Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Michael John, affectionately known as MJ, runs the Games and Playable Media master's program at UC Santa Cruz, where he and his team work to transform bright, eager game students into industry ready professionals.
Michael has a long and storied history in games. Ever heard of Spyro the Dragon? That adorable character who enchanted and educated kids on the PlayStation? Michael helped bring Spyro to life and did the same for other games including the God of War series and the innovative Glass Lab educational games.
Michael's passion for using games to educate and inspire is a key theme [00:01:00] throughout his career arc from producer to educator. And that passion really shines through in our conversation.
Michael: A big part of what I believe in, uh, has always been, uh, enabling people to create. So if you think about what I've done as I became a more senior designer, but even now, more so as a college teacher is I'm here and I'm enabling other people to create and to express their heart.
And that actually satisfies my heart. And now I'm going to start working on also some projects that are designed to enable creation in that same kind of way to help maybe younger people understand. Principles of of level design or principles of game play that are kind of black box for a lot of folks until they really get into it.
And so it excites me to think, what if I could create something that would remove that from the black box? Maybe a few kids out there would say, Oh, I can do that. I can make this thing that expresses who I am. Like, to me, that [00:02:00] would be the most exciting outcome.
Amy: Want to peer into the future, listen in and find out what's hot and happening with the upcoming generation of game creators.
Welcome Michael to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Michael: Hi, Amy Jo, great to be here.
Amy: I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm really excited to get to learn more about you. We've known each other for a long time, but I don't actually know the story of how you got started in the industry and how you made your decisions along the way, what to work on.
So tell me, how did you get started in digital and gaming?
Michael: Well, that's a long story.
Amy: Well, tell me the medium version.
Michael: Sure. Like a lot of people, my first job was in QA was a quality assurance tester in gosh, it must've been the early nineties. I got a job working for Phillips on their CDI project, which was a compact [00:03:00] disc interactive that was supposed to mean.
And they were making some games for this kind of weird console that wasn't really a console. Anyway, I got hired to test games that lasted for about three weeks. And then I got promoted to like an assistant producer and kind of went from there inside of that organization, which wasn't going far, but was a lot of fun.
Uh, and then I actually got recruited to join universal interactive studios by Mark Cerny. So when I had an interview with Mark, who was not somebody I had heard of before. Uh, but when he told me that he was the person who made marble madness, I had sort of like an instant fanboy collapse like in his office and realized that didn't matter what he said after that I was going to try to come work with him, which I did for a number of years.
Uh, and that's where, uh, really got to do a lot of fun things, really worked with insomniac games and, uh, a little bit with Naughty Dog and some other people eventually decided to go out, uh, Mark and I actually [00:04:00] went on our own for a little while as a consulting group of two. And that was also really interesting and fun, just kind of traveling around and meeting a lot of people in the industry, trying to, I guess, help them with their production processes is what we ended up specializing in more than anything else.
I have my own company for a little while, where I did some prototyping for Sony that never went anywhere, although I really would like that game to live someday. It was this wonderful idea that we had, which I think a lot of game designers have that story. Went to EA. This, this is kind of a series of examples like this, where I get kind of the offer you can't refuse.
Richard Hilleman, who became my boss and kind of mentor at, at EA, uh, offered me a job. They created a new job title called Senior Creative Director at Large. And he said, do you want that? And I said, okay. So I basically got to do within certain bounds, whatever I wanted at EA that seemed interesting and useful again, moving all around the company there, getting to [00:05:00] know how a lot of the different studios worked, um, and trying to socialize.
Uh, creative process and that kind of thing within the company, uh, which was really fascinating. And I've really felt like the blessing of that more than anything else was the time I got to spend with the teams making sports games. I think very few people in the industry have exposure to sports and how those are made.
And it's really unique. And, uh, I mean, really just some of the smartest people out there are making those games and how they work is really fascinating. There are this constant schedule, like there's no. If you are late with a sports game, you don't ship it. You just put it in the can. Um, and that does happen from time to time, but it's economically disastrous and you just really don't want that to happen. So they have that kind of as this drumbeat in the background.
