Undead Labs

AUTHOR: James DATE RECORDED: May 20, 2011 AT 17:54PM

I’ve been super busy building our zompocalyptic playground — towns, forests, and farms; rivers, mountains, and valleys; main streets, back alleys, highways, train tracks, and side roads. Places to climb, places to hide, places to fortify and make a stand. There’s no limit to how much attention and polish there is to add, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So when Emily came by and asked me to think about writing my intro, I wasn’t sure if I’d have the time to tackle it. Instead, I’d like to share some excerpts from my childhood journals with you.

Read on and you’ll see exactly why I love what I do…

May 4, 1979

Today I know what I want to be when I grow up! With a box of crayons and some paper, my passion for drawing is ignited. In mere minutes I effortlessly scribble out a doodle that blows Nana’s mind. She exclaims that it is “absolutely the cutest one-eared bunny she’s ever seen”. It is proudly displayed on her very exclusive refrigerator gallery, right next to another prized masterpiece: her exquisite clipping of the Cathy cartoon that remarks on the social conundrums and personal conflict of chocolate addiction and dieting. You know the one.

Also to be noted: Nana is a seasoned haggler and has more cookies than she lets on. Request three next time and settle at two.

January 18, 1982

Today was my sixth birthday. I took the five dollar bill that Nana nestled in my card and cashed it in for quarters at the corner market. They installed a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, and my battle against an unwavering, barrel-hurling pixel monkey and a human rival I only know as “A S S”  has begun. A S S maintains a commanding hold of the top five high scores, but I know that with persistence (and enough access to supplementary laundry quarters) I shall reign supreme. The shop keeper maintains a great level of support and encouragement for my inevitable victory.

The digital monkey is proving to be a cunning adversary — in the small number of times that I successfully ascend his forbidding tower in an attempt to rescue the maiden, she is abruptly snatched away and placed atop yet another precarious perch next to a seemingly endless supply of barrels. You damn dirty ape; she will be freed!

I need more quarters, and if I have to raid my sister’s piggy bank to achieve victory, I shall. Conquest without sacrifice is hollow.

Billy Jorgensen snapped my rainbow suspenders again today. Being inferior in stature I attempted to wound him emotionally by comparing his repulsive excuse for a face to a festering pile of baboon feces, but in my rage “doodie head” was all I could muster.

October 12, 1985

I have encountered (and now adore) the zombie genre! The adults have rented a video cassette tape, “Night of the Comet”. As an avid star gazer I insist on watching this film, but the oppressors once again enforce their barbaric curfew. My cunning triumphs as I sneak out of my holding cell and down to the television room where I stealthily part the door from the jamb. The narrow view is less than optimal, but sufficient to see the screen.

The film is ridiculous but intriguing. It opens my mind to the idea of a life of ultimate freedom — liberation from bedtimes, chores, and vegetables. A world filled with never-ending arcade visits and infinite pizza nights. I find myself playing through different scenarios in my head…the opportunities and the struggles. Also, seeing a zombie’s head get opened with a monkey wrench speaks to something twisted deep inside of me.

I fear the dog may have eaten Starscream’s left fist today. I cannot locate it anywhere. Tomorrow I shall retrace my steps.

July 13, 1987

I had a grand adventure today! First, I rode my bicycle down to the lake and did some sketches of the rock formations near the beach. When I was done, I ventured the long way back, making a stop at the marsh for some aquatic exploration. I was surprised to see that most of the tadpoles have their legs now. Continuing on my journey, I took the shortcut through the golf course to see what action the ball fields had to offer. Not much. Just a few of the older boys playing catch.

Finally making it to the library, I locked up my bicycle and took a stroll along the train tracks to the tunnel. I dared myself to go further in to the darkness until I lost my nerve. For my troubles, I came away with three more railroad spikes for the collection.

