Today was my last official day working for Trion World Network. On Monday, I start a new job as Community Director for Gazillion Entertainment.

Yes, that Gazillion Entertainment; the company I called ‘the new 800lb gorilla‘ when they de-cloaked back in March, and who are working on a variety of MMOGs, including two based on Marvel Comics.

Not so surprised now, are ya?

Yes, I’ll admit that when Gazillion’s acquisition of the Marvel licence was announced, my interest was very definitely piqued, if that wasn’t obvious. What really got me intrigued was that they had acquired NetDevil, a development team who I’ve been a fan of since we worked together on Auto Assault. I made some enquiries, heard some pleasing noises, and six months later… here we are.

You might think that I’ve spent the last six months scheming to extract myself from Trion, but that’s absolutely not true. In fact, I’ve had a blast over there, and I’m genuinely sad that I’m leaving. The development teams behind Heroes of Telara and the Syfy-MMO(Action)RPG are packed full of great people who I’m going to miss and in the case of the Syfy crew, now don’t get to work with – boo! Both games are looking great, and unfortunately I now won’t be able to help them across the finish line. Don’t think I’m forgetting the MMORTS in production with Petroglyph Games, either; a trip to Las Vegas earlier this year convinced me that they are going to unleash something that’ll shake up the genre. I still believe everything I said about Trion back when I announced I was working there, however… when opportunity knocks, you don’t just sit back in your easy chair.

Gazillion has got a stellar line-up of games coming, including some I know are going to surprise a lot of people, and my new role allows me to work on all of them, as well as tasking me to direct community strategies for the entire company. Once offered, I couldn’t turn that down, even if it meant leaving behind new friends and some great looking games at Trion.

Weirdly – at least for me – this means that I’m back to full-on secrecy mode. I thought Trion had a lot of secrets, but even after signing on with Gazillion, I still don’t know about everything they’re developing! Roll on Monday….

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks and I’m sure it’ll be a crazy couple of months ahead, but I’m very excited about it; perhaps even ‘stoked’ or ‘psyched’ if we’re being American. Here was me thinking I was done with big, tumultuous changes in my life. I guess all I can do is strap in and enjoy the ride!

I’ve been pretty quiet over the last eight months, particularly when compared to most of last year. I had two good reasons.

One, I secured a job with Trion World Network, which was still in ‘stealth mode’ when I got the job, meaning I couldn’t talk about… well anything, really. Not the company, not the job, not the game(s)… so I just kept my big mouth shut.

Two, I was going through the time-consuming, tedious and nerve-wracking process of getting my US immigration visa. This would have been a tough enough process at any time, but considering it was connected directly to me taking up the job, I felt in some way I should just keep quiet. Didn’t want to jinx things. I only broke silence when the internal mental pressure began to get so much that even endless games of Civilization IV weren’t enough to keep The Voices in check, and I had to vent somewhere.

Well, now I’ve officially got The Job, and I sure as hell have The Visa. So I can talk. A bit.Trion’s an exciting company to be part of. With three games in active production (Heroes of Telara; the MMORTS project with Petroglyph, and the MMOARPG being made in collaboration with Sci-Fi/SyFy) there’s a hell of a lot to do, and lots of exciting possibilities down the road. I’ll admit it; before I found the job opportunity last year, I didn’t know much about Trion. I’d read the odd press release, but it was only when I started to really do my research, by reading every single scrap of info and interview I could find, that I got excited about what I might be getting into.

When I flew out to Redwood City and met the various team members there, I got more excited. These guys had a vision; a definite idea of what they wanted to do in the MMO ‘space’ and how they wanted to move the genre forward. The idea here wasn’t just to make a carbon copy game, or move things forward by inches. This is potentially revolutionary stuff.

Without trying to lapse into pure hyperbole, what I saw and what I heard during my two days of interviews was enough to make me very interested in being part of the company, and very anxious to get started. As you can imagine, kicking my heels for much of the following eight months while my visa processed was pure bloody torture.