And yet they have also have a really, really kind of enthusiastic, let's say, fan base who constantly expects novelty, but don't want you to break it. So [00:06:00] they're in this weird design space of, Uh, fans going, I want you to give me everything new, but don't change anything all at the same time.
And so how they manage that, like towing that line and, and still innovating, um, is really, really difficult and requires like this real creative discipline. That's fascinating to learn about and see how they work and not to mention all the technology sides of what they have to execute and execute, you know, reliably and quickly.
Amy: That's utterly fascinating and sports games are really EA's great strength. If you look historically at EA, that's EA's history, right? So now you're a professor as of today, and we'll get back to that in a minute and congratulations Professor MJ.
Michael: Thank you.
Amy: Looking back, let's dig into innovation a little because that's really a thread that runs through all of the podcast interviews are how you navigate innovation and successful innovation requires paradoxically different skills [00:07:00] to succeed.
You know, it really is tricky to navigate. So you had this opportunity to really be inside of a very particular type of disciplined and successful innovation. on a very particular genre. So looking back now from your where you are now, what did you learn about innovation and in particular about the reality of a successful innovation that you didn't know when you started working on that project?
Michael: Uh, you know, you're talking about when I was at EA, right?
Amy: Yeah. And you've probably learned things since then, but what do you, what do you know now about successful innovation that you try to impart to your students that you didn't know 10, 15 years ago?
Michael: Okay, I think to be a little bit more accurate would say I was at the front row seat to the innovation that EA I wasn't really inside it, but that's that still got gave me a lot of opportunity to learn and I'll give you an example.
So, the FIFA soccer team was in that [00:08:00] classic kind of dilemma they have every year, which is, you know, how do we introduce something new that doesn't break everything old and somebody on the team? And I don't know who it was. Had a suggestion, which was, well, we've always had this mode of play, which is you play the soccer team and you press the button and the ball goes to another player and now you're controlling that player.
And then you press the button, the ball goes to another player and now you're controlling that player. And that's how it works. What if you only controlled one player on the field out of the 22 players, you only get to control one and that's it. And from the way the story was told to me, the answer was, well, that's dumb.
Like who would want to do that? You know, it means most of the time I'm just standing around and I'm not doing anything. And that was certainly the reaction I had when I heard this, which was. That's a dumb idea, but somebody who had some vision who was in a leadership position said, I think it's time to try something.
We need to innovate. Let's try that. And that became something called be a pro, [00:09:00] which is now this like absolutely core feature of all of those FIFA games from, you know, for like now until forever. And who knew that it would be really fun. Like they didn't know, but they took a chance based on kind of an educated guess.
And we're able to be smart enough about how they allocated the resources to do that, where it wasn't going to break the team. And then once it came in, and there's, you know, there's more to it. There's, uh, when you're playing, you're always having to be in the correct position on the field and that's actually engaging.
And so there's like arrows and stuff that show you where you should be going. So it wasn't like it just magically happened. But conceptually, it was really out there as an idea. And that's where the innovation comes from. And even in something that feels as constrained as like, I'm making a soccer game, what can I do with a soccer game?
Well, you can do a lot. And, uh, and that was a really, really great story of, uh, innovation. Actually, if you look back in time, uh, had a gigantic impact on the popularity of FIFA versus a pro Evo soccer.
Amy: That's a great story. So now let's [00:10:00] fast forward to today. How is that insight that you have playing out in the way that you engage with and steer students where you want them to take risks and learn how to innovate, and yet you're preparing them to work inside of game companies.
Michael: Yeah. I mean, all of that comes back to, I mean, what I just described was kind of a really large version of what we might call a design thinking process, which is have an idea, try and test the idea, and then, you know, decide whether it was worth it and move it on or don't. And, uh, you know, whatever the process you would have heard from the Stanford D school people or somebody like that.
That's the process that I try to help the students understand how to integrate. And so they'll be like sitting in their room going, Oh, I have this idea and I think it might be fun, but I just don't know. And they're like, well, how come you don't know? I said, well, I haven't built it. I said, exactly. You haven't built it.