After my harrowing ordeal, I procured some sweets from the corner market to get the quick boost of energy I’d need for the trek to the arcade across town. Upon arrival, I realized that I had spent the last of my money on the Jolly Rancher power I had consumed to get there. Fortunately, throwing rocks at a bottle in the alley proved to be just as engaging.

There was still some time left before dark, so I rode out to the middle school I will begin attending in the fall. I discovered that the closed gate securing the inner yard after hours made a most excellent climbing surface, and I quickly found a way to the school’s roof. It was there that I found a place of unexpected tranquility and enough rubber balls to choke a Brontosaurus.

I had just begun to admire the setting sun when I was shaken from my private rooftop world by the shouting of a neighboring resident. I swiftly retreated down to my bike and bolted towards home, taking a few precautionary evasions to foil the pursuers I knew were there but could not see.

Fast forward to years later —  I’ve been making games for over thirteen years now, from animating characters for 2D kids adventure games and 3D backgrounds on Backyard Sports, to helping build the amazing world for Guild Wars. I even had the chance to make a dam good word game along the way.

I’ve learned a lot over the years, but really I’m an only slightly matured version of the kid in the journals up above. You can probably imagine how thrilled I was to find a kick ass team who wants my help to build an open, engaging, and zombie-filled real-world environment. A world that people can run around in and explore like I used to, except instead of checking out tadpoles and venturing into dark train tunnels, they’re playing out their own survival scenarios. How awesome is that?

What could I say to a job that would let me utilize my skills and experience to make the exact video game that I’ve wanted to play every since I could hold a joystick?

Hell yes!

James

[If you just can't get enough James and would like to know more about him, be sure to check out Jeff's introduction.]

AUTHOR: Jeff DATE RECORDED: May 20, 2011 AT 17:53PM

You find a wide range of personalities on the typical game development team. There are the grizzled veterans who’ve seen it all, know how to solve just about any problem, and view bold ideas with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are the youthful idealists, often fresh out of school and giddy to be working in their first game gig, who challenge traditional boundaries with strange ideas. Most of those ideas are completely infeasible, of course, peppered with the occasional brilliant idea that builds empires. 

A healthy team has a good mix of these personalities, but the rarest and most valuable people on the team are often those who can balance these extremes and just figure out how to get awesome things done on time. These are the “closers” — the quiet ninjas of game development, and without them, you don’t ship games.

James McMillan is a closer.

Rewind to 2005. I was still at ArenaNet and we had just released the original Guild Wars. We had committed to releasing expansions to the core game on a regular basis, so we needed an art team that was capable of cranking out large amounts of high-caliber content at a fast pace. Realizing we needed some heavy hitters to help out, I started interviewing local artists, placing particular emphasis on good game design sensibility and technical problem-solving ability. Two of my most trusted go-to guys, Doug Williams and Brant Fitzgerald — both now card-carrying Team Zed members — encouraged me to talk to this guy they knew named James McMillan. 

James turned out to be a quiet, unassuming guy. He clearly loved games, and he absolutely dominated the art and level design tests we threw at him, but he didn’t leave a trail of ionized plasma behind him, breath fire, or shoot prismatic spray from his fingertips. I liked him immediately.

As I worked with James over the next few years, I grew to respect him immensely as an artist, and perhaps even more so as a person. He’s the guy who quietly brings in donuts for the whole team every Friday, never taking credit until somebody finds out they aren’t provided by the company and starts asking around. He’s the guy who’s at work on the weekends in the months before ship because It Has To Get Done, without feeling compelled to come in and crow about it on Monday morning. He’s the guy who builds and beautifies large sections of the game world, and then is happiest when the praise goes to the entire team. He’s the quiet builder, the ninja-assassin of politics and drama. The doer.

He’s a closer. He’s our closer.

Welcome to Team Zed, James!

Jeff

P.S. Don’t forget to check out James’s welcome to his fellow survivors!