Then suddenly everything came together. In late May my visa finally got approved, and days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles, to officially start the job as part of the E3 team. Due to a last minute delay in my visa processing which added another month to the wait, I hadn’t been as involved in the E3 planning as we’d initially hoped. As a result I expected to feel like the ‘odd man out’ at E3, the guy who didn’t know what was going on. (“Don’t worry,” I told my boss, “I am able to fetch and carry coffee.”)

What surprised and delighted me was how quickly I was welcomed by everyone. I felt like an important team member from the moment I arrived, and by the end of the show I felt proud to have been part of such a tight-knit, hard-working team. Without getting too sappy, I couldn’t have had a better welcome to my first ‘official’ work in the US, and for a new company, to boot.

(I’m not sure whether to stand up and salute right now, blow my nose on a tissue, or beg off because I have something in my eye.)

So what’s next?

Well, I leave the UK ‘officially’ on July 9th, with Tom (the cat) and Amanda (the wife) following closely after. We’ve found a nice little apartment in Redwood City, not too far from Trion’s office (by California standards, anyway…). We’ll settle in and start adjusting to our new life. It’s already been a whirlwind of paperwork and decisions; it’s probably not going to die down any time soon. Someday soon though, I look forward to relaxing on my big American sofa, watching my big American TV, with my big (well, medium-sized) American car outside.

And while I am there, my brain shall hatch big American community plans. Believe me: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I’ve been pretty quiet over the last eight months, particularly when compared to most of last year. I had two good reasons.

One, I secured a job with Trion World Network, which was still in ‘stealth mode’ when I got the job, meaning I couldn’t talk about… well anything, really. Not the company, not the job, not the game(s)… so I just kept my big mouth shut.

Two, I was going through the time-consuming, tedious and nerve-wracking process of getting my US immigration visa. This would have been a tough enough process at any time, but considering it was connected directly to me taking up the job, I felt in some way I should just keep quiet. Didn’t want to jinx things. I only broke silence when the internal mental pressure began to get so much that even endless games of Civilization IV weren’t enough to keep The Voices in check, and I had to vent somewhere.

Well, now I’ve officially got The Job, and I sure as hell have The Visa. So I can talk. A bit.Trion’s an exciting company to be part of. With three games in active production (Heroes of Telara; the MMORTS project with Petroglyph, and the MMOARPG being made in collaboration with Sci-Fi/SyFy) there’s a hell of a lot to do, and lots of exciting possibilities down the road. I’ll admit it; before I found the job opportunity last year, I didn’t know much about Trion. I’d read the odd press release, but it was only when I started to really do my research, by reading every single scrap of info and interview I could find, that I got excited about what I might be getting into.

When I flew out to Redwood City and met the various team members there, I got more excited. These guys had a vision; a definite idea of what they wanted to do in the MMO ‘space’ and how they wanted to move the genre forward. The idea here wasn’t just to make a carbon copy game, or move things forward by inches. This is potentially revolutionary stuff.

Without trying to lapse into pure hyperbole, what I saw and what I heard during my two days of interviews was enough to make me very interested in being part of the company, and very anxious to get started. As you can imagine, kicking my heels for much of the following eight months while my visa processed was pure bloody torture.

Then suddenly everything came together. In late May my visa finally got approved, and days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles, to officially start the job as part of the E3 team. Due to a last minute delay in my visa processing which added another month to the wait, I hadn’t been as involved in the E3 planning as we’d initially hoped. As a result I expected to feel like the ‘odd man out’ at E3, the guy who didn’t know what was going on. (“Don’t worry,” I told my boss, “I am able to fetch and carry coffee.”)

What surprised and delighted me was how quickly I was welcomed by everyone. I felt like an important team member from the moment I arrived, and by the end of the show I felt proud to have been part of such a tight-knit, hard-working team. Without getting too sappy, I couldn’t have had a better welcome to my first ‘official’ work in the US, and for a new company, to boot.