Figure out a way to build it so that you'll know. And Oh, that's easy. Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily easy [00:11:00] to build things, but there simply is no way of knowing without building. When you're talking about something that's interactive for people to play with.
Amy: As you're working with all these students, what's one thing that you really wish they knew that you see them misconceiving and wasting some time?
And going, oh, darn! What are some of the common patterns that you see?
Michael: Well, most of them don't know how to be disciplined. You know, they think, I think that, uh, well, let's, let's back up a step. Most of the people that are coming to our little graduate program here at UC Santa Cruz are not coming from someplace where they were professionally creative.
They were either coming from, you know, I've been an undergraduate and usually I've been learning some kind of engineering or computer science, or maybe they've come from like an it company where we get a fair number of people, but in all those cases, they weren't being asked to be creative on a daily basis.
And so I think they walk in and they say, Oh, my job now is to be creative. This is going to be awesome. I'm just going to [00:12:00] go crazy. And I like the energy, but just saying it's time to be creative doesn't mean it's time to stop being disciplined and having processes and things like that. So, you know, I think that's a lot of the training we end up doing.
Now, some of them do come in with a lot of discipline and we kind of have to Get them out of their discipline a little bit to be a little more creative. If I was going to say there's a pattern, it's this sort of like, Oh, it's all creativity. Now it's not disciplined. The answer is no, it really is still disciplined.
Amy: So you've worked with quite a few student teams over the years. And as we know, you know, building things usually as a team sport. What are the signals that you see that tell you that a particular team or an individual if it's an individual is likely to succeed? Looking back, what are those signals where you go, okay, of all the people in my program, this one could really go out and do something interesting.
They've got what it takes for this [00:13:00] team.
Michael: Yeah, it's funny because it seems to happen pretty quickly. Uh, and it's usually, and this is the same thing that I saw when I was working with people in the industry. It's not different. It's people that are driven. There's a kind of relentlessness that you look for, which is not the same as being like necessarily super smart or, you know, having a certain background.
It's just, I will figure this out. I will get to this answer. Nothing can stand in my way. You can't stop me. You know, that kind of being aggressive and driven toward a problem is ultimately usually the differentiating factor of who's going to make it and who's not.
Amy: That's awesome. So I imagine you've also seen that professionally when you were working on gaming teams and shipping stuff, you worked on Spyro the Dragon, correct?
Michael: I did.
Amy: Can you tell me the story of how that project came to be? What obstacles it might've you know, gotten passed along [00:14:00] the way and how that relentlessness and focus played out in that particular game and the team that created it.
Michael: Sure. So that was during my time at Universal and we had this kind of weird, uh, setup where our little team at Universal Interactive, which was just a couple of people, um, had Brought in to game development's very tiny game development studios and actually had them working in our office space Those two studios were Naughty Dog and Insomniac.
So Naughty Dog had gotten to work relatively quickly on what became Crash Bandicoot Insomniac was working on a game they called Disruptor Which was a first person shooter is largely lost to history and that's probably okay But the model was kind of that, and this was mostly Mark Cerny and myself, that we were going to get pretty involved with these teams and with their processes while they built their games.
Um, because we were [00:15:00] kind of, we were looking at, at, I mean, we were on Universal Studios lot. We were looking at how, uh, things were done inside of Hollywood. And we knew that that was kind of a pattern that was frequently used in Hollywood. So we were curious how that would work with, uh, with games. It also helped to keep the company behind us at Universal to say, yeah, sure.
That's fine. As long as you're keeping a close eye on them, right? So after Disruptor, we were frankly pretty inspired by Mario 64 and what it was doing. So there was sort of a technology question of, could that be done on the PlayStation because we were pretty much a PlayStation shop at that point in time and then be of these kind of cute mascotty characters like Crash had been and this was really, I have to say, pretty much driven by Mark Cerny, who wanted that stable of characters.
So he had worked at Sega, um, and actually was, I think he was the lead programmer on Sonic 2. Um, so he had a lot of background in that [00:16:00] world of these mascot character games and he understood that if you could make a game that had a character that really appealed to people and that played really, really well, it You could have a really, really popular game.