AUTHOR: Kevin DATE RECORDED: April 22, 2011 AT 18:00PM

I started my audio career when I was 10. Well, sort of. My father owns an AV repair shop in San Francisco where he fixes all sorts of electronic goodies, from CD players to tube amplifiers and turntables. As a kid, my job was to take pieces that weren’t worth fixing, open them up, and with a 600-degree soldering iron, strip out anything of value. I guess you could call me an audio scavenger, but I loved it. My time at the shop taught me how to be comfortable with the internals of audio gear—motherboards, ICs, and transformers—and that being electrocuted sucks.

I was a sponge for knowledge, even if it hurt.

By 16, I was a repair technician at the shop, in charge of fixing old turntables, speakers, amplifiers, and even cassette decks. But fixing gear wasn’t the only thing I loved about music. I had also saved up enough to purchase a copy of eMagic, a music recording program that would later become Apple’s Logic. When I wasn’t working, I was recording songs I wrote for guitar and a couple of synths I owned. I quickly realized that I wasn’t very good at playing music, but I really enjoyed recording it.

I took the “responsible” route out of high school, going to college instead of attending a recording school. But that didn’t change my dreams. In my free time I was DJing at local parties and clubs at night and continuing to play my own music. I also got involved in creating sound effects and music for small video projects and theatrical plays on campus.

Even though I’d wanted to get into the audio industry, the only job I could find out of school was delivering water for Arrowhead. Not exactly my dream job, but it paid the bills. Then came the motorcycle accident. I cracked my right arm in a couple of places and realized that I couldn’t lift 20,000 pounds of water a day anymore.

So, with no job and my savings running out, I decided to look into the same recording school I had my eye on years earlier. Maybe spending thousands of dollars on school when you’re broke isn’t logical, but it was now or never. I decided to take a chance. I took a tour of the campus on a random Wednesday, my entrance exams on Thursday, secured my student loans Friday, and started classes that next Monday.

Everyone in my life thought I was nuts, but to me it made sense.

Eighteen months later I’m pulling another Houdini. I complete my last class on a random Friday in April, pack everything I own on a Saturday, move from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a Sunday, and start two internships on Monday. One of those internships turned into my first assistant position — learning quality control and voice-over session setup for Bang Zoom Entertainment. Over the next couple of months I moved into a variety of other roles: dialogue editor, voice-over engineer, and sound designer. I was on my way.

From there I went to PCB Productions, who provided third-party audio support for developers. Each week a new game came in and my role on each title was extremely varied. Sometimes I was a voice-over director and engineer. Other times I got to create sound effects and manage portions of gaming projects. I could be working on up to four different game titles simultaneously. I was learning every part of creating audio from games in a very regimented fashion and found myself wanting to be part of a development team more and more. As much as I enjoyed the fast pace and quick turn around of just doing sound effects, or just doing voice-over directing, I didn’t feel invested in the final product.

That changed at Petroglyph Games, where I worked on Universe at War and their following titles. Being in-house every day, sitting with the rest of the team made all the difference. Instead of being limited to providing audio based on a list of SFX or a script, I could really be hands-on, guiding audio technology, planning and designing audio for projects. I really liked it. My next move was to Surreal Software (ironically moving from Vegas to a game called This is Vegas), and then to Monolith to work with their team on projects like Lord of the Rings: War in the North and F.E.A.R. 3. That’s when Brant started talking to me about this new zombie project he was working on.

Immediately, I loved the idea of getting to create everything from the ground up and to work on a new IP with an experienced team. I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into the post-apocalyptic world o’ zombies ever since I came on board.

And my life keeps getting busier and more interesting. My first album is coming out in the middle of May under the San Francisco-based label, n5md. Finishing that project has given me the musical knowledge and the inspiration for Class3. While the two will be completely different styles, I think of music as presenting different levels of energy and emotional states to the listener. My goal is to have the music support the emotional tone of the gameplay as closely as possible. Whether you’re clearing a building or in the middle of a teeth-gnashing, flesh-ripping zombie horde, the music will respond.

