in peace.
I still look back on those days andcan't even imagine like the wealth
of talent, when we were juniorsmixed with the veterans, we had
there to see like what everybodywould go on to work on and become

(02:26):
I always look back, right.
there's a, multi-verse realitywhere we all stayed together like
brought midway back to prominencefor the later part of the decade.

Ben R (02:35):
the six gyms, like, you got your reality, you got, you
know, everything you're doing.
you know, I got, I got my mind gym, like,
other people that are graphics and like,you know, everything like aren't those
like all just one piece to a giant puzzle.

John (02:48):
It's true.
couldn't keep us together too long.
Right?
Like they had to be balancedto the universe kind of thing.

Ben R (02:54):
Yeah, exactly.

John (02:55):
We had to be scattered.

Ben R (02:56):
we had to be a part two to come back.

John (02:58):
Yes.

Ben R (02:59):
do imagine, like if we did all come back together, though,
we might break the universe.

John (03:05):
Those ships tomorrow's would have to come sooner than later,

Ben R (03:08):
Oh, I mean, you know, I've discovered water on Mars, right.

John (03:11):
Do every time you tell me that I have to take a pause and
be like, what was this guy doing?
That he was alreadyexperimenting and looking ahead.

Ben R (03:19):
was a young kid, you know, I was great at math and science and like
I got discovered by the right peopleat the right time, you know, it was,
that's the way I described luck everybodyhas their own definition of luck.
And my

John (03:29):
Sure.

Ben R (03:29):
of luck being at the right place at the right time and knowing it.
So like I was, self-conscious, Iwas self-aware enough, like, even as
a pre-teen between, I knew where Iwanted to go in life and I've always
known that I wanted to make games.

John (03:42):
Where were you at this?

Ben R (03:43):
in Birmingham, Alabama.
I grew up there we had an amazingschool system the year that I graduated
our school in Birmingham JCI B theJefferson county and international
baccalaureate school was founded forDiplomats and for students that were
coming over as part of that culturelike, because us degree, isn't even
recognized internationally, like yougo to Spain, you go to France, you go

(04:04):
to the UK, have a high school diploma.
It's like third, but you havea high school diploma from
the U S what does that work?
And so they made this whole program,the JCB or IB program to make
it internationally recognized.
There was a whole IBaccreditation act sat scores.
and actually we had thehighest act, sat scores.
I was one of four peoplethat make perfect.

(04:26):
Actsh

John (04:26):
What's that like, a 30,

Ben R (04:29):
you do it by taking it repeatedly.
you don't get a perfect on your first try.

John (04:33):
they take the best score of each category, right?

Ben R (04:36):
Yeah.
you can perfect it that way, but there'sa true, perfect the same way that you
get a true, like, you know, like askill on lock or you get an achievement.
Like, was in lucky achievementsback in the day, like, you know,
that were, real life achievements.
so they, put us on the front of Newsweekmagazine actually their year I graduated.
By the time I graduated, I think I'd takensome like eight or 12, like AP classes.

(04:56):
I went straight into being a sophomorein college, but, it didn't mean anything
because the skills that I wanted tolearn, they don't teach in college.
fall sale is the first place that Iever taught that actually taught me
the skills that I actually needed.

John (05:11):
Well, the ones that you wanted, right.
To do the thing you wanted to do.

Ben R (05:13):
Exactly.
it was a huge draw for me.
with Dave working there,like, you know, Dave burns.
Yeah.
The founder of D and D you know,the, the true, true creative

John (05:24):
depending who you ask.

Ben R (05:26):
He is the job's to the Wazniak.
He is the, guy who was the producer,it's like, the person is going to take
all the credit, you know it, while youget your programmers in the background
who are working hard, who are doingthe job, who are doing the heavy
lifting, like who's that guy on G4.
Who's that guy on, youknow, on the IGN interviews.
Who's that guy at showing upat , you know, he's up there.

(05:47):
He's talking about the game.
He's he's the hype man.
he's the front man.
here's a valuable.
And I don't, I don't want todiscredit any producers or any
executive producers, especially causeI don't want to ever get like, you
know, blacklisted from something.
the producers that they havea great role, but they don't
understand the inner workings.
They understand the,the minuscule details.
And I want it to go to full sail, to studyunder somebody that taught the details

(06:10):
that How has this pawn move in chess?
How does a character move in, a Warhammerbecause that's actually what Dave they've
studied or that's what he did beforehe ever made D and D most I've had the
privilege, the honor, and the privilegesitting down with him and talking
with him while he was still around.
And you know, when we used totalk, I talked to him about

(06:31):
what was it like making war topgaming, and making that thing.
Cause we're top gaming washis bag back in the day.
all these reenactments and you seepeople pushing pawns around or, or
pawns, but you see people pushing

John (06:43):
Pieces miniatures.

Ben R (06:45):
on the board.
that was war, top gaming.
that was the way the generals, that'sthe way that people back in the day,
like, you know, going back to Greektimes that people would bottle,
like they would get reports fromthe front, you know, the term Nike.

John (06:58):
Yeah.

Ben R (06:59):
You know that that's from somebody running 26 and a half
miles, like go fucking marathon.
They want him back and then dying.
Cause they're reporting back to their,generals, they're reporting back to
the they're saying victory, Nike.
But like, you know, that's thekind of stuff that he used to
do and he inspired me so much.
Like in the details.
Everything is in the details.

John (07:18):
you got to full sail because that's this place that was actually
teaching game design and development.
Right?
I mean, I mean, there's a few optionsat the time that seemed to be closer
to your stomping grounds in Birmingham,

Ben R (07:28):
I recently heard one of my ex professors Kayvon,
Acosta Musharraf.

John (07:32):
Kayvon,

Ben R (07:33):
Yeah.
he was talking to me like he was, he wassaying like, they've shifted their focus.
split it into multiple tracks.
So if you do want to be a producer,if you want to be the high man, if you
want to be the person who understandsproduction, because it is a valuable.
skill, Like
I've had to, learn how to do all at all.

John (07:49):
this place is in the, in the industry that claim
like, oh yeah, we're flat.
We don't have producers.
But all that really means is thateverybody wears a producer hat, right?

Ben R (07:56):
Yeah.
Well, you still have to have, at the endof the day, you have to have somebody
that checks off all the boxes, right?
Like even if you don't have a producer,you always have a product owner.

John (08:05):
Yeah.

Ben R (08:06):
in scrum methodology, you have like, you know, the scrum leader and then
you have the product owner, like, youknow, agile, everybody talks about agile.
Everybody talks about,oh, we're super agile.
It's like, yeah, that just meansthat you don't want to like
have organization sometimes.
I think the best organization,comes up around organically.
It comes from.

(08:27):
People taking the lead people,taking charge you still have goals.
So what I do today as a lead, becausethat's my current position, I'm
the lead AI and encounter designer.
would I do is I work with mydirectors, take their goals and I
break those down into actionable tasks.

John (08:44):
Okay.

Ben R (08:44):
I, say to each one of the people in my group, or I delegate
out to another lead or give themlike what our requirements are.
Like I say to them, like,Hey, it's, sometimes it's like
more a fearful or a femoral.
You know, like we, as a director,I want to see combat be good.
It's like, what is combat good mean.

John (09:05):
Yeah, like a user story kind of thing.

Ben R (09:07):
Yeah.
you get this user story.
And then as a leave, what you have to dois you have to break it down and this is
what production does, but the disconnectsometimes is, the production side.
Doesn't understand always thetechnical requirements, because
they don't understand the, theDave Arneson kind of details.
Like the little Snickers details is whatmy creative writing teacher used to say,

John (09:29):
Snickers like the candy bar?

Ben R (09:31):
Yeah.
Well, when you write a creativewriting paper, you say I went to
the store and I got a candy bar.

John (09:36):
No, no, you got to fluff it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben R (09:41):
the creativeness is in the details.
And sometimes that kind of detail getslost like across like production and
design and it's not productions fault.
Oftentimes like if you don't have aproducer that's embedded with you.
if they're not with you, like you know,if you don't have pods, like, is, is
the terminology they use in scrum.

(10:01):
Like if you don't have a a producer foryour pod, if they don't know every single
day, every single person within that podis doing it and why they're doing it.
And when it's like, when it canbe expected to be delivered, how
can you expect anybody to produceanything when they don't even
know what they're talking about?

John (10:16):
Sure.
Sure.
I mean like what, what do you doin cases where you like your team's
kind of spread thin and, and, youknow, you've got to share producer
across different features and
strike teams.
How do you get the

Ben R (10:24):
why we've got to step up, we've got to step up and then they
have to be the producers themselves.
And that's what I've had todo in several situations.
been in a 300 person team.
I've been in a three person team.
seen the gambit, like I'veseen, I've seen, you know,
the small teams of large team.
And like I said, you gotta take off thatdesigner hat you put on the producer.
I mean, you have to understandwhat the constraints are.

(10:46):
You have to understand whatthe deliverable time is.
You have to understand why is my directorasking for this in the first place?
Because sometimes theysay, I want game good.
But what they really mean isI want you to improve things.

John (11:00):
Oh, yes.

Ben R (11:01):
you have to interpret that you have to understand, but again, that's
a, that's a level of communication.
Like if you, if you have a,hierarchy, like, okay, well
you have a flat hierarchy.
Does that mean that everybody'stalking to everybody all the time?
I never felt a problem.
Like, you know, I've, I've gotten introuble for this at some companies
walking up to a person's office andjust being like, Hey dude, what's up

(11:22):
like, you know, walking directly toa person and asking them a question.
some places, you know, they wantyou to stay in your channel.
They want you to, You know, swim in yourlane, like going up to the director of
the game and just asking them like, Hey,want to ask you about this in some ways.
It isn't cool.
Like, so when people talk aboutflat hierarchy, I think what
they mean is open communication.

John (11:42):
Yeah.

Ben R (11:43):
the same way that we have open floor diagrams.

John (11:46):
Yeah.
You can go anywhere to anybody.

Ben R (11:48):
Yeah, look well, well, I, I worked in QA, but I worked in QA for a software
development company did finance software.
And if I walked up to the vicepresident of the finance software
company and I just walked into hisoffice and I was like, Hey dude,
like, what do you want for this thing?
He would do a chat medown like in a second.

John (12:05):
man.
I guess I can see that right on liketeams of like on massive teams where
multiple people need to be in the know.
And if you kind of go around theselittle like checkpoints and stuff like
that, then someone gets left out andHey, how come Ben knows this thing?
And you didn't know, you know,lead person or something like that.

Ben R (12:23):
Well, okay.
So that's the reasonwhy we made discourse.
That's the reason why slack exists isto try to, you know, you know, all,
all slack is IRC with an HTML five.
like, like anybody who's been usingchannels, like since the original
newsgroups that were pre email, like,you know, newsgroups were just, it's a
thread and channel and, and that's like,all we did was we made slack for gamers.

(12:47):
Like when I was working on discord,

John (12:48):
well, it started for gamers, right.
But now it's become just likewidely adopted for any community.

Ben R (12:53):
what we used to be doing is we used to be writing bots like a, or Stan
the, the lead, like a techguy over discord used to be
writing bots for monitoring.
When, when boss spawns would happenin final fantasy 13, he would message
them back to himself so that he canlog in and then like tamp this bonds.
Like that was the reason why, why,you know, he made all this stuff.

(13:15):
And so he didn't haveto write those boxes.

John (13:17):
this instant necessity of something kind of feeding technology, right.
Or apps.
And then other people gettheir hands on a blue.
I could also do other things.