And so that, you know, you can see that in Crash, and you can also see it in Spyro. And even though the whole, through the whole of Spyro I always worked for Universal Studios. I had such a close cooperative relationship with Insomniac that frankly, there was no line between us, which was just awesome. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
The advantage to Insomniac was they didn't have to pay me. So I ended up doing a lot of the level design. I did a lot of the sort of figuring out the early, uh, Mechanics for the character and that kind of thing, along with the insomniac people, you know, it's, it's a long time ago. It's 20 years ago now. So a lot of it's kind of lost in memory in some ways, but I really felt like that the team that insomniac put together that Ted price put together.[00:17:00]
Was a lot of pretty special people, especially by the time we had gotten into the sequels, just a lot of people that really cared about each other and cared about the projects and that that really comes out in how those games came out, which as I'm sure you know, there's a remaster of those games being worked on as we speak.
It's been really, really interesting and heartening to me to see on social media in particular, how the fans of the series, how excited they are to see the remaster and how. They're expressing a lot of the emotions that they've had, uh, when they were playing the original games, kind of, it's neat to hear, and it's kind of not surprising given the type of team that, that put those games together.
Amy: And what emotions are they expressing?
Michael: Uh, well, there's a lot of crying, which is really awesome, but also just, you know, this was the game that. I played to go to another place when my life as a young person was really tough, or, you know, when my parents weren't getting [00:18:00] along, I would just go down into the basement and play Spyro and just go to Spyro's world, those kind of comments.
And it really is its own world, as those kind of games can be, and it's very safe and pretty and it makes sense. And I can totally see how a young person would find a world like that, a very comforting place to go when they're maybe having a tough time in the real world life.
Amy: And it really speaks to the power of character and setting.
Michael: It absolutely does. Yeah. Yeah. And even just little things like, you know, Spire has a particular palette of colors. Those colors act on people in a certain emotional way. That's kind of hard to explain, but it is very real. You know, they're, they're bright colors, but they're also soft. It's funny because I, as I've watched the Activision Toys for Bob team has put screenshots out of the game, especially some of the earlier screenshots.
And people would say, no, no, no, the colors are wrong. And I was, they were really passionate about that because it wasn't evoking the right feeling for them. So the colors have [00:19:00] been iterated and now they look a lot closer and people are happier.
But, you know, the, it's the little things like that, that matter, that make it a place that feels safe and feels warm.
Amy: That's such a great insight and very actionable too. Yes. What a great story. You've been immersed in the gaming world for a long time in different roles. You're now guiding and imparting your wisdom and bringing out the best and training up the next generation of game designers, what is it that's on your radar?
That you think is new and exciting and design and tech, whose work are you're following? What is it that's inspiring you that you then translate, including stuff your students are bringing to you?
Michael: The thing that's most inspiring to me about working with the students that I'm working with. Is I guess I would say the effects of the fact that we have a really diverse group of students.
So, on the [00:20:00] one hand, it's like, it's neat. It's like, oh, there's a lot of women that come through here and there's a lot of, you know, people from other backgrounds that are that are getting their education here. That feels good, but what another thing that happens is that the projects take on a different flavor because of that.
Like this year, we had, we had six projects that got completed, uh, last month. I'm going to get to see if I get this right. I believe five of those six, the creative leader was a person of color. And two of those five, it was a woman of color. And it's not coincidence that they're the ones that seems to be coming up with the non traditional ideas.
So, for example, the two women led teams that made games this year, one of them is a little kind of anime looking platformer, and if you saw a screenshot of it, you'd go, Oh, I've seen that before. Until someone tells you that the entire game is controlled with your voice, that you actually never touch a keyboard or controller. And you have to tell the little character what to do.
And you have to try and get her to [00:21:00] cooperate with you all through talking. It's very different.
Amy: Did they use open source libraries to pull that off technically?
Michael: They used Cortana on Windows, which is probably not what I would recommend. And so, but it's, you know, it's free and it's easy to integrate.
Amy: Got it.