For years I’ve been questioning my decision to learn every part of audio for games since it would have been simpler to pick a specialty and stick with it. But that’s not who I am. It’s in my nature to need to know every aspect of things I’m passionate about. In my career that’s come in bits and pieces — learning about dialogue editing one week, integrating systems to create environment sounds the next. Maybe jumping around from city to city and role to role seems sporadic, but to me, it’s the same thing I’ve been doing since I was a kid — digging into everything and scavenging knowledge one concept at a time. Until now I haven’t had the chance to use that knowledge to its entirety.

Here at the Lab I finally have that chance.

Kevin

PS: If you just can’t get enough Kevin and want to know more about him, be sure to check out Jeff’s introduction.

AUTHOR: Jeff DATE RECORDED: April 22, 2011 AT 18:00PM

It’s been awhile since we introduced a Team Zed member, so today I’d like you to meet our audio director, musician in residence, and unapologetic gear geek Kevin Patzelt. Before joining Team Zed, Kevin worked as a sound designer, sound engineer, and voice director on numerous excellent game franchises including Supreme Commander, Disgaea, Skate, Trauma Center, Lord of the Rings, and Call of Duty. Most recently, he worked on an unannounced open-world game project at Surreal Software (now WB Games) alongside our own Brant Fitzgerald.

He must have made quite an impression, because one of the very first things Brant said to me on his first day at the Lab was “When we’re ready for an audio director, I know our guy.”

Sound and music should be an integral part of the gameplay experience, rather than something tacked on at the end of the production cycle. Games like Red Dead Redemption and Castle Crashers on XBLA are great examples of how powerful it can be when the sound and music work together with the art and design to create a great game experience. We knew that this was what we wanted for our game, so we realized that we needed to find an audio director who was a hardcore gamer, a zombie freak, and an audio geek — and we knew that we wanted him on board immediately.

We brought Kevin in to do some prototype work for us and quickly realized that — as Brant promised — he was indeed our guy. We asked him to take on the role of audio director shortly thereafter, and now he’s immersing himself in the nuances of how metal baseball bats sound when connecting with human skulls and pondering slabs of raw meat as the ultimate sound source.

He’ll kill me for outing him on this, but that background music you hear in our Friday At The Lab video is some of his early prototype work for ambient music in Class3. He was out of the office last Friday, so I snuck it in as a soundtrack without him knowing. Kevin’s an extreme perfectionist and would have insisted on being able to polish the mix before we ever let anyone else hear it, but since it’s just too cool not to share, I’m just going to have to ask for his forgiveness on this one.

I think I used the phrase “gear geek” earlier. Want proof? Check out these photos of his sound studio. The bulk of the audio you hear in Class3 will emerge from these stacks of inscrutable knobs and wires.

Welcome aboard, Kevin!

Jeff

PS: Be sure to check out Kevin’s welcome to his fellow survivors for the raw Kevin feed.

AUTHOR: Dave DATE RECORDED: March 17, 2011 AT 16:49PM

My infatuation with video games began at the dawn of the 80s, prime time for coin-operated arcade games. I grew up in California’s Santa Cruz mountains and during this era every pizza parlor, bowling alley, mall, roller rink, amusement park and grocery store had a collection of these machines. As a kid I didn’t have money to really play the games, so I would spend all my time checking out their graphics. The arcades were an art gallery to me — I loved things like the endless scrolling landscapes of Xevious and Spy Hunter, the explosions in Defender and Asteroids, the 3D vector art of Battlezone and Tempest, and the faked 3D of Zaxxon, Marble Madness and Paperboy. Outside of the arcades, movie theaters were showing the first films with computer animation: The Last Starfighter and Tron.

I knew then that somehow, somewhere, I would be making art with computers when I grew up.