Ben R (13:24):
But I mean, but, but games, aren't always about necessity.
They're about art and, and great artis, is something that touches you.
It moves you.
It is you as a viewer are now orexperiencer in the case of games.
But you as the player that you give themagency, you give them the power to explore
space, there was a talk, but there wasyou know, in the defensive, like Siskel

(13:46):
and Ebert back way back in the day, I
think have.

John (13:49):
critics, man.

Ben R (13:51):
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.

John (13:52):
did they do?
the, like the two thumbs up thing?

Ben R (13:54):
Our games.
Aren't like, I don't think anybodyargues that any more is like, whether
we, whether or not, when I say games, Idon't mean the art, the visuals of it.
I don't mean the sound design.
I don't mean the animation.
Everybody look wholeheartedly Reese,but do you consider the maker chess?
So,

John (14:13):
DAS an interesting one, right?
Because I mean, I would not, man.
I would consider it well.

Ben R (14:19):
whoa, whoa, dude, dude, like really?
Okay.
Come on.
The person who wrote the rule,set the person who said this, like
modeling, that's what Dave did.
That's what they did.
And that's the reason why Iappreciate him as an artist.
He said, this Palm moves forward.
This is actually representative 15 realpeople on the battlefield getting killed
right now in our pawns quote, unquote.

(14:40):
But they're the representative ofa group of people who are living,
breathing, dying, just like you and melike, but it's, it's the modeling and
the modeling of system is an art form.

John (14:50):
I w when you break it down like that, I will agree
that that's an art, right?
Like modeling something you see in theworld down to some like sweet contained
finite rule set that, I think is

Ben R (15:03):
So one of my favorite exercises to give someone who's on
a job interview is like, make me agame, make me a rule set right now.
Here's your constraints.
Here's what the, here's what the goal is.
Cause you, you know, thething that defines toy versus.
I used to talk to Fred Frederick Marcus,who I was actually just looking up.
One of his IGA talks yesterday FridayMargaret is a great, brilliant game

(15:24):
director used to work the motto you'vecome around to people's desks and
you'd sit down with them or, or maybeit was just me because like he, would
come around to my desk we'd sit downand we talked for hours about anxiety,
about game theory, about like whatmakes a game, like Push yourself.
How do you stress the system?
if you're not stressing the system,if you're not defining it, you

(15:44):
can live in a, avoid, if you don'tpush your bubble out, like how do
you even understand the limits?
But rule set.
So the, the thing that makes, and Itaught this at the academy of arts,
when I was teaching game design to art.
students which, which in itselfwas a whole nother challenge.
And especially considering several ofthem were ESL students, like, you know,
trying to teach somebody like where you'restruggling to communicate with them.

(16:08):
And even basic conversation, try toteach them the most important thing.
And what defines a gameis a victory condition or.
until, you know, until, you know howyou can win and until, you know how you
can lose, you can not have a strategy.
You can't know how to get to that point.
You don't even know what your goal is.
You're shooting for the stars, youhave to have an end goal in order

(16:30):
to understand how you get there.
And that's, that'swhere strategy comes in.
And that's when you can find thedetails where you can find the, how do
I do this move and said that move andthere's opportunity costs of course,
like one once you start to define, Okay.
what are the actionsthat players can take?
Like once you have a goal and thenyou can define the actions then,
and only then can you have strategy?

John (16:51):
I mean, that's game theory, right?
Like there's a big evolutionof competition winning, losing
who's on top who's on bottom.
Going back to being a lead, beinga designer through and through with
different things from end-to-end bringingthe game to life, you've really attach
yourself to like AI and encounters.

Ben R (17:12):
Only recently that's only recently.
I've attached myself to severalthings throughout my career.
Like I thought I want to do boss,like bosses because bosses were the
scripted moments within like longercinematic games is what I would describe
them as like when we, when we werediscovering like what 13, 13 was going
to be, like, when I was working atlosers, we went through iterations.

(17:32):
We were like we gears of, of star wars,are we, you know like mass massive star
wars, massive act like w we tried, wetried on all these different hats that
are all these different kinds of genres.
And we try to see, you know,which one was right for us.
But, but when we settled in wasultimately a cinematic shooter.
But when I wanted to make those big.

(17:52):
TV screen, or like now, like I thinkwith the streaming culture, like
you can have them on your TV screen,like the used to be cinematic screen.
It used to be like, youknow, go into the movies.
Like you know, those big moments oflike, why do you go to the movies?
You, first of all, you go to make outand like, you know, hang out with your
girlfriend in the back of the theater.
But like, you know you know, those,those big like onscreen moments,

(18:13):
the, the, the drastic parks,

John (18:15):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those Hollywood blockbuster

Ben R (18:18):
you know, Jean's cameras, first film was there ever was promised to,
and he was one of three directors.

John (18:24):
damn D it's hard to see him sharing directorial power with anyone.
Yeah.

Ben R (18:31):
I felt really hurt when, when Lucas arts got shut down, it
was a, and now they're reopening itas Lucasfilm games, which I'm, glad
that they're re they're doing that,but it's still, it was painful.
It was painful.
I,

John (18:42):
yeah, you thought you were going to be there for life,

Ben R (18:44):
I was a Lucas lifer.
I,
my kids up like 10 years before theywere born for the daycare, they're
like, that's how long the daycareline was like, cause you got, I mean,
diggers, it was crazy.

John (18:56):
In the states.

Ben R (18:57):
yeah, I was looking at like, you know, like, like
you know, establishing myself.
My, my friend was working downat jock Java, the hut, you
know, down at our coffee shop.

John (19:07):
That's the name of the coffee shop at Lucas arts.

Ben R (19:09):
yeah, well it was back in the day.
I don't know, after COVID theyshowed a bunch of shit down.
They shut down sessions,they shut down Java the hut.
My friend was was the leaderthe executive chef terminology.
The executive chef over at sessions.
Shout out to Dan, Dan, Dan beggars.
He's buddy of mine.
Like he's helped me through throughthe best and worst of times.

(19:30):
There was somethingmagic about that place.
And I used to take people on tours.
I used to walk them around the campusand, you know, they shot one of the
shots I'm like, I think from episodetwo, like in the fountain garden, they're
like they, edited it to hell and back.
But it was a very special placeand it still is a special place.
You have IRM there, you have allof the moneymakers, which are, you

(19:51):
know, how Lucas makes us money.

John (19:53):
Isn't it from

Ben R (19:56):
Yeah, merchandising merchandising.
They said it in Spaceballs.
We have the, we havethe star wars lunchbox.
We have the storage bedroom, we havethe storage flame door, like there's
a, there's an interesting story there.
I won't go into it, but, but if anybodywants to look it up online, there's an
interesting story between, I think it wasSony and Lucas at the time, like about
how he couldn't make the second film.
Cause he didn't have money in thefirst film hadn't come out yet.

(20:17):
But but that was, that was his thingwas that he was like, wow, I will,
I will retain the licensing rights.
And so Lucas licensing makes.
We had to license our own character backwell, fortunately we had the licensed
star killer from Lucas licensing.
I shit, you not, this is a true story.
go talk to the keeper of the Holocaust.
There's also a guy he isthe keeper of the autograph.

(20:38):
I'm like, who is who?
Who's the head of licensing?
Like the keeper of the whole ground.
You have to go talk to him.
And like we had to license ourown characters back for the sequel
because they owned the charactersfrom the, from the first game.
So that's the reason why if you everplayed fortunately shoe, you don't
see any repeats except for circular.

John (20:57):
Because the licensing hurdles to jump.

Ben R (21:00):
We, we would, we would have to pay them to use our
own characters that we created.

John (21:04):
Okay.
So hold on.
That seemed a little crazy.
I kind of understand from like a business,you know, Hey, this is the process.
And to go around, it is, itcreates like an exception
clause or something like that.
But like you are Lucas arts.
Is that not essentially likefirst party to Lucas property?

Ben R (21:21):
Lucas film is the parent company and Lucas Lucas film owns everything.
So Lucas financing, Lucas arts, Lucas I'llindustrial light magic Skywalker sound.
Who is the he has anonprofit organization.
If you ever listened to NPR and he hears.
Brought to you by this nonprofit,like they do a lot of great
things, but the moneymaker, thepeople make all the money is

(21:43):
licensing.
Yeah.
People ask like, why ismonkey island coming out?
Why is, a day that I'd come now?
why are they doing full title?
Why are they doing link?
TFCU where's the money come from?
Like, how are they out there making it?
And that was the even why they ended uplike chopping off, you know, sometimes
you gotta chop off the armor, yourbaby you know, to make a good game.
The, there was something I learned at fullsail you know sometimes in order to ship

(22:05):
or some sometimes in order to, to sellto Disney you gotta, you gotta make some
concessions and you have to, you know,take out the least profitable section of
organization cause, when Lucas startedand this is just hearsay, like what I've
heard uncle George said was you know waslike, you know, just make it true, make
it make a good and, and that that's, that,that was one of The things that drew me

(22:26):
to the organization in the first place wasthat it was, The art for the sake of art,
Art people don't recognize thatthe creation of a rule set is
an art form and it is unique.
And it is like distinguishable,like between products like there's
can still be derivative art thingswill be iterations on your rule set.
I made up a game one time when Ididn't have enough chess pieces.

(22:49):
And I didn't have enough checkerspieces of, we made up a game called
check checkers where it's like well,for every chess piece, it moves like
a chess piece, every chair piece,it moves like a checker piece.
And then at the beginning ofthe game, you got to design your
own, like starting rule set.
You had to place the pieces.
They had to be behind the second doc orwhatever, but like, just, just that that.

(23:10):
slight modification of you can eitheruse checker pieces or chess pieces.
And you can design like where they'replaced your initial Starting points
That is Seventh dimension kind of shit.
Like, you know, like string theory.
Like if you want to go up to the 11thdimension, like as you get higher
and higher up the dimensions like,cause like I was saying before, I
did astrophysics for a long time.

(23:31):
Like, I've thought about this, likewhat are the rule sets of the world?
Like, Well,
you have basic physics.
Like everything dropped.
Well, you can change those.
Like at a certain point, you'vegotten enough dimensions up.
We were, it's not only aboutthe rule set, but it's also
about the starting conditions.
It's about like, what if we changed thebig bang, what the big bang was, was
slightly bigger or slightly smaller, orwhat if there were different elements

(23:54):
that compose the bank, big bang.
Our most common element inthe universe is hydrogen.
That's how we get the red shift.
That's how we, like, you know,when you observe a disarm, you
have to subtract out the hydrogen.
Like what if the most commonelement in the universe was oxygen?
Well, what if we were nitrogen basedbasically universe, like you start
hitting into like banjos territory andlike, you know, multiple dimension,

(24:15):
parallel dimension theory, butwhen you're designing a game, you
should think about it like that.
I have this little pocket universe, Ihave this little, this game I'm designing.
And it, whoa, right.
Actually talks a lot about thisabout, you know, designing sport is
about designing, you know, SIM citywas originally a helicopter game
where you were going to fly overand shoot things with a helicopter.

(24:36):
And he found, he found that making thecity was more entertaining that the
helicopter was going to fly over thenthan actually the helicopter itself.

John (24:44):
All right, man.
I've never heard that story.
I've heard a lot of likecivilization, some city

Ben R (24:49):
He's he's he's big out here in the bay.
Like he's, he's based in Oakland.
You know, he has, he has several projectsyou know, that he does, and he does a
lot of education outreach, you know?
Well that was one of the nice thingsabout working the LucasArts they, they
brought in these people, they brought in,in Meyer, they brought in well, right.
They brought in, you know, someof the most simple games, ours,
and I got to sit down with them.