Michael: Yeah, that's a longer conversation, but I will say that they got an award for their technology. From us for the simple reason that they were able to, uh, muddle through that tech and the creative director just revealed after months that one of her motivations for why to do that was because her, her mother has really bad arthritis.
And she wanted to make a game that her mom could play. And I was like, oh, damn, that's so sweet. And and and also just like what a motivation that is to do something innovative, right? When you're thinking of I just want to make a game for all of the hyper gamers out there. You know what your motivations are, and you're not going to make a lot that's new based on that motivation.
You may come up with some other [00:22:00] innovation, you know, like the FIFA example that I came up with, but when your motivations are to make something for somebody really different, it's a really powerful driver, uh, to create something innovative and new. And, uh, the other game that, that was made. Uh, by a female elite this year was a woman from the Philippines and she wanted to make a game and I kind of pause at the word game because it's, it's not fun, but a game that explores and shows what it's like right now in the Philippines with the drug war that's going on and in particular with the reaction of the government of Duterte and how he's cracking down on that and how that's that crackdown is creating as many if not more victims as the drug war itself.
So she made this VR experience of you're a cop and you need to be a cop inside the system and you're ultimately, you know, spoiler alert, but you're gonna have to do bad things.
And, uh, it's like, [00:23:00] uh, you know, you get like sick to your stomach and we actually have had to put a trigger warning on, on the game because people get really upset as they should. And again, this is not the kind of project that someone walking off the street and saying, oh, this is a program where you learn how to make video games.
It's probably not the first thing they would guess is being made, but by inviting all these different types of creators with different backgrounds. into our school, we're seeing a lot of that kind of really different new stuff be created.
Amy: It's an emergent property of the system.
Michael: It is. It is. It's like when you've added a certain variable called certain types of diversity, the emergence of the system, the complexity of the system increases, and therefore it becomes more interesting.
Amy: What I love about this is it's really widening the genres of gaming. And if you, you know, if you think about the big, large scale patterns in entertainment, you know, the [00:24:00] rise of, uh, plays and then the rise of movies, you know, how they started and where they are now, and then games. Games is still on the rise and movie genres are very broad, right?
There's so many different genres in movies. And now with video that's exploding, you know, the genres of videos are like cells dividing. But with games, we have also new genres emerging from the indie scene, right? New types of co op play, et cetera. And what you're talking about is like shock VR games. With a political twist and it's a new genre, but that's what you do.
You make new genres. That's part of how, you know, you're in a growing area.
Michael: Yeah. And there's a funny thing too, where, you know, you see a lot of people that make this. Uh, metaphoric comparison to movies, right? Well, you know, compared to movies, we're at this stage of the, you know, novelty or innovation. But I [00:25:00] think it's actually more useful if you look at it like you were just saying, as there was plays, and then there's movies, and then there's games.
And this is actually not a linear line. So the level of complexity of what you can do from going from a play to a movie is dramatically different. And people talk about this, we're film scholars, like, well, at first it was kind of you locked down the camera and had a play and then you kind of move the camera a little bit and you know, all the quote unquote fourth wall and all that kind of thing.
And now, you know, movies are computer generated and. And, you know, where you can go with those is so far beyond where you can go with a play and it's exponential to go to games is yet another exponential rise in the number of complexity of things you can do, first of all, because it's interactive. And I think most people understand that, but also because of the systems piece of it, where a computer is evaluating really, really complex background material.
You know, one of the really fascinating and I think exciting growth areas in games now is procedurally generated [00:26:00] content. And, you know, we had some notable games that were a little disappointing for some people like no man's sky.
But then again, you know, more and more games like, like the, the roguelike genre of, you know, procedurally generated games is like alive and well, despite the fact that it's pretty old at this point, and I think is actually growing where people are going to be playing games that are more and more being built on the fly, like, the experience itself is being built by rules instead of by created content.
And as that happens, you know, I don't know where it goes because who does, but, you know, we're on that exponential place of where the experiences can be so phenomenally different from what people have had in the past that you can't even really predict it, but it's really exciting. And, you know, this is the farthest thing from a more abundant medium at this point.