Santa Cruz is just over the mountain from Silicon Valley, so it was common for my friends’ families to have some sort of desktop PC. I loved IBM PC games like Microsoft’s Jet, Electronic Art’s Starflight and all the Infocom text games like Zork and Planetfall. During my first year of high school, I saved up enough money to buy a Commodore 64 with the intention of learning how to program in Assembly and make my own video game. But instead of making games, I just spent all of my time playing them — the Commodore’s library was impressive, and I enjoyed whole summers experiencing classics like Elite and Ultima IV. Then, in 1985, a new console from Japan called the Nintendo Entertainment System came out with graphics that were as good as coin-op games. Soon, all the VHS movie rental stores started renting out Nintendo games.

These were glorious times.

In college, I majored in graphic design because it was the only art department that had a computer lab. We used painfully slow Macs to do layered vector art and desktop publishing. At that time a family friend was a programmer for the CD-ROM game Iron Helix and he gave me one piece of advice: learn Photoshop. I promptly took out a student loan and bought my own painfully slow Mac, an external hard drive and a flatbed scanner that came with Photoshop version 2.0. I graduated Central Washington University being their first student to produce artwork done with this program.

After college, I did an internship at an advertising firm in Spokane, Washington. One evening at the local Mac user group, a couple of brothers who made puzzle-based educational games presented a new game they were wrapping up that featured amazing 3D art done with StrataVison Pro on the Macintosh. They called their game Myst, and after that night I knew that I had to figure out 3D modeling and construct virtual worlds.

After a few years of bouncing around some west coast cities, doing odd jobs, and getting married, I took out another loan and purchased the 3D modeling and rendering package FormZ and a Mac that could run it. FormZ was a full-featured, solids-modeling package with all the bells and whistles like NURBS and metaballs. I bought plastic models of airplanes and battleships and used those as subject matter for figuring out how to build and navigate in 3D space. My wife and I then moved to Seattle, and while making my 3D portfolio, I started knocking on every video game company door in the area. After a year of this, (I didn’t have PC or 3ds MAX experience, so that was a bit of a speed bump) the charismatic and bodacious Chris Taylor at Gas Powered Games hired me. I was Gas Powered’s second artist, and was tasked to build the fantasy world of Ehb for the game Dungeon Siege. I spent long days modeling and texturing snowy mountains, dark swamps, desert canyons, rivers, castles, and all kinds of dungeons while at night I dreamed in wireframe. My destiny had come true.

After Dungeon Siege, a new company called ArenaNet popped onto the Seattle scene, founded by three ex-Blizzard bad-asses. I had lunch with one of them, Jeff Strain, and he pitched me their idea for this thing called an online fantasy world. The game was totally Internet-based and they wanted the company to be family-oriented with a no-crunch culture. I was a new dad and I knew the future of gaming was online, so I hopped on over to ArenaNet and spent the next seven years making (and blowing up) environments for the Guild Wars franchise.

When Jeff went on his own and started Undead Labs—having plans to create the ultimate modern-day zombie apocalypse online world for consoles—I didn’t have to give it a moment’s thought as to where I was going next. The chance to join Mr. Strain and build the definitive zombie-plagued, end-of-society world with console action for console gamers is one hell of a tasty opportunity to sink your teeth into.

I’m savoring the flavor.

Dave

[If you just can't get enough Dave and would like to know more, be sure to check out Jeff's introduction.]

AUTHOR: Shaun DATE RECORDED: February 16, 2011 AT 13:55PM

Almost 14 years ago I did something crazy. I quit a good paying cushy university job as a research software engineer to fulfill a childhood dream.

When I was twelve, I loved my Atari 2600. I thought video games were the coolest thing ever. One day, I got a new game from a little start-up called Activision. They were doing something pretty “revolutionary” in those days. In the little booklet that came with the cartridge they had a head-shot of the developer who had made the game. This was an epiphany for me. People actually made video games for a living!