(25:10):
I got to sit down with QuentinTarantino and be like, when you were
working on glorious bastards, how'dyou come up with the screenplay?
And I got to talk to him about, hewas like, well, I went to this record
shop and I was looking through thesealbums and then like, I, the sound
design is, is what he poses on first.
Like, and, and, and, and if, ifyou're, if you're trying to make a
game or you don't know what game you'remaking yet, I, I highly recommend.

(25:32):
Right.
The soundtrack first, come up with theI mean, and also watch high-fidelity
because you know John Cusack, hedescribes it very well of you start
out strong when you kick it up anotch, then you draw it back before,
so you don't blow your load too early.
Then, then you, you do a slowbuild up talker shadow, it's
same thing as Shakespeare.
Like if you even go back to the classicthree, like actual picture of like, oh,

(25:56):
what are the major beats of your game?
What are like, I mean, it's, it's,again, it's fundamental theory.
but.
If you work the music, drive the pace,
if you think about it that way.

John (26:06):
It's like pacing 1 0 1, man.
You just kind of distilledit down to its purest form.
I like it.

Ben R (26:11):
as a multi-talented multi, you know, instrumentalist, I play music, I
do games like, you know, it's like jazz.
So, you know, like you can't justlike, let it be free form or whatever.
Like I, I personally prefera pop song over jazz.
You know, you can't just do off.
Yeah.
A little bit of structure helpsthe audience understand the message

(26:31):
that you're trying to get a messageacross like, what is your takeaway?
And, and I asked this toBrian Sharp, but you know

John (26:39):
Yeah.
Dude, Brian Sharp.
I got to connect with that guy.

Ben R (26:42):
I asked him like, he was telling me about meditation or yoga,
and I was like, what's the takeaway?
And he's like, what

John (26:49):
Yeah,

Ben R (26:52):
my mind is so
focused.

John (26:54):
and max many times, the point.
When am I going to get out of

Ben R (26:57):
Well, you know, that, that's what we, as, you know, you know, apex
predators slash, you know, survivalists,you know, whatever you want to define
your personal, like human gameplay asbeing but you know, w we, we look for.
And because you know, why we wentfor veterans is because it actually
takes our brain less energy.
Like if you, if you are, have to thinkabout something, if you had to process

(27:20):
something, thinking calories, it takescalories, you actually have to think
harder and then it, you burn energy in.
And so what we try to dois we try to find patterns.
We try to find similarities.
And so we are big brain, like, youknow, theory it creates these neural
pathways and neuroscientists talkabout this all the time about the
midmaxing and the optimization of,of finding patterns within society.

(27:44):
And so that the Genova Chen actuallytalks about like the flow state, a
bunch, and like, you know, to getinto a flow state, you have to like
get those like neural pathways built,but then you have to alter them.

John (27:56):
yes,

Ben R (27:57):
it's, Mario and the turtle, like the very first level of Mario,
if if you just, if you don't touchthe controller, Mario runs forward.
I don't know if you've ever tried this?
poor.
Like it was, it was somethingthat was brought up to me in,
in a different game design talk.
If Mario just runs for, he runsstraight into the first Moomba cause
is, is, is right under three blocks.
And there's a fourth block on top of it.
if you did nothing, first ofall, you can't run backwards.

(28:20):
So pushing the

John (28:21):
screen.

Ben R (28:23):
but I want to, I want to be very clear, just like quantum theory, like
the absence of input is still an input.
Like the, like the
absence.

John (28:32):
your zero case, right?

Ben R (28:34):
it's, it's quantum theory.
It's, it's a box.
It's, it's a, you know, the, the catyou know when you look inside the boxes
that are alive or dead, the cat poorcat, what let's say, you know, it's

John (28:44):
look inside the box.

Ben R (28:46):
something.
So, so it's, it's something that, that hasless like a, an emotional attachment, you
know if you look inside the box, you havea bit, yet you had a coin, either have
a coin, or you don't have a coin becausecats are much more valuable than that,

John (28:58):
Amen.

Ben R (28:59):
but by not looking in the box, that's how that's.
So I have, I have one, onetattoo on my wrist, and this
is the most important thing.
I know your viewers can't seeit, but the most important it is
what's called a PNP transistor.
It has an input, it has a connectionand it has an output it's also

(29:19):
referred to as a type of switch.
Basically, so you can eitherswitch it on or off, but.
connection.
It's the most basic form of a transistor.
And it's what we have millionsof inside of your phone,
inside, everything that you do.
It's the most importantinvention since the plow.
I talk about this a lot and sometimes,

John (29:36):
kind of has a plow shape though.
That's the crazy thing about it?

Ben R (29:39):
well, all the plow allowed us to become an industrialized
like civilized society.
my mentor Mr.
Hollis rest in peace.
You know, he, he, he taught meabout the fundamentals electronics.
Again, this goes back to like, why,why would, why do I think I was more
successful than my counterparts?
You know, going through, you know,programming and stuff like that, like

(30:00):
is because I was taught robotics.
I was taught, you know,from the ground up.
I, I, I had the privilege and honor of, ofbeing part of a, you know, a program which
was the pre-computer and, and engineeringprogram that was developed by, by Mr.
Hollis as a, as a alternativeeducation kind of thing.

(30:20):
he recognized that the high schoolswere not teaching computer science.
They were not teaching.
He, he was one of thesepunchcard guys back in the

John (30:29):
Oh, gosh.
Yeah.

Ben R (30:31):
he, we I've seen the stacks of punch cards and how we
like used to program computers.

John (30:36):
the old G miles and miles of punch cards, feeding
instructions, all bits, right.
You just kind of
on and off,

Ben R (30:43):
drop a stack in there, like like my entire evening.

John (30:47):
you know, it happened, you know, it happens,
man,

Ben R (30:50):
no.
There's lots of war stories fromthe war room of like, you know,
being, being in your, you know, inthe zone, you're trying to develop,
you're trying to hit a deadline andthen you dropped the stack of cards.
But he,

John (31:01):
in like what we do today,

Ben R (31:03):
You, you delete, you delete the repository.

John (31:06):
oh God, well, you can always recover that,
right?
Like,

Ben R (31:09):
No, not, not.
You delete your local repository,you delete the repository,
the remote repository.

John (31:15):
which,

Ben R (31:16):
imagine you deleted your get hub.

John (31:18):
oh my God,
permissions, Maine.

Ben R (31:20):
No, that would be the good one today, but what I was trying to get
at, and I think a message I want tosend you to your listeners is, is that,
you know, the transition is the mostimportant invention in the last 100 years.
And an interest is how we taught rocks tothink is the way I describe it to people.
It's it is the,

John (31:38):
who's the,
rock.

Ben R (31:39):
The rock is the courts.
It's the crystal, it's the you know it's,the transition is made out of Silicon.
It's how the silicone is.
Crystal is technically arock like you know, the, the
planet.

John (31:51):
right?
Like

Ben R (31:52):
Have you ever thought about the rock that we live on is just a big
enough rock that we can't jump off it?

John (31:58):
ha, because is that because of the gravitational pull because of the size

Ben R (32:02):
Yeah, it matters.
It really matters.
It matters a lot.

John (32:07):
ketchup off this damn rock?

Ben R (32:09):
Yeah, it's just a rock.
It's so big that you can't jump off it.
But like every single, every singlething that's inside of a a computer well,
there's the, so Jay tag, the joint taskaction group, or the, are the people that
made the original integrated circuit.
I see they're the people thatmade the Silicon base, like,
you know, kind of things.

(32:30):
And, and it's funny now becauseI've done weighing into the hacker
community, there's J tag connections oneverything in your phone and you're in
your water heater and your everything.
Like you can, you can, you can tapinto these J tech ashes and if you know
the fundamentals of electronics andcomputer circuitry, you can actually.
D compile, like the instructions arebeing sent, like, along those, those

(32:51):
things, that's how people hack phones.
That's how people do all this shit.
but at the fundamental level, all it isis a, not courts, but silicone-based,
you know, crystal, like you know
why quantum computing is so big now?
Why it's so important?

John (33:05):
always looked at it as just like kind of the,
massive leap processing that.
Achieve
with it.

Ben R (33:11):
Where's that massive?
We've been processing come from.

John (33:14):
I mean, I, I imagine like there's some crazy jump across the number of
cores that you're sandwiching together.

Ben R (33:21):
See, that's the old school thinking.
So the reason do you know why wesandwich course together in the.

John (33:27):
I guess we're just running out of space.
So we, we started going vertical.

Ben R (33:29):
an electron, if you can only make a channel so narrow, so, so
tiny, so compact before the electronsstart jumping channels, where they
start dropping between the leftside, as we can watch multi-core
processing came about was because wewere, we were hitting Moore's law.
We were hitting the maxes.
You know, you're not able to acceleratethe process any faster because we

(33:51):
made them as small as we could.
And literally electronsare jumping back and forth.

John (33:55):
And then he he issue right.
Heat in space.

Ben R (33:58):
he heating space.
Yeah, definitely the heat increases thepositive charge and then it is outward.
It's a by-product of,the, positive church.
But the electrons were jumpingacross channels in the, in the when
they try to make these, you canonly make them a molecule thick,

John (34:14):
Yeah,

Ben R (34:15):
as volume of.

John (34:16):
size we can get to.

Ben R (34:17):
so quantum computing came about because of the fact that they, they
now have reached, they're starting to.
at least like we're goingto plateau on Moore's law.
If we don't, if we don't actuallyhave a way to make things that
are smaller than a molecule,
Like
you, when you startedgoing into the subatomic

John (34:34):
we got to change the game now, right?
Like how the ha how we approachand how we build in this.

Ben R (34:38):
okay.
So there's two majorgame-changers in that.
How the fuck do you maintain thatwithout a giant cooling system?
Like when I was working on, on theMars rovers, like we had a whole liquid
nitrogen cooling system for any of ourstuff, but but if you want to go so
atomic, like if you want to go, youknow, particle, smasher, like level

(35:00):
like you, you first of all one of thehuge gains is that you now are working
with a Triny system I'm bringing itall back, like to use cat, you know,
the important thing about like, I I'msaving this risk, my other risks for, the
first quantum pocket, quantum computers,

John (35:17):
caught fall where you think we are.

Ben R (35:20):
last hundred years, I think I'll, I'll see it before I die.
like I think we're going to go

John (35:24):
Hi.
I like that.

Ben R (35:25):
past a hundred years
anyway, so

John (35:27):
give me, give me a goal, man.
Like stay healthy, stay low, stayalive, long enough to see this thing.
See what people do with it.
Cause the civilization is goingto move at a ridiculous pace.
Once that comes together like that.

Ben R (35:38):
we've solved the disease of aging.
aging is just a disease, like, youknow, the same way than anything else.
The disease, we've been able to figure outhow to stop like cells from degenerating.
Like when you, when cell split, theydegenerate and then like, that's the
reason why we have a finite lifetime,but quantum computing doing back to
the topic quantum computing, one of thethings I like about it is that it is

(35:59):
trinary system and setting the binarysystem in serving ones and zeros, which
is what we described as electrons.
Like, you know, one zeros jumping

John (36:06):
Positive negative here.