Amy: Yeah. Well, that's the nature of systems when they're complex and there's several complex interacting systems, you can't predict them. And in fact, we're clearly in the midst of [00:27:00] that right now in social media.
Michael: How do you mean?
Amy: All of the Facebook. Wow. We couldn't have predicted this would happen.
Gee, how, how are we going to plug these holes?
Michael: Yeah, they have some, they have some system design issues. Definitely. It's social media. Yeah, I would. I wouldn't want to be working in social media right now. I think it's a, it's an area that has a lot of, a lot of kind of vexing problems to solve that are in some ways even beyond design problems.
They're almost philosophical problems.
Amy: Well, there are also business model problems.
Michael: And they're also business model problems. Yeah.
Amy: I mean, like solving them actually means changing the business model.
Michael: It might. Yeah.
Amy: But back to inspiration. So it sounds like there's not a lot going on in social media that inspires you, or perhaps there's a nugget of something there.
Michael: Maybe I don't, I, I mean, I'm, I'm on Twitter quite a bit and, and, uh, I try not to be on Facebook as much as I am, but I guess I don't find it to [00:28:00] be, I guess I don't find it to be an area that is in itself inspiring. I do think that there's a lot in games. About connecting people that is inspiring. So like, I think still to this day, my favorite game ever is probably journey, which was this kind of opposite of social media way of connecting people over the internet because the, uh, the channel of communication and journey is so narrow and so tiny that you really have to work to make that connection with the other player that you're cooperating with.
And that work makes it rewarding and makes you care, um, which is kind of the opposite of social media, which is just like, I'm going to blast this at you. And you don't have to do anything except press refresh and the type of connection that's being created in those 2 media is very different.
And I don't want to sort of come off like I don't believe that there's a way to connect over the internet that's meaningful because I really do think that there is.
Amy: I think your point is more that games have some clues about where that direction could go. [00:29:00] Because as always, games are the canary in a coal mine.
Michael: I guess so. Uh, the games certainly lead the way in an awful lot of things. Uh, they've led the way in technologies, uh, certain technologies for a long time. And yeah, I would, I would say it's probably a good bet that games are a good place to look for how to create a more cooperative world on the internet.
Um, I actually have an interesting story about that. So a game designer that I worked with for, for a while, interesting young guy, And just very kind of anarchists, atheists, very, you know, that, that was kind of his point of view. And I got a big kick out of him and he would play World of Warcraft on a pretty regular basis.
And he had joined up with a clan and he played with this particular clan on a very, very regular schedule who were all members of a, uh, evangelical Christian church. Except him and he just loved these people and, uh, he cared so much about them and he would talk a little bit about how he felt like it was, uh, A little bit [00:30:00] of a conflict for him, but at the end of the day, they were there to play World of Warcraft.
They weren't there to argue about religion or politics. It was this You know, like, like you're just saying, it was this different experience from social media that maybe social media could take a clue from somehow that if you create connections that are, that are still deep, but are inside this other environment, maybe that can bridge some gaps instead of creating gaps.
Amy: It's the anti bubble.
Michael: Is the absolutely anti bubble. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
Amy: So you have a long history as a creative person, you know, who's also really got their hands in tech. What are the kind of projects that really light you up? What's your sweet spot?
Michael: It's always been one thing actually, which is, and I used to have this little flow chart on my wall and it said, here's a thing.
And then I had to look, what are those little decision branches? And it says, does it have heart? And if it said, no, it said, don't do it, I said, yes, it said, do it. And that was like my workflow done. [00:31:00] That's really kind of my question. If I'm going to connect to a piece of work, the question is, does it, it doesn't have to be my heart, it could be someone else's heart, but is it expressive of your heart and the things that you really feel is what always is going to get me excited.
And, uh, you know, student projects sometimes aren't, uh, sometimes are, but the ones that are, I always feel really connected to and, and maybe try a little bit harder to help them succeed as well, you know, and, and I'm just doing some of my own work as well. A big part of what I believe in, uh, has always been, uh, enabling people to create.