I knew immediately that I wanted to make games.

I went to my father and told him my career ambitions. Being the supportive man that he was, he responded, “Don’t be an idiot, son, there’s no future in that!” So, following my father’s advice, I took a different career path. I decided to be an astrophysicist. I got my degrees in physics and astronomy (my father still didn’t approve, but that’s another story).

I loved doing scientific research, but I still wanted to make games. The whole time I was doing science, I was going home and trying to make games on my own as a part-time job. It was this constant compulsion not just to play games, but to make them as well.

Finally, I decided to take a risk. I didn’t want to look back on my life and regret that I had never tried to live my dream.

I decided to quit my job and create shareware games until someone gave me a job. Turns out I managed to get a job with a game studio start-up here in Seattle without having to take quite such a big risk. I was ecstatic. I was going to fulfill my childhood ambition!

My first game was a PC title, but before I knew it, I was making console games. I got to work on one of the first PS2 development kits in the country. It was baby blue, the back had no cover, the controller was soldered directly onto the mother board and you had to develop under Linux (crazy Japanese developers). It came with a bunch of thick auto-translated manuals that basically just listed hardware registers and what each bit did. I had to write my own device drivers for everything in the hardware. It took me weeks just to get a polygon to render. It was a huge pain in the ass and it was AWESOME! Being able to control the hardware completely at that level was fantastic. I’d found a new love in embedded development. It was all about exploiting the hardware to the max, despite its strict constraints. Creativity is all about restrictions and console development gives you those in spades.

Fast forward 12 years and I’ve gotten to work on almost every major home console and at least one portable. I still love it and it just keeps getting better.

My love of this career isn’t just predicated on cool hardware or other nerd bit twiddling. I love playing games and I especially love console games — though I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Civ. I love sitting on my couch, with a controller in my hand, having nothing but fun. And what’s going to be more fun than gruesome brutal zombie kills, exploring a large open world and planning out how to survive the coming apocalypse? Nothing IMO. I want to play this game now!

So here I am, honored to be working with this world-class team, making a game that I’ve wanted to make since before I was even in the industry. Hell yeah! It’s been a helluva ride and I regret NOTHING!

To celebrate getting to work at Undead Labs on this amazing game, I give you an original zombie themed cocktail.

Shaun

[If you just can't get enough Shaun and would like to know more, be sure to check out Jeff's introduction.]

AUTHOR: Jeff DATE RECORDED: February 16, 2011 AT 13:55PM

There are around five million professional programmers in the world. (I don’t have a source for any of these numbers. Just roll with it, okay?) Of those, around 10% are good at what they do, and about 10% of those could be considered great. We’re down to 50,000 great programmers. Of those great programmers, I’d say 1% of them have 10+ years of hardcore professional game programming experience, which leaves us at about 500 candidates for the Undead Labs technical director position.

I’m not done yet, though. I also want someone who has written a modern console 3D game engine from scratch (down to 15), who has experience with all major console platforms (down to six), and who has worked on both third-person console action games and PC MMOs (down to three!).

Oh yeah, and someone who passionately loves gaming. And zombies.

That brings us down to one. One person in five million.

Somebody get me Shaun Leach.

(I was also going to say “and obviously someone who holds degrees in both physics and astronomy.” Fortunately, Shaun has that too…)

Today I’m happy to introduce you to our technical director, Shaun Leach. Shaun joined us at the beginning of the year, but we had a few Big Announcements to work through before we could introduce him to you.

Shaun entered the game development world in 1997 at Surreal Software as the AI and engine programmer for Drakan: The Order of the Flame. He went on to head up the development of the PS2 engine used for Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates, LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring, and The Suffering.

In 2003 Shaun decided to get “closer to the metal” and took a lead position as a graphics programmer at Sony working on optimizations to the internal PS2 rendering engine.