Ben R (36:07):
positive, negative that, that's what this is all about.
That's what the PNPtransistor is all about.
It's like, if you don't put anythingin, you know, it doesn't connect.
If you put something in.
But that's that's binary, that's it?
That's where the ones zeros come from.
That's like literally the basis ofall binary is, is, is a transistor.
but with quantum computing,now you have a trinary system.
Now you have one zero, orI have not yet observed it.

(36:31):
the act of not observingit is, is in itself a
state

John (36:35):
there we go.

Ben R (36:36):
state that can be used in quantum computing.
they talk about this in stringtheory and about and about this
and quantum computing, liketheory if you've ever taken.
There's some great courses online,by the way, if you, if you were
interested in quantum computing theyoffer them for free from MIT and
from Stanford and from Berkeley, likethere are all these great, like every

(36:56):
online quantum computing courses thatI recommend you go check them out.

John (36:59):
I'm with it.
So like, if I'm bringing it downinto, like, let's say I'm writing
a scripting node, I'm breakingit down and you know, there's a,
there's an on, off and uh, not here
yet.
Not yet observed.
Okay.
Is there a symbol, Is therea symbol, for that state?
there like a ASCII.

Ben R (37:16):
no I'm saving my other risks for that symbol.
Like there, there, there are, thereare a couple of diagrams online,
like wa but they're conflicting.

John (37:23):
No, one's standardized it yet.

Ben R (37:25):
you know, the second, most important thing of quantum computing so
the, the way that we normally transferinformation around the world right
now is through fiber optic, right?
Yeah.
Through light.
And so what, what is fasterthan the speed of light?

John (37:36):
I don't know.

Ben R (37:37):
Y.
So through the, there, the actual quantumentanglement, we can actually beat this
beautiful boy through, through that.
Like that's the reason why it comes fromabusers so fast is they move faster.
It's it's, it's the first everybodytalks about like, you know, like,
oh, star Trek and everything.
It's like, no, we, we actuallyhave measurable quantifiable, like
the, the only way they can do itas they shoot a beam of light.

(38:00):
And then, and then they seethat it's faster than the light.
they they shot it across a lakewith like a 50 mile wide lake.
And then you can see that the particlegot there faster than the beam of light.
Like we have scientific ways ofmeasuring light and we have scientific
ways of measuring quantum entanglement.
And so I could communicate with Chinafaster, the speed of light right now.

(38:21):
Like if I had a quantum entanglement.

John (38:23):
Okay, bro, you just, you just broke it down for me, man.
It's a try.
And every system that opens up awhole nother factor of outputs and
instructions and that moves fasterthan the speed of light, which I
didn't even know was an element or likethat's not you can't, it's not even.

Ben R (38:42):
The way you do is by folding dimensions.
You go through the, through the fourthdimension, up to the fifth dimension,
and then like, by, by having thetwo portables that are entangled,
like you, can you full dimensions?
That's the only way you can get faster.
And then the third dimension.

John (38:55):
Okay.
I understand at a high level withmy caveman brain, I understand the,
the, the core elements of quantumcomputing and how bring it back
to from the transistor to this new

Ben R (39:08):
Yeah.

John (39:08):
get here.

Ben R (39:10):
Yeah.
But let let's let's talk about games.

John (39:12):
Let's talk about games, man.
After that, that making games is easy,bro, let's go back to making games.

Ben R (39:19):
Yeah, let's stop solving really quantum entanglement.

John (39:22):
But this is exciting, right?
This society.
Cause I definitely wanted toask you if like, are we going?
Where can we get to, and, and iseven quantum computing, like within
the foreseeable future and howthe would that change what we do?
So, I mean, let people noodle onthat and as speculate and we can
always talk about that in the future.
Cause that's just a topic that's not goingto go anywhere where you're just going
to keep getting closer and then figuringout all the different applications of it.

(39:44):
But for people today, coming to you andadmiring what we do, what you built,

Ben R (39:50):
Okay.
Well, so everything is just a tool, right?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter howfast your computer is.
Like, you know, the fastest gaming rigthat doesn't make you the greatest games.
Like design is about likeexperiential it's about agency.
And, and it's the difference betweena book and a movie versus a game
like is a passive media versusan active media in through games.

(40:14):
And through interactive entertainment,we can build engagement and
we can build these neurons,like firing through our brain.
But every, every step of the way,that's kind of like, what I was trying
to get at originally was, was we asgame designers, what we do is we build
hurdles, we build hurdles and you haveto be able to jump over that hurdle.
If I made a 10 meter highhurdle for three foot.

(40:35):
You're not going to beable to jumper bearable.
You may have to make achievable goals.
It's a, it's a systematic pattern andit follows the Shakespearian method
of, you know like give people, agency,give them like power, give them, or
at least some of the best games thatI've experienced do this pattern.
They, they, they give you agency.
They give you the ability as a playerto be able to enact that agency, to, to

(41:02):
show what I would call it, player skills.
So you have the player skills and as an agdesigner, like if we want to get back on
the topic of AI design, like what I haveto do as an AI designer and in what I do
every day is I make achievable hurdles.
Like I make a challenge.

John (41:18):
skills.

Ben R (41:19):
Yes, exactly.
So, so if if the playerskill is Dodge, right.
I do.
I give you a bowl that runs straightat you and you have to learn, you
have to learn, oh, like it's goingto keep charging straight at you
and you have to Dodge left or right.
Like, it's a, it's an achievable goal,but, but it's, it's testing your mastery
of the ability to Dodge left or right.

John (41:40):
Yes.
with what you do today, Ben, how hands-onare you versus kind of more managerial?
Is that up to you?
Do you get to pick whatapproaches do you have for that?
What do you like?
What do you wish you would be

Ben R (41:53):
I am a big believer in leading by example and, and my managerial
skill is I get in there every day.
I would never ask anybody to do something.
I wouldn't be able to do myselfor couldn't do myself, or can you
be working with reduction or, orif you don't have production, how
can you be a producer yourself?
If you can't understand the, the, theamount of time it would take to do

(42:14):
something or whether or not it is a.
Known unknown or if it's an unknown,unknown, like an unknown, unknown is
basically in the production process.
You have your pie in the sky, youhave, you know approve produce.
And some people call these thingslike L gates or some people call
them like, you know, different?
Like milestones or whatever, but,you know, you have, you have like the

(42:36):
seven, seven piece I think is whatwe call it or something like that.
You know pine sky proof or pre-productionimproved produce then you have the
ship and you have the, the finalpost-production like shippers
only is the only one that doesn'tfollow the P methodology, you have
these very clearly defined phases.
If you can't get over that initialhurdle, if if you're a game designer

(42:59):
and if you're a fledgling game designer,what, what I've seen people struggle
with and I've I at being a teacher,being a professor, being a person who's
analyzed games again, again, like Ialways say, well, what is your goal?
What is your, and we talked about thisat the beginning, bringing it back you
know, what is your win or lose conditionuntil you have a winner lose condition?

(43:21):
You don't know where going.
and then, and only then can, can youdefine the where the player skills.
Because not every Mario can, youknow, jump in three dimensions.
Like some can only jump in two dimensions,like, like until you give the player
power until you give them that agency,like you can't start to begin to define
what are the obstacles that you have tolike present to them an AI and the AI?

(43:45):
Well again, shout, shout out toSergio OCO he was a big believer
in you know, AI should be the, theworld's best, second place finisher.

John (43:55):
all week always like right on your tail, right on your tail.

Ben R (43:58):
He should always be something that is challenging, but that is.
It is, it is something thatyou, you can do, but each should
always be achievable to do.
And it should be like increasingitself over time, like, as you
were getting better as a player.
So, so there are two types of gameslike or actually there's three types
of games there's social games board andcard games, and then video games, like

(44:20):
that's a whole nother thing, but but,but within video games within that, that
third spectrum there are, there are twotypes of games and th they're you know
ones where you increase your player skill.
So things like super meat boy thingslike you know, we're, we're in order
to achieve success, like you knowbinding of Isaac, like you have to
not level yourself up as a character.

(44:42):
You have to level yourself up as a person.
Like you got to get.
Like, there's no way you can beatthis next level unless you get better.
Not, not my stats are getting higher.
Like it's not a massive act.
It's not a, oh, well, I just went andgrind it out like a final fantasy.
Right?
You go, you can't be the boss.
You go grind it up.
You go, you

John (45:02):
stats up.

Ben R (45:02):
stat up your character.
Like you're leveling uphere during not living up.
you as a person.
You're not learning new skills.
You're not learning howto be a better combatant.
You're not learning how to defeat theboss more effectively, where all you're
doing is you're standing past it.
And that's, that's increasingthe, the stats of the character.
It's not increasingyour skill as a player.

John (45:21):
Yeah.
Putting in your reps, right?
Just constant repetition,like exercise, right?
Like building the muscle, justdoing it over and over and over.
Getting your timing down yourextremity down your reaction,

Ben R (45:30):
Right.
We imagine, imagine it, I mean, there are,there are some apps that do this now it's
like, imagine every rep it's like, oh,we're going to wrap this like bar belt.
Now you're going to rep this,like pull up and get a rep this
thing, every single thing is, yeah.
Well, just like building your body,building your mind, you gotta,
you gotta be holistic about it.
You can't just like, you know, workthe same thing over and over again.

(45:51):
You have to ask to actually tryyourself, test yourself, like, you
know, push yourself in all thesedifferent dimensions and all, all the
11 dimensions, like a quantum computing.

John (46:02):
What is kind of like the most exciting development in
AI that you've seen in a while.

Ben R (46:08):
Oh, well, well we'll, I don't know if you know, but we're way, way behind.
I mean, and like, that's the reasonwhy I got into hacking recently.
Well, no, I mean, well, no, I, Iespecially is, you know, is they, now
have, they now have access to quantumcomputing in, in some areas in the
weather utilizing it for, and, andwhat they're doing is, is so there's

(46:30):
different types of machine learning.
So AI, AI, AI is, is a wholefield, but it's, AI is a super set.
It's a larger set of of you know,different types of subsets and
where we're all the, the most like,you know, advancements from being
made right now is machine learning.
But people are not applying.
As well as they could.
You know, I have, I have my owndevelopments I've been doing for, for

(46:52):
the last five years, even before it wasa two K like on, on machine learning
architecture and how to make a gameengine that's based on machine learning,
RJ architecture, but machine learningagain, that is a super set it's like,
okay, well, within machine learning,you have, you have imitation learning.
You have there's there'sabout like 12 different types.
The, the important part is that thereare so many different types of machine

(47:13):
learning that you can do now that arebased on, Chu learning or deep learning.
Where will you take large set of data?
And this is where the data miningprocessing companies come from.
This is where your fake spokes come from.
This is where your Amazon'scome from, but, but they're,
they're way behind Alibaba.
They're way behind Tencent.
in China, like the coolest thing I sawat GC this past year, and the coolest

(47:35):
AI I saw was a thing called Wu Kong.
AI, if you haven't seen it, look it up.
It's basically they made w U KO and G like the monkey king.
It's a it's in some mythology.
But a Wu Kong AI it was it's it's,

John (47:49):
Dennis, like Pete's a team of pros.
Okay.

Ben R (47:52):
Yeah.
Team of pros as well, because ithas to use reinforcement learning.
It has to use has used imitation learning.
It has to use team-based group tactics.
You have to you the same waythat I give a player agency.
When I make a AI, it's called an agent.
So the agent is the thing that has agency.
Like I make an AI agent, it has agencythe same way I give a player agency.

(48:16):
Like I can model like a playerversus like these things.
But like, up until this point,there are certain things.
I don't know if you know about likecapture and recapture and like recapture
to the reason why you now have topick out like stop signs or whatever

John (48:30):
We'll take the little thing in the right direction.
Yeah.

Ben R (48:33):
all you're doing is you're training AI.
There, you, you are training AI everytime you do a recapture, like look it up.
Like they that's how they, theycatalog every single library.
Now they have a, they, they gotthe, you know, the London library,
they got the, New York times.
They, they, and they were able tocategorize the New York times in, in
like a, you know, a matter of weeks.

(48:54):
Because, because there's certainthings that the computers can do
better than humans, but, but throughreinforcement learning and through
imitation learning is what it's called.
We can actually train computers todo the things that they can't do.
So we're, we're, we're making AI rightnow that that are better than us.
But the only reason why they'rebetter than us is because we

(49:15):
don't have infinite memory.
When you go to sleep at night,

John (49:17):
Ram gets flushed bro, or committed to long-term
memory.
Yeah.

Ben R (49:21):
your short-term memory.
your mental long-term memory, but youdon't have an infinite hard drive space.
You get a terabyte up your, up your brain.
Like you can either add more storagespace, like it's not expendable storage.

John (49:33):
I like to think, man, you know, what's the elastic enough,
Mary, you can kind of keep buildingand stretching it and building those
neurons, but you're right, right.
Like things that you don't, youcan't test everything constantly.
Right.
So things that you haven't used in awhile are going to kind of fade away.
Right.

Ben R (49:46):
the whole machine learning architecture, it's, it's basically,
if you've ever written a recursivealgorithm, like you understand
how machine learning works, it'sa, what's it called Markov chain.
the idea is that instead ofhaving memory, what you do is you
collapse the memory into a single.
And it's like, I don't have abrain that can remember everything.

(50:06):
I have a brain that can only holdso much, but if I change it every
day by using like what I've learnedtoday, in order to affect like the,
the current state of it, then that,that is, that is machine learning.
Like literally all we did is we said,well, what did we take this thing,
that has infinite space when wegive it a limited amount of space.
And now with the limited amount ofspace we have to rewrite and you have

(50:27):
to like, change the rules the way thatit approaches something like every day.

John (50:32):
What I've always enjoyed about AI design, right?
It's kind of surprising the player, right?
That's what I've always kind ofpursued whenever I'm down deep
in some behavior trees or goatmodels or whatever like that.
what applications for gamesare you excited about?

Ben R (50:48):
think the most exciting things are, I guess, looking at going, I is like,
if you played against like competitiveplayers and if you've played against
like real-world players, modeling realworld players, I think that like any
person who's into competitive gaming,like, you know, we, we do this whole
survey where it's like, what are youlike, what type of game are you aware?
You're a casual player.
impeditive player youa a story drone player.

(51:10):
Like, you know, we, we have like allthis modeling that we do, like within my
company, like in order to, find our targetdemographic, that's a big part of like,
you know, selling games and marketinggames is finding your target demographic.
So it depends.
It depends on what your demographic is.
it's a multifaceted question.
what is the best?
AI is the best AI, is what ismatched to that player style.
Like it has to, it dependson your player style.

(51:31):
If you are a solo driven storyperson, then like the best thing
for you is going to be a series ofhurdles they're slightly higher.
And that drop back down the,give you a sense of power
at the end of every chapter.
So you complete a game, you go throughthe first act of the game, you get
really strong and then you go intothe second act and you just demolish
everything and, you know, great.

(51:53):
Cause you're like, oh, well Icompleted the first chapter.
Here's my reward.
Here's my, extrinsic and intrinsic reward.
Like I'm both more powerful statwise and more powerful as a player.
you get that, adrenaline, Russia thatdopamine release because, The game
has shown you the, Hey, you completedthis thing that was really difficult.
And so that's how you make solo games.

(52:14):
That's how you makemultiplayer games at all.
It's completely different.
It's completely different.
when you're making a multiplayergame, if I was to make an AI for a
multiplayer game, or when I have madeI for multiplayer games the focus is
not on like these series of hurdles.
It's about pushing her.
It's about testing her masteryof different skillsets.
you could say that's kind ofsimilar to what you're doing in a

(52:37):
single player game, but it's thetesting and the mastery is no.
longer driven by some narrative is nowliterally how fast can you achieve this?
it's, can you jump, can you walk,can you run, can you do this?
the Asher, you can test somebodymastery and then putting them
against a real player as quickly as
possible, ended observing what thereal players do against each other.

(52:57):
And that's what we call imitation learningis now, we model in AI, off of the
imitation of what a real player would do.

John (53:03):
I like that.
I like that.
Right.
Because my problem has always been thatfor the solo player, who's trying to
solely get better by beating on botsnever, ever going to be a match for
somebody who's been playing other people.
But maybe goal is that.

Ben R (53:18):
The AI that the stuff tends to make it now beat 99.9, 7% of
the players or something like that.
Like it literally, it's an unbeatable AI.
came about after I assumingyou're familiar with the game go,

John (53:30):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Play it though.
But I know about.

Ben R (53:34):
One of my mentors or one, the people used to work at
LucasArts clan Hopkins,he talks about a girl.
And about how there was this Japanese veryfamous game of go where like you had the
traditional person who was very, you know,like into the game ago, who like, was like
traditionally trained and he had upstart,you have the new guy who was like, you
know, post world war two Americanized,you know, Japanese go player.

(53:56):
And he did a very deceitful thing.
He met.
He, realized that at the end of theday, when you sign like your, your
move or are you putting your moveinto a envelope for the next day who
get games ago can last multiple days.
That's how in-depth go is instead ofchess where they're slapping the clock
every two seconds, you know they'retrying to be as fast as possible because

(54:17):
there is a finite move set in, in chess.
Neural girl has a much more probabilityspace, which is why they, it takes several
days, But but Clint Hocking, he talksabout, those match where there was a
very deceitful thing where somebody madea move that was insignificant because
it gave him 24 hours to think about.
his actual next move.
And the go master was,very offended by this.

(54:40):
He was like, you just,you're not playing, but Yeah.
you're not playing for real.
you're gaming the system.
You literally met a gaming at this
point.
Like.

John (54:49):
knew that if he gave him 24 hours to think about you know, that
he wanted to get to get to his likespace of something just kind of

Ben R (54:57):
Yeah.

John (54:58):
wasting that time.

Ben R (54:59):
Yeah.
Yeah.
When Sam making the next logicalmove, he made an illogical move
that gave him more time to thinkabout their next logical move.
made the, what would be if there wasinfinite time, if there was not a time
between the last move of the matchand the next move of the match, the
next day, there wasn't 24 hours, thenhe would have played differently.
If he was forced to on thespot, make that decision.

(55:19):
He met a game, did, he was one ofthe first example of metagame like
where he realized the rule set.
And he took himselfoutside of the rule set.
Instead of playing as a player, Playedas a person who's trying to win.

John (55:30):
Yeah.
Played a win.

Ben R (55:32):
played play to win outside of the play.
you know,

John (55:35):
There you go.
I mean, that used to notbe a factor of the game.
Right?
If you break it down, the rule set,you know, there's no thing that says
like, Hey, you know, humans get totake a break after this much time.
Right?
Like that was notsomething that was written.

Ben R (55:46):
How was this something that when the go people like it meant to go and they
were drawing with sticks and rocks on theground, which is how good was originally
created when a drawing with like sticksand rocks on the ground, they were
playing go with a bunch of black rocksand white rocks or whatever like that.
Wasn't something they considered thatwas not something that was part of
the original rule set that person who,like I say, like chess, chess person,
like didn't then think, well, if I givepeople, infinite amount of time and

(56:10):
again, it comes back to the fact thatthere is a much more finite rules space.
in chess.
there isn't go and go, there's, afactorial greater of number of moves.
Because every time you put down arocket can cascade and he can like
capture things and like, and from it.
Yeah.
exactly.
So, so when 10 cent solvedThe go AI basically.
It was the thing in like 2018.

(56:32):
It was like almost threeor four years ago now.
When they solved that, like whenor not Tencent explicitly, but
when, when they solved that withinthat space, it was a huge thing.
It's called AlphaGo.
it was, It was, sort of
like, we went from like deep blue tolike they had you know so deep blue,
I don't even remember Casper off,like, you know, back in the nineties,
like,
uh, you know, he almostbought the Presidio.

John (56:54):
Tampa, wait, Lugo.
When you tell him what the proceedingyou tell him about like bay area.

Ben R (56:57):
They were trying to determine what, what they were going to do with this park
space in Northern San Francisco and Louisbid on it back in like the nineties.

John (57:05):
And the grand masses make that much money.

Ben R (57:08):
I don't know where it's funny it was coming from, but I think the,
the youth government decided that, thatthe, the, the idea of using it as an
arts and entertainment center, insteadof like you know cutting out all the
trees and train to like some kind oflike residential place was, was more
beneficial to the city as a whole.
But yeah, the Kasparov actually bidin and he was outbid or, or his, his

(57:29):
proposal was not as good as, as Lucas's,which is why we have the Presidio up in
San Francisco

John (57:35):
How far away are you from the Presidio?

Ben R (57:39):
blocks.
Like you know,
a stone throw a, I mean,I can, I can take a bus.
I can be there in 12 minutes.

John (57:44):
Nice.
Nice.
I like being near greenery, man.

Ben R (57:47):
before this, I was working up in Nevato and really miss the city.
And so I'm glad to be back init, like it was, a little bit
disconnected in the north.
But like I'm, I'm reallyhappy to be back in the city.

John (57:58):
I got to ask you, right.
Activision's in the news majorpurchase by Microsoft, right?
Like almost $70 billionto buy the whole thing.
everybody has this speculationas to the winds and the IPS, but
you can't argue the portfolio.

Ben R (58:11):
We'll also be also birds with Zynga as well.
You
heard that part, right?

John (58:16):
I'll hold on.
Zynga was take two.

Ben R (58:19):
Bye.
Oh, no tuning to gain, to gain capitalismyou know to gain gaps, leads and

John (58:23):
Yeah.

Ben R (58:24):
activation.
Yeah.
I, I call it active.

John (58:27):
Major purchases all like in the same time window, right?
Like big ass acquisitions for

Ben R (58:31):
it's in the fiscal year.
It's like when these kinds of thingscome out, like they've been working
on this the same way that, you know,they could have told us a year ahead
of time when they were going to shutdown because arts, because the Disney
deal was going through, like they couldhave told us they instead, Kathleen
Kennedy came down and tap Jeff Boris, myproducer on the shoulder and said by the
way, you can't release this game today.

(58:51):
Like like it was literally, we were,we were live for an Xbox live or we
were ready to like pull the triggeron Xbox live beta with 10,000 people.
They some people data mined andthey found the cover on the store.
we were ready to go.
Like sometimes production andanybody who doesn't understand that
the games are driven by marketing.

(59:11):
Slap in the face for you, you know,bucket of cold water, the reason why
most game companies feel today is notbecause they don't have good games.
It's because they don't havegood marketing and marketing.
And this is the reason why, why zinger thegood-bye out companies is the reason why,
they could, you know, recreate games isbecause marketing is 60% of your budget.
if you're going to
average and being the next day,Bola, you know, going off and

(59:35):
make your own game studio like.
Yeah.
yeah.
Next polio.
Yeah.
Shout out to Danny.
doesn't every full cell graduate,like go out and just start throwing
game company is because it doesn'tmatter like the production costs, what
matters is, is new, new user funnel.
And this is, this is what we, figuredout on discord and is because it's
not about making a great product andnot, not about making a great game.

(59:57):
It's not making aboutgreat, a great platform.
None of that matters.
If You do not have marketing themajority of your budget, like 60% of
your budget, if you're going to makegame title should be allocated towards
marketing because can buy clicks, youcan buy, like she can do viral marketing.

John (01:00:13):
you can buy a streamer.

Ben R (01:00:14):
You can do everything you can like to make a great game, but nobody plays it.
Is that a great game?

John (01:00:20):
That's a good point, man.
Nobody knows about it, right?
Like, I mean, you have theseindie breakout hits, right?
That over time, word spreads, wordof mouth, and that's how they come
up without zero marketing, butit's rare and far between, right?
that's why these publisher dealsexist as shitty or much as you want
to avoid them or do your own thing.
They help get the word out.
Right.

(01:00:41):
They get you on these storefrontpages, they're in their catalog.
Right.

Ben R (01:00:46):
ask me, you know, like you have good ideas.
Like one, you try to make her own venture.
And I, I have

John (01:00:51):
it wouldn't surprise me, man.

Ben R (01:00:52):
I've started a dozen companies over the past 10 years.
Like my first company everwas the most successful.
When I was 16, I made calledmagic city, web design.
I made websites for a mentally disabledgroups not groups themselves, but
for people who are advocates of them.
So the things like the nationallines, familial, or the Alabama
family trust, like I was working with,nonprofits in the area, like, and this

(01:01:14):
is during the early two thousands.
So while people were stillfiguring out what the web was like,

John (01:01:18):
Yeah, timing.
Timing.
Must've been a big part of that for sure.

Ben R (01:01:22):
it was a big part of that.
I mean, it helped payfor my college education.
I'm like, that's how I help.
I mean, thank you to my grandparents andmy parents for helping with that as well.
part of my college funding actually camefrom, the profits, from that venture.
But, you know, I made probablyat least a dozen companies
over the past several years.
But the, important thing is, is, youhave to have not just a product and that

(01:01:45):
has to not just be a marketable product.
There has to be a market for it.
There has to, you have to know what
you're
targeting.

John (01:01:50):
this thing.
Who's going to be buying this thing

Ben R (01:01:52):
Yeah.
Who's going to be playing this thing.
Who's gonna be buying this thing
Like when, when, when, you know,

John (01:01:56):
often, right?
Like it's rare

Ben R (01:01:58):
one of my favorite parts is when, when dollars come to donuts,
you know, it's a Southern phrase.
Or maybe it's just somethingI heard over the years,

John (01:02:05):
no repeat that, man.
I haven't heard that one.

Ben R (01:02:07):
dollars.

John (01:02:08):
what does that break down to?

Ben R (01:02:10):
how do you get fed at the end of the day?

John (01:02:12):
Uh,

Ben R (01:02:13):
you making money with your game?
Are you,

John (01:02:15):
are you
eating, are you eating,

Ben R (01:02:17):
yeah.
are you eating.
like, when shit hits the road or whenlike, you know, road meets the pavement
or wherever you want to call it, there'sa lot of turn of phrases out there.
I've seen very few peoplewho've struck out on their own.
One of the people I really lookup to again, I got to give a
big shout out to Ken Hudson.
he was guy back in the day.

John (01:02:35):
Yo, I'm going to link up with him, man.
I'm linking up with him.
He's going to be on thepodcast, not too long from

Ben R (01:02:40):
I would love to hear that podcast.
Please, please bring him on the show.
Please bring him up.
but no he's, he's one of the few peoplethat, that struck out like doing his own
venture, but the reason why I felt like hewas so successful and I think he actually
won an academy award for one of his
things.
he went back to work with, Clinton, watch out legions, like
either throw up in in Toronto
in that area.

John (01:03:00):
I think he's in this new spot called brass line entertainment,
but I think he's out of Toronto.

Ben R (01:03:05):
yeah.
After Toronto.
but he was one of the few peoplethat I've, I've seen really
strike it out on a new venture.
Like, you know, go, gostake a claim somewhere.
Yeah.
Break from the mold.
And you're out there and you know,just took a simple idea or like
a core, what we used to call ita full-scale look of the nugget,
like, Yeah.
what's your nugget, like?

(01:03:26):
You know, what is your core idea?
He took it, he marketed it, he got thewhole package downright and like, you
know, it's, it's something that like,you know, I look towards like a, you
know, maybe one time during the future,but The only, the only way I would
do another product or I strike out onmy own is if I had a platform first
and like, I'm going, like the gamewould be a product of the platform.

John (01:03:48):
Hell.
Yeah.

Ben R (01:03:49):
I, believe in platforms like, you know when I was working with Jason Citron
at discord, he's like, there's threemajor things you got to think about when
you're starting a company or when you'restarting a, a pro product or whatever.
It's people product process.
are my last game, like, I can't talktoo much about it cause you know
it was never released, but we weretrying to do too many things at once.
we had a new team, we had a new product,we had a new process and, if you want to

(01:04:13):
do all three at the same time, like it'sgonna take a long time develop each one,
like longer than a normal game dev cycle.
If you're, if you're gonna makesomething new, you should focus on
one vector and of those three, you'regoing to have a new team then fine.
If you want to make a sequel to, you know,the greatest game of all time something

(01:04:34):
like, you know, you want to make the nextleague of legends or something like, you
know, you're gonna make legal legendswho were doted to ironically, like you
have to have a understood process andunderstood product, which they did.
And then you have to have new people.
Like you can't, you can't doall three at the same time only.
It's a, it's a good, fast, cheap,

John (01:04:55):
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Damn man.
You just broke down, the riot games,success story right there, man.
I

Ben R (01:05:00):
Yeah.

John (01:05:00):
thought about that.
Right.
Like, Hey, they just kinda looked atsomething that was proven and existed and
they didn't have to kind of reinvent it sothat they can then build out their team.
Right.

Ben R (01:05:11):
Yeah.

John (01:05:11):
kind of facilitated building out their process and tools.
And then

Ben R (01:05:15):
They already have a pretty well understood and established process.
Like I think at least from myunderstanding, they had a tool set.
They had an engine, they built the engine.
Like but also understood their market.
you know what the greatest thingabout, about league of legends is

John (01:05:26):
what's that.

Ben R (01:05:27):
it runs on any machine.

John (01:05:28):
Yeah.

Ben R (01:05:30):
if you're a Brazil player, if you're a white going away,
like if you're playing a mortar,Kaiser, like, you know, you, you can
still, you can still enjoy product.

John (01:05:38):
Hell.
Yeah.

Ben R (01:05:40):
An educator being an instructor.
Like I think about things.
I try to break it down for people.
I hope the message gets acrossbecause I am my own thought process
and not everybody thinks the same.
Like I don't, I don't like everybodyto have the same experiences,
like as well, there's a differencebetween intelligence and wisdom.
Lots of people can be intelligenthave a heightened score.
Like if you want to get down to D and D

(01:06:01):
terms, like, you know, like why doclerics have high whiz in low end?
And why do, sourcer wizards havehigh end low is, is because.
I think there are too manywizards and sorcerers.
again, that industry, like there arepeople that have really smart brain,
but they don't stop and smell the roses.
they don't see the full picture.
in the Meyers-Briggs terms like,you know, you can be a person that

(01:06:23):
is, thinking or feeling but you canalso be a person that is observant

John (01:06:26):
perceiver.

Ben R (01:06:27):
NFE or ENTP, like early feel or my two Myers-Briggs like they, do you
see the trees or do you see the forest?
you get caught up on this sensory and,but, or do you see, are you perceptive?
Do you see the bigger picture?
the leaders that I look to and thepeople that mentors to me are people
that they can take that step back.

(01:06:48):
Hey, let's not talk about a game.
Let's talk about the game industry.
and that's why I love what you'redoing here with this podcast.
you're taking people out of the moment.
You're saying, okay.
Let's stop thinking about like whenthe next milestone is what your next
task what's your next leg deadline.
And you, you say to people, Hey, let's,let's talk about this holistically.
let's think about this for a second.
why do we make games?

(01:07:09):
And that's what dreamweek was all about for me?
when I first proposed the idea to, toK dream week was, you know, something
that it's about the, why not thewhat, it's not, what are we making?
It's like, why are we makingit in the first place?
And I think you can do thiswith any industry would remove,
was it was, it was five days.
It was, it was a full work week where,you know, I purchased the company.

(01:07:30):
I said, Hey, can you give us allyour resources and all of our, all
of your, you know, multi-billiondollar, you know access to, all
the things that you have access to.
Can we take all your tools?
All of the things that we normallyhave access to, but we focus on a
particular product and can we justlet people just make whatever they.
can a person take a step backand they not make what they want.

(01:07:50):
Can they write about like what they want?
Like we had, we had a personthat did nothing but just
journal for the entire week.
Like they just wrote about games.
Like it's about engagement and dreamweek is also about how you, as a user,
want to engage, it's not a, not deadline.
It's not a timeline.
It's not like some people do engage betterbased on deadlines or timelines, and some

(01:08:10):
people want to compete with each other.
So we did elect a panel of judgeslike from, every demographic
and sexual background and,you know, race and everything.
Like in geographic background, we, wemade a very diverse panel of judges.
But, goal was to make sure that.
everybody felt recognized that everybodyfelt like they were, doing something
that was worthy and just give themthe, full weight of a corporation

(01:08:35):
to, to make their dreams come true.

John (01:08:37):
That's epic, man.
I love because the fact, you know,you have an international team, right?
Like spread out all over the world.
So diversity.

Ben R (01:08:43):
I'm up all hours of the night interfacing with
you know, people in the UK.
We have we have assume Britain, wehave a studio in the Czech Republic.
We have our actually multiplestudents in the Czech Republic.
we have outsourcers thatwe work with in China.
I don't get much sleep.
I work a lot.
And but, when you love what you do, younever worked another day in your life.
That was something my dad taught me.
That's something, you know, I holdtrue to my, my story is, is you know,

(01:09:07):
when you love, when you genuinely enjoywhat you're doing and like, I felt this
way, working with, with Dave as well.
It's like, it's not,it's not a job anymore.
It's really, now it's a passion.
it's a drive.
It's something that, is a definingcharacteristic, to look background, I
started up, like, it's just, it just,it just became another stat of mine.
But you know, okay.

(01:09:28):
Why I leveled up my game dev stats today?

John (01:09:31):
Hell.
Yeah, dude.
I love taking the time tolink up, kick it with you.
Dream week, I mean, just seems likesomething that creatives need, right?
Like we kind of.

Ben R (01:09:41):
No, not just creative.
It's something thateverybody's I was talking

John (01:09:44):
human people, people,
people
need

Ben R (01:09:46):
like
I,

John (01:09:48):
people in, in marketing, people, in HR, people in, in, in services,

Ben R (01:09:52):
thing is, is you don't have to do your normal job.
One of the coolest projects.
so dream week was actually inspired or,appropriated is probably the better word.
Like from Lucas arts, likeclosure and back in 2009.
And I still have, I probablydisplayed the ribbon on my wall.
I got, I got best knockoff.

(01:10:12):
Some people would take that offensively.

John (01:10:15):
you copy something.

Ben R (01:10:16):
What, like well, what we had made a 1942 clone

John (01:10:20):
1942 is like vertical top-down plane scrolling up,
shoots a bullet shooter thing.

Ben R (01:10:27):
Exactly.
Yeah.
There's, there's lots ofJapanese, like, you know, bullets,
shooter kind of games out there.
Well, Yeah.
we thank you for, for giving some contextfor your listeners, We at four people
we had we and myself we had a producer,we had a, you know, a audio guy and we
had an animator shout out to can too.
But we didn't have a Mahler.
We didn't have a person thatcan make models for a game.

(01:10:47):
so again, designing within constraints,
designed with Katrina.
What we did is we took up, we tooka camera, like back in the day
when you had like, you know, likehandheld cameras, like number, it
was a phone with an actual camera.
I can, we, we took a top-downpictures each of the,
stuffed animals in the office.
And then the animals beginning,the characters would tilt
them slightly 45 degrees.

(01:11:08):
We take a picture like, it's the wayyou do stop motion, like way as the
way, you know, robot chicken was made.
Like you do stop motion.
Like, and so all we didis we, we hit frames

John (01:11:18):
Yes.
And that's the meaning of banking.

Ben R (01:11:20):
Yeah.
If you're turning beggingyou, you turn her left.
Right.
the gameplay, except for the, finalunicorn boss battle that I'd made.
I stayed 72 hours over theweekend in order to get that
boss battle line, because

John (01:11:32):
what was the timeframe for a dream week?
Was it a week literally like, seven days.

Ben R (01:11:37):
it was, seven days.
but, one of the things that we, wesettled on, like talking to HR and like
in working with the international team,we're very big on corporate culture
and we don't want to ask people towork outside of normal working hours.
So we did not want toextend it over the weekend.
We did not want to have people comingin on Saturday or Sunday working on it.
So, so we, we, we stuck tofive days, like a normal,

(01:11:57):
like, eight hours.

John (01:11:58):
start Monday, submit Friday night or start Monday review Monday.

Ben R (01:12:02):
cause we had to deal with the Czech Republic.
So the Czech Republic is nine hours ahead.
So they're They're GMT plus one.
we started on theirbeginning of their Workday.
We ended up on the endof the Workday on Friday.
So, Yeah, I think, I think itwas, I don't remember that.
Well, that's another thing about Jamieis that people submitted shit late.
Like I didn't care.
Like

John (01:12:22):
We don't give a shit about deadlines.

Ben R (01:12:25):
we, we do for people who want deadlines, we gave them a day.
For people who don't want their lines.
there were three vectorsof dream week, right?
There were, there werepeople who wanted to compete.
And even within that, there were peoplethat wanted to have a pre-formed team
and people that wanted to be match made.
So I, I actually made two cues.
Like if you have a pre-made Q team, thesame way that we do matchmaking in a game,

John (01:12:47):
Yeah.

Ben R (01:12:48):
so they don't get judged, they don't get judged by the same
categories, as the people who were solved
you, they have a wholedifferent judging category.
Like I I'm, I'm going to write a
blog post.

John (01:12:58):
that's super equitable, right?
Like, because there's definitelyto like having rapport and knowing
each other versus people likehaving to get to know each other,
just to start working together.

Ben R (01:13:08):
Yeah.
Yeah.
no, the people that were workingtogether for the first time you
know, we had the match made masters.
We had the, the, the best indie solo,like we add like, you know, different
awards that we gave to each group basedon what their were and how they, how
they worked within those constraintscause it's not, it's not fair.

(01:13:29):
Like, so some of the pre-made teamshad been working for a month ahead
of time, even before we announced,cause they already had a team,
they were already working on a rat.
Catcher was one of the names of thegames where you have to catch a rat
as a, as a cat, there were two, twoseparate teams in the Czech Republic.
They were already working on this for amonth ahead of time and it wasn't fair
to judge them against the other team.
So, so when we did the award ceremony,like we had a whole separate category,

(01:13:52):
like we knowledge the people who, whowere not in either of those queues and
that's, that's what it's all about.
That's what remains about.
Acknowledging everybody saying,Hey, these are the cool things.
Like, you know, that youdid these equal things.
I do.
They're not always equitable.
They're not always exactly, youknow quality you know, based.
But you know, some people workbetter, under deadline but some people

(01:14:14):
don't work good hunter that line.
So that was only one aspect of family.
That was, that was, thatwas the forward facing.
That was the, you know,let's, let's promote.
And let's like, do the thing.
We also had the the free dreamersis what I call them or the
lucid dreamers is what I call
them.

John (01:14:29):
dreamers.
Yes.

Ben R (01:14:30):
Yeah.
Which is, you know, justdo whatever you want.
Do it on your own time, doit at your own schedule.
Nobody's going to be pressuring you.
Nobody's going to be giving youa time or or anything take this
week for yourself to work on yourown, whatever you think is best.
And that kind of freedom, Dhakafreedom is the thing that people
came back to me time and time again.

(01:14:51):
And I, I passed these, these thingsalong to other people because I was
the only one of the organizers I was,I was the most front-facing one, but I
was, I was the only one of the peoplelike that was making all this happen.
Like it was, it took a lot of workbehind the scenes, like, you know, get
the leads on board to get the, the, thelicensing like You don't think about this.
Like, you know, if we're going toaround me making something at a, as an

(01:15:13):
official studio, we have to make surethat every single thing is licensed.
Everything.
Several thing is if you're using apiece of software, if you're using, if
you're using an asset, if you're usinga sound, everything has to be fully
licensed in order to be in compliance.
Because we we can't, we can'tmake herself vulnerable like that.
We're, we're a big company.
Like we're doing, even if it'snever released to the public, even

(01:15:33):
if it's not for commercial release,doing something like that, like it's
something again, it gets back to, youdon't think about the marketing costs.
You don't think about the licensingof the software costs or the
licensing of the asset costs.
every single thing that was made indream week had to be homegrown, had to be

John (01:15:49):
Okay.
Okay.

Ben R (01:15:50):
not, you're not allowed to use anything LA, unless It
is like MIT license or somethingthat's already for you license use.
that was that was the only like so stuffon the unreal store is all fair game.
Because when you buy it,you buy it in perpetuity.

John (01:16:06):
Yes.

Ben R (01:16:07):
part of organizing dream week was making sure that
everybody was in compliance.

John (01:16:11):
like, I'm just curious about the rule set, right?
Like we got the timeframe is everybodyusing like a same set of a consistent
engine as the consistent like ID or.

Ben R (01:16:22):
I wanted to make it more open, like where you could use, you know,
you use whatever, but due to compliancewe, we had to restrict it you know, to,
to unreal just because that was, onlyone that we could guarantee compliance

John (01:16:35):
Okay.
You guys had a, I don'tknow what they call it.
A multi-user license
or some

Ben R (01:16:40):
unity.
We, we got in touch with one oftheir, like BizDev people, like we had
conditional licenses, but then they would,they said after the event, like, they're
going to take back licenses and like,

John (01:16:51):
per seat, right?

Ben R (01:16:52):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it was, it was, a wholething, but no, we looked at Good.
DOE in gen.
We

John (01:16:58):
Yeah.
Good.
Those free

Ben R (01:17:00):
looked at the, the, whatever the successor Columbia yard is it's
called.
Like,

John (01:17:04):
3d E.

Ben R (01:17:05):
we looked at all these things.
and, you know, I wanted to people tolook at other tool sets and look at
other pipelines because I think justcome off of using our own internal engine
for the last, you know, 30 years or
whatever it

John (01:17:19):
Yeah.
It's so good to see howthe ways to do the thing.
Right.
And like, bring that back.

Ben R (01:17:24):
It's good.
Just to look at other, other toolsets and other ways of thinking
and like other design paradigmsand patterns and like everything.
I just learned recentlythat unreal has utility.
blueprints, obesity.

John (01:17:34):
Utility.

Ben R (01:17:35):
Even build tools in the unreal engine in blueprint, like
you can make, you can make unrealblueprint tools that are like, you
know, windows that show up, like as
an editor window, then a real,

John (01:17:47):
oh shit.
So like MF like windows.
Okay.
Okay.
I gotta look this up, man.
You teach him me

Ben R (01:17:52):
it's still an engine

John (01:17:55):
separately.

Ben R (01:17:56):
or window out or an asset browser window or something like that

John (01:18:00):
you,
know, tools are my jam, bro.
So I got, I gotta look into this.
I'm
excited about that.

Ben R (01:18:04):
Look, they used to call it blue utility, I think was the old term,
but yeah, it's a utility blueprints.

John (01:18:11):
That's native to the engine.
That's not like a plugin,a third party plugin.

Ben R (01:18:15):
Right.
as a 16 year old game, like ideologists,like, you know, you have an idea, but
you don't know how to make games yet.
Why, why are we making it so hard them?
why is it.
so hard for, for a personthat just has a game idea?
Like, I I've been pitched so many gameideas, but by people outside the game
industry, when I tell them what we gamedesigner, like they come to me and they

(01:18:36):
say, oh, I have the signing for game.
Why don't we do this?
And this and this.
and I say to them the same thingI would say to any of my students,
same thing I'd say to anybodyelse's game jam that I'm evaluating.
What is the goal?
What, what, how do you win orlose and what hurdles are you
presenting the player along the way

John (01:18:53):
boom.
Bring it all full circle.
I'm a friend.
We are going to enter the final round.
Are you ready?

Ben R (01:19:00):
fun.

John (01:19:04):
Fight?
No.
I forgot, man.
You got a good voice, man.
We haven't done like,

Ben R (01:19:16):
I played in a band in
San Francisco, max rats,

John (01:19:19):
God damn.
I love it.
All right.
What's the last game you finished?

Ben R (01:19:25):
shit finish like, okay.
Are you talking about completionist?

John (01:19:28):
the

Ben R (01:19:30):
half-life Alex was
last one I can say to the credits.

John (01:19:33):
Did you think that was a great like test of the medium?

Ben R (01:19:36):
is half-life three.
It is.
It really is.
It's the next evolution of half-life.
That is the best, I mean, like I play alot of games for competitive analysis and
I watch a lot of pro players play games.
I love games done quick.
I love seeing how the way people have toways around games or, or use glitches,
like in order to get past lake shore inareas it reminds me of the importance of
QA and, and how much I loved being in QAand now valuable or QA testers are like

(01:20:02):
with a work from home environment, likepeople are trying to outsource that stuff.
And like, you have tohave embedded QA, you

John (01:20:07):
Yes.

Ben R (01:20:07):
testers that are in part of your pod that like,
understand what the goals are

John (01:20:12):
100%

Ben R (01:20:13):
you have to make a AAA game dev potty, you got to have a designer,
have a producer, you got to have QA.
those are the three basic requirements.
Like engineer would be great.

John (01:20:22):
artists would be great.

Ben R (01:20:24):
artists will be great.
Sometimes not always built.
Oh, those are shared resources.

John (01:20:27):
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're always shared audio person.
Yeah.
What's the last book you read?
Or listen to

Ben R (01:20:35):
oh I, I was just reading ready player two.
I really loved the only declineis I, I both read and listen to
audio book.
It's narrated by Wil Wheaton.
I don't know if he's still doing tabletopgaming, but he used to do a great thing

John (01:20:48):
on YouTube.

Ben R (01:20:49):
Where you, you would show different tabletop games, which like, again,
it's like one of these things where.
I don't always have the the full amountof time to like sit down and play game.
But if I can watch a game or vanwatch somebody break down the rules
and they do a really good job ofmaking it entertaining and keeping
the, keeping the rule set relevantand like you know like making, but
understanding the context of the game.