So if you think about what I've done as I became a more senior designer, but even now more so. As a college teacher is I'm here, and I'm enabling other people to create and to express their heart and that actually satisfies my heart. And now I'm going to start working on also some projects that are designed to enable creation in that same kind of way to help maybe younger people understand principles of [00:32:00] of level design or principles of uh, gameplay that are kind of black box for a lot of folks, um, until they really get into it.
And so it excites me to think, what if I could create something that would remove that from the black box? Maybe a few kids out there would say, Oh, I can do that. I can make this thing that expresses who I am.
Like to me, that would be the most exciting outcome.
Amy: What are those projects that you're working on? Tell us a little more.
Michael: Sure. One starts next week. This is kind of my kind of big one, which is. I, I've really discovered that there's a hole in pedagogy or, you know, in, in teaching materials out there, uh, for level design.
Yet I find level design to be this really fundamental way of looking at game design. Uh, it's not the only way, but it's a really powerful way. So I could write a book if I wanted to, and maybe I still could, but I'm more interested to make product that people can interact with that will help them understand.
So, uh, I've [00:33:00] put together a team for the next, uh, summer for 10 weeks, and we're going to build a whole set of unity projects. That co in sequence to help a person understand how to build levels and get into all the subtlety of it. And actually, this all became kind of conceivable when unity recently bought a tool called pro builder, which allows you to build pretty detailed meshes inside of the unity editor.
You don't need, you know, my blender or something to to build. And so now it's like, okay, we can do this and, uh, uh, put together a team and we start, start on Monday.
Amy: How exciting.
Michael: It's going to be awesome.
Amy: So is this for level building in the very visual sense of layout visually, or is this getting into level design in terms of tuning your curves and things that someone who wanted to learn level design, but wasn't necessarily super visual?
Michael: The end [00:34:00] state is both, but where I'm going to start is with the more visual, although I'll argue that it's not as visual as you think. So a lot of level design is, um, not so much thinking like, well, what's this going to look like? It's more thinking of when I go through this space and I move a character in a camera through this space.
What's going to attract my attention? What's going to surprise me? What's going to make me feel happy? What's going to make me feel worried? And being able to build those kind of. Emotional vignettes is actually the really fun part of level design. Um, and one of the things that I'm really kind of pleased about is two of the people to the students that have joined this team are architectures students are actually one of them was a working architect.
Um, and they, so we speak the same language when it comes to those kind of things. It's like, oh, yeah, it's all about how a person can move through the space. Not just how it looks. It's like, yes, exactly. We're talking the same thing. So it's, it's in hopes of giving people a sense of how those [00:35:00] kind of things are built.
And I have a lot of these lessons that I've done. As an in person instructor. Um, but building that into a tool I think could be, well, it's a big challenge, but I I'm really looking forward to it.
Amy: It is a big challenge. And if you pull it off, it's got very widespread applicability.
Michael: I hope so. Yeah.
Amy: So what else is happening?
That's very exciting that you're doing that. And then what else is coming up on the horizon that's exciting? You've just got tenured professor today.
Michael: Yeah. I don't know if it's a promotion or a new job, but it's a little both.
Amy: So congratulations. And so that means you will be running this program and at Santa Cruz for a while.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, uh, I certainly hope to be here at UC Santa Cruz for, for quite a while. Um, it's. You know, academia is something that that always interested me, both of my parents were college teachers as I was growing up. So I kind of had that in the blood, [00:36:00] but I also didn't know what to expect getting into a major, you know, research interview university environment, like, like, you see, Santa Cruz and it's really cool.
It's, I have the opportunity to teach all the students, like, I've been describing, but at the same time, the colleagues I'm interacting with on a daily basis. are doing these really crazy, really, really interesting research projects. You know, I don't know quite how they apply to games that people play yet, but that's kind of the whole idea is we don't know yet.
And, uh, being able to see how those things are developed and watch them come down the pipe is really cool also.
Amy: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your amazing stories and wisdom about how to bring creative ideas to life.
Michael: It's a pleasure.
Amy: It's been really mind expanding for me.
So I hope we talk again soon.
Michael: Yes, I do too.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, [00:37:00] the shows that help you innovate faster, faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.