Shaun returned to game development in 2004 as a core technology lead at Zipper Interactive spearheading the development of the next-generation PS3 engine for the SOCOM and MAG game franchises.

Turning his attention to the Xbox platform, Shaun took a lead position at Microsoft in 2008 working on core engine technology for the Xbox 360.

Most recently, Shaun was at MMO developer ArenaNet heading up the Guild Wars 2 console development team.

In short, the dude has left some seriously impressive technology in his wake. After hearing from a few of his former colleagues who wanted to “work where Shaun works,” I was even more convinced that he was the right guy to drive the technology we need to create for Class3 and Class4.

So, great programmer, strong leader, deep industry experience, proven console technology track record, passionate gamer, hardcore zombie fan — oh, also easy going and an all around awesome guy to work with…

Yeah, he’s our guy, and he’s one in five million.

Welcome aboard, Shaun!

Jeff

[Also be sure to check out Shaun’s welcome message to his fellow survivors...]

AUTHOR: Jess DATE RECORDED: January 14, 2011 AT 15:49PM

It used to be that when I told people what I did for a living I often got the response “So you play games all day?” That was always such an odd question to me. It’s like asking an architect if he stares at buildings all day. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, no, playing games doesn’t magically make them reproduce into more games (but how awesome would it be if it did?!). Making games is work. If you’re doing it right it’s fun work, but it’s still work.

Not only is our industry young, it’s constantly evolving in order to keep up with technology. There are no blueprints, no guarantees, no foolproof methods when it comes to making a game. Sounds risky, right? Well, it is. So, with all these unknowns, what is the recipe for success? For me, the answer is talent, experience, and passion. In a word: Undead Labs.

I initially came from the film and television industry, but after a few years of seeing how miserable everyone was, I decided it wasn’t where I wanted to end up. Here enters video games, or more specifically, SCEA. I started off in external production working on Twisted Metal: Black, including the online version which sole purpose was to promote the launch of the PS2 network adapter (hard to believe that used to be a separate hardware add-on). From there, thanks to the support of some internal designers, I landed a spot on the design team of Dark Odyssey, a Greek mythology game that was just starting pre-production (and would ship three years later as God of War).

Having had a film background, I found a niche as the camera designer for a game with a cinematic camera system. So, you may be thinking “wtf, you didn’t want to stay in design?” Well, my career change could be somewhat described as a post mortem of my time as a designer on God of War. We managed to make an amazing game with what would be considered a fairly lean team by today’s standards.  However, it took a lot of superstar talent and a hell of a lot of crunching to make it happen. Shipping felt great, but I’ll be the first to admit it — I was burnt out.

I knew I didn’t want to go through a development crunch like that ever again, but I wanted to keep making great games. Were the two infinitely inseparable? I didn’t believe they were. So with my new in-the-trenches perspective, I dusted off my producer hat and started a new gig at Snowblind Studios just as they were finishing up Justice League Heroes.

It felt strange not to be implementing anymore. After all, I’d spent the last three years fiddling with proprietary tools and tuning gameplay. But after a few months, I found my groove and was relieved to realize that I’d made the right career choice. Production was extremely challenging, and fixing all the obvious problems wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. But I got to have my hands in every department, was able to connect with the entire team (not just the designers), and found a lot of satisfaction when I was able to clear bottlenecks for people.

One night, about a year ago, I was sitting in a quiet office late at work, when I ran across the website of a game company claiming  they were going to make a zombie-survival MMO, and here’s the kicker, it was for *gasp* console.

The part of me that loves a good challenge was intrigued, but the manager side cringed at the inevitable bloated team size and organizational cluster f*ck associated with MMO development. While it’s true that in many ways it takes an army to build a AAA game to compete in today’s market, it’s also true that when you tell Artist A to go talk to Programmer B and they have no idea who you’re talking about… well, that’s a problem.