(01:21:09):
Like they get into the character.
It's like, watching your favoritestar Trek actors embody the roles
of, the characters in the board game.
So

John (01:21:17):
That's cool.
The little role playing aspect of it.
Yeah.
I love it.
Okay.
So you've done a lot, Ben,you know, like you said

Ben R (01:21:25):
I wouldn't say I've done a lot of sanity.
I've done a little,

John (01:21:27):
okay.
You've done

Ben R (01:21:28):
a little bit of everything,

John (01:21:30):
a little bit of everything, right?
Like you've worked on one of, almostevery type of game in the genre,
across platform, across types.
You've been in robotics.
You entrepreneurs some shityou've been in academia.
All of, all of those, right.
If you had to pick one thing,what are you most proud of?

Ben R (01:21:48):
I'm most proud of being a student.
I'm an eternal student and everybodyshould be an eternal student.
I'm learning every day.
Every, every single thingthat I've done is just another
way for me to gain knowledge.
Like, until the day I die until,you know, I have my last breath,
like I'm, I'm going to be an eternalstudent and everybody should strive
to be so there is no mastery.

(01:22:09):
Like there is no completionistscore in the game of life.
the more, you know, the moreyou realize you don't know
is a common attic added them.
But you know, the only way youlose bringing it full circle,
the win loss condition, theonly way you lose the game of?
life is when you start.

John (01:22:23):
I'm with you.
I agree.
The day you stop learningis the day you die, man.
The day your mind stops beingimportant to stops having inputs.
Right?
So it's not going to give you any outputs.
I like that.
I'm with you.
If you can go back and talk to 18 yearold Ben written, what would you tell him?

Ben R (01:22:40):
shit.
was making great stockinvestments at the time.
I would've said, keep it,keep your stock investments.
But if I had to give him like a nugget ofwisdom for how to give him the nugget I
would say, well, listen more talk less.

John (01:22:51):
Oh, okay.
The two ears, one mouth.

Ben R (01:22:55):
Yeah, one mine years.

John (01:22:57):
Okay.
Okay.
Dope.
I liked that one.
All right, brother.
Where can people reach out?
Connect a few, see whatyou guys are working on.
Are you guys hiring

Ben R (01:23:05):
We absolutely are hiring it to gain.
We, we have a job board they'relisted you know, we, we have a
couple of projects in the works.
You know if you reach out toour recruiters, they can tell
you a little bit more about whatopportunities are available.
you can also look meup on Ben written.com.
You'll look me up on my website.
I do want to say a couple of things.
So, I'm trying to think about like whatthe future of not just Yes, but the

(01:23:29):
future of game development and like,

John (01:23:31):
interactive?

Ben R (01:23:32):
make it better for developers to make games as opposed to just
like, that's part of what my learningswere from dream week was like, I was
observing, I was watching, know, how dowe make the future of gaming together
in collaboration and how do we notreinvent the exploding red barrel?

John (01:23:48):
Amen to that, bro.
Amen to that.
I'm with that, I'm on the eternal searchfor like optimizing game engines and
teaching people to use these thingsand not have to, what do we say?
We say like you spend 60, 70% of thetime just making something work and you
only have like 30, 40% to make it fun.
You know what I'm saying?
Want to flip that shit?

Ben R (01:24:06):
Also another thing that I, I mean, I kinda knew this was like as
18 old Ben, but like somebody thatsame to myself, again, like just to
reiterate was write everything down.
If you are, if you a new person, can't,recount the number of journals like that.
I have, I found recently that of like,you know, especially during COVID, when
you start to pull out all the boxesand the start to open up all the books,

(01:24:27):
damn, that was a great idea that I wrote.
Like 18 years ago, likewrite everything down.
even if it's all white board and evenif it's temporary like that, the act of

John (01:24:37):
Okay.

Ben R (01:24:37):
they say that it's an education when you're learning about education.
you know, so much from listening, youlearn so much from speaking, learn so
much from writing, going the most fromteaching, like the, the, just the act of,
of taking it from your conscious mind and,and like having to you know, alliterate
you know, trying to write that down, likeif you're trying to, transcribe like your

(01:24:58):
thoughts, it is, it is important process.
again, it gets, back to the quantumcomputing those neural pathways.

John (01:25:05):
definitely I plus a thousand that I liked that too.
Right?
Like we can watch things to the endof time we can listen to things,
but it isn't until we go through theactive step of writing it down, that
it actually starts to kind of sink in.

Ben R (01:25:19):
What's the difference between books and.

John (01:25:21):
Exactly right.
Passive versus a interactive right.

Ben R (01:25:25):
I have passive

John (01:25:26):
Act passive versus active.

Ben R (01:25:28):
through the act of writing it down.
You are being active.
You're no longer passive.

John (01:25:32):
I love it.
Who do you nominate?
We will, right now we're on thesecond season of the podcast, right?
So we already know the criteria.

Ben R (01:25:43):
I'm telling you, Kim Hudson, can I send you your next get.

John (01:25:46):
I nominate kid Hudson to fall out of the play area behind you.
Ben, I'm going to make that shit happen.
And even if God, if I, even if Igot a name drop, you was like, yo
bro, Ben red wants to hear you.
Come on the show.
You can't say no to him.
I'm going to make thathappen for you, bro.
Do you have any last words for thepeople out there before we wrap up?

Ben R (01:26:06):
Don't stop dreaming.
You know you may think that thatyou're just a pawn in the game of life.
might think that you're beingplayed by other players take back
that agency, remember that you areyour own master of your own reality
and that this is just a dream.
We're just the imaginations of ourselves.

(01:26:26):
And, you know, your perception is reality.

John (01:26:30):
Going back to that dream thing.
One last thing before we wrap itup, how much work or time of effort
did it take to make dream week?

Ben R (01:26:39):
Months months, months of red tape paperwork getting across borders, state
workers, like was, it was not an easyprocess, but I had a great, great, great
group of people helping me along the way.
It takes a village make a game.
there is no grandma's boy,
you

John (01:26:56):
Oh, God,

Ben R (01:26:57):
you don't make a game in isolation.
You don't,

John (01:26:59):
the console.
He just took the Xbox homeand he became the controller.

Ben R (01:27:04):
a guy who made a a Titanic mod, the mafia.
Original mafia, mafia,

John (01:27:10):
Yeah.

Ben R (01:27:10):
20 years to make it, if you want to get something to market,
like if you wanted to be in herlifetime, you gotta work with people.
Be willing to work with people, bewilling to make concessions reach
across the aisle, you know, shakehands with people and, you know
Speaking of working with people.
We do want to mention that we have somejobs open, here@twokyoucangototwok.com

(01:27:31):
and there's a job section.
You can also go to the greenhouse website.
that website is going to beboards.greenhouse.io/two K.

John (01:27:42):
I love it.
Yo, aye.
We outta here.
In this industry, I'm luckyto bump into people who offer
such an interesting on the way.
To look at life and thinkers thatI can have a profound conversation
with in whatever direction, withoutany kind of guidance or notes.
I mean, Ben is a life, a self-proclaimedlifelong student who admits to

(01:28:05):
not being able to sleep becausehe's always working on something.
This interview felt different tome compared to my other episodes.
It felt like we were simply on a wave,just discussing the arts of games.
And if it didn't sink in, remember.
The first thing about makinga game is defining the goal.
What's the wind condition.
What's the loss condition.
I know this is a wide spectrum andinteractive entertainment, and you could

(01:28:27):
definitely get into a debate on whatit means to be a game and not having to
have a specific win or loss condition.
I remember in my days in school wasdefinitely one of the early bits were
taught when breaking down game theory.
I can walk away with a bit more pridein what I do up until this conversation.
I would not have looked at somebodydesigning chess to be an artist.

(01:28:51):
And now.
I agree if you can break down a rule setthat eloquently, that everything kind of.
Saul, you know, balancesout and leads to a win.
Uh, loss or a stalemate.
That that is an art.
And not everyone can do it.
It makes me think about the time Iwent through rules of the game at full.

(01:29:11):
So my class with Dave, Arneson thecreator of Dungeons and dragons.
And.
I'll be honest for me.
I didn't appreciate that time.
I couldn't tell you much about thatclass other than getting to know
about the awesome board game in Katon.
Right?
That was my biggesttakeaway from that class.
And if I could go retakethat with him, I would.

(01:29:31):
But I'll never have thatopportunity again, because Dave
has moved on to that next life RPG.
So I really take advantage of being ableto talk to people like Ben or Jamison
to Raul who unlike me cherish that classand soaked it up and really connected
with one of the OGs in this game space.
Uh,
one of the greatest things I tookaway from Amazon was our dedicated.

(01:29:54):
Leadership principle to learn andbe curious, which manifested itself.
As actual days in the scheduling.
Right?
I think it was like 20% of our schedule.
I would be learning and be curious days.
And we were empowered to go offand pick up a new technology, read
something, anything that wouldget the creative juices flowing.

(01:30:16):
That we could.
Bring back as a skill to empowerthe business or what have you.
And.
Then even at.
EA we had something like this,I forget what they were called.
And it was something that was easyto kind of be like, oh yeah, we'll
push this off until planning orpush it off to the next milestone.
So you gotta be careful andmake sure that it stays.

(01:30:37):
Plan, but having it as part of theculture was something that I'll never
forget because normally up until then,everything I had done at a game studio was
just, feverously behind the pursuit of.
Getting whatever project shippedor completed or hitting the next
milestone to get the next greenlight meeting or something like that.
And at epic, I'm still tryingto figure it out, right?

(01:30:58):
Like, uh, ultimately it's very easyto take advantage of the limitless
amount of opportunity of resourceswe have available and go propose
something and then pursue it.
But I'm still trying tolearn the tact and strategy.
Right.
And still trying todeliver my first big win.
As part of the team and prove myself.

(01:31:18):
For Ben to come into a companywhere it's not the culture.
And really propose that and spin itup grassroots with a group of people
and invest the months and monthsand months into making the time and
finding the technology and clearingall the assets and defining a rule set.
And making it as inclusive to all thetypes of workers and people that you have.

(01:31:43):
It's just fantastic.
And it's a huge feat.
It is no small feat I think that wasmy favorite part of the interview was
hearing about what dream week is, how itcame to be and what people got out of it.
I would love to connect with morepeople who went through dream week.
If you were there, hit me up.
I'd welcome your story.
On episode 30, two of out to playevery, we sit down with Zach buck,

(01:32:05):
a designer at the wandering band.
I got to know about him asa result of reading, Jason
Schrader's press reset book.
When I was working at EA at a time, he.
Had this kind of dream run throughthe company where he got into QA and
worked his way up the ranks to seniorproducer, to do all types of things at
EA and work on some amazing franchises.

(01:32:25):
You won't want to miss that storythat debuts on Monday, May 9th.
make sure to follow us so that youdon't miss out on that episode.
Thank you for listening, Deb.
If you found this episode informative,I ask that you pay a link forward to
a developer to help grow our listener.
If you're a game developer with astory you think could help a fellow dev
out, please go to out of play area.comand click on the Calendly link at

(01:32:49):
the top to meet up, please make sureyou get approval from your manager
or studios, PR HR team beforehand.
Out of play area, the game developers,podcasts releases, new episodes every
other Monday on all the major players,including Spotify, apple, and Google.
Please make sure to follow us, to seewhat developer falls out of the play area.
Next time.
I'm your host John Diaz untilnext time devs stay strong.

(01:33:13):
Stay true.
Stay dangerous

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Ben Retan | Lead AI & Encounter Designer @ Hangar 13 | Ep 31

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ben Retan | Lead AI & Encounter Designer @ Hangar 13 | Ep 31