(I’m not sure whether to stand up and salute right now, blow my nose on a tissue, or beg off because I have something in my eye.)

So what’s next?

Well, I leave the UK ‘officially’ on July 9th, with Tom (the cat) and Amanda (the wife) following closely after. We’ve found a nice little apartment in Redwood City, not too far from Trion’s office (by California standards, anyway…). We’ll settle in and start adjusting to our new life. It’s already been a whirlwind of paperwork and decisions; it’s probably not going to die down any time soon. Someday soon though, I look forward to relaxing on my big American sofa, watching my big American TV, with my big (well, medium-sized) American car outside.

And while I am there, my brain shall hatch big American community plans. Believe me: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

“Bum!”

I’d hoped to have a post primed and ready to rock, but given general secrecy and my rapid departure from the UK, that wasn’t to be.

More details soon, no doubt, but for now you might have a few questions, like:

“Trion World Network?”

“What are you working on?”

“What’s keeping you busy at E3?”

More soon.

When I originally started writing these, I thought I’d be finished in this part. Clearly I can’t count: at a rate of two episodes per part, with eleven episodes to talk about, I won’t be finished until part six.

The fact that I can’t do simple division won’t be a surprise to my mother, but it is a continuing source of disappointment to my secondary school maths teacher, Mr Chenery. Sorry, sir.

Episode 9: One More Thing

This was always supposed to be the second-to-last episode, and on the release schedule (believe it or not, I did have one) was supposed to go live on the Monday before Games Convention started. However, due to other episodes taking waaaaay longer than I hoped to finish (I’m looking at YOU, Episode 8!) I realised if I didn’t bump the release of this and Episode 10 up a bit just to fill the gap, there was no way I’d be able to finish Episode 11 and release it pre-GC. Hence, we lost a bit of impact with the central gag.

Said gag being, obviously, “Oh noes, we’ve only gone and forgotten the game we’re demo’ing” (nudge nudge, wink wink). In case you’re wondering, no, Martin wasn’t responsible for making sure Aion was on our demo PCs… that’s IT’s job, amongst others. Nor indeed do we use DVD burners to make installers for the PCs. In fact, it’s all done with magic.

This was a pretty easy shoot, especially considering it has a grand total of two shots in it (Medium two-shot; single close-up). We did it all after work one night, which again meant that Martin had to run around shouting in an empty office, but by this point people were used to it.

Martin’s close-up acting was fun, but was something of a pain to edit – not because of anything he did, but because of background people in the shot during his close-up. I only realised on editing that there were two people standing at the other end of the office behind his head; so to eliminate them from ‘continuity’, short of doing a George Lucas-style digital removal, I had to cut very carefully away from him as he half-exited frame. I really like being able to cut on a frame-to-frame basis, but man, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course you guys never notice it either – it should, rightfully, be seamless if it works.

I should mention how good Jörg was in the ‘unflashy’ role too; he improvised his little “Uh-oh” at the end, which a lot of people enjoyed. A great straight man, which is why of course he was cast in Episode 10…

Episode 10: Subliminal Messaging

The idea for this episode was thrown together fast after Martin and I saw the stand renders, and heard they were supposed to be ‘top secret’ until very close to GC. We immediately decided it’d be cool to do a video where we were lamenting that we couldn’t show fans the renders, but that they were great, and if only we had some way… so the script was practically written right then.

This was shot directly after Episode 9 – we just upped and moved into our staff room, Monkey Ranch, and set up. Shooting it was easy-peasy, except for sound issues – the vending machine you can see in the background, plus the coffee machine that you can’t see, both intermittently decided to make noises that would probably have appeared on the soundtrack. (I have to guess at that myself, because we can’t monitor sound on our camcorder. I know, crappy.)

Anyway, apart from that it was all easy. I