When I started at Snowblind I was employee number forty-something. Four years later the team had grown to over 100 people. As much as I loved the team, the history I had with them, and was a fan of the LOTR game we were making, I really missed the cozy, intimate team I’d been on during my early days at the company.

With that in mind, you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that the Undead Labs studio philosophy was maintaining a small, tight-knit, high caliber team — indefinitely. Having met Jeff in the past, I knew this wasn’t some fly-by-night indie studio spouting bold claims that would end up going the way of the dodo within the first 6 months. Something special was happening at Undead Labs; a once in a lifetime opportunity was presenting itself to me.

Lets face it: your friends are the family you choose. We’ve all dreamt about getting to work with our friends or starting a company with them. Often game devs spend more time together than they do with their actual families, sometimes hovering around 60-70 hours a week. Ask yourself who you’d want to spend that much time with. I did. And the answer was with this group of super-talented, zombie lovin’ game nerds.

Make no mistake. We have a huge job ahead of ourselves, and we’re doing something no one has done before. Not many game studios can say that, and I’m so excited to be working with a team who can actually pull it off. To paraphrase one of my favorite zombie heroes: There is no “i” in team, but there is an “i” in pie. And there’s an “i” in meat pie. Meat is the anagram of team…oh hell, zombies love meat pies!

Jess

[Also be sure to check out Jeff's introductory post for more Jess awesomeness...]

AUTHOR: Jeff DATE RECORDED: January 14, 2011 AT 15:49PM

“You mean someone like Jess Brunelle.”

Yes yes, goddammit. Someone like Jess Brunelle.

It was 2007, and I was sitting in a conference room with several colleagues discussing our ongoing search for the perfect producer. Of course, the problem is how you define “perfect” when talking about a producer, because every studio has a different notion of what a producer is actually supposed to do.

At one end of the spectrum, the producer runs the show, not only establishing and driving the schedule but also setting the vision for the project and making the critical design, artistic, and technical decisions. It’s certainly an efficient model, but you aren’t going to get the best out of talented developers like James Phinney and Doug Williams when you remove them from the decision-making process.

At the other end of the spectrum, the producer is a mere lackey, responsible for documenting and communicating the decisions of the development team leads and picking up balls as they drop. This model ensures that the developers are able to drive key decisions about the game, but it can also result in a development process that lacks discipline, and in the worst case a game that is constantly delayed or never ships at all.

I’m not really thrilled with the notion of cutting our development leads off at the knees or watching the development process fall into chaos, so neither of those extremes are going to work for us.

In an ideal world, your producer should have the authority to lead the development process while also allowing the art, design, and programming leads to drive the key decisions about the game. The problem is that while a company can grant authority, it cannot grant respect; respect has to be earned. In order for this model to work, you need to find a producer who can earn the utmost respect from the development team. And that means you must find someone who has solid development experience on great games; who loves games; who listens, but is also decisive; who isn’t afraid to admit being wrong; who mixes common sense and methodology in equal measure; who gives credit rather than taking credit; and who has a track record of success in the game industry.

I mean someone like Jess Brunelle.

Jess certainly has the development background to command the respect of Team Zed, having been a designer on a little game called God of War during her four-year stint at SCEA. Most recently, Jess was the lead producer for Snowblind Studios’ upcoming The Lord of the Rings: War in the North.

I tried to hire Jess back in 2007, but at the time she was too wrapped up in a super secret new game under development at Snowblind. When Snowblind Studios was acquired by Warner Brothers in 2008 and WB decided to take the studio in a different direction, it left a Z-shaped hole in Jess’s heart.

A Z-shaped hole that was filled perfectly by a certain zombie-survival console game under development at Undead Labs…

We finally found our perfect producer. Lead us toward the light dark, Jess.

Jeff

PS: Also be sure to read Jess’s welcome message to her fellow survivors.

PPS: Emily asked me for a “head shot” to use with this post. I don’t think this is quite what she had in mind. Hope you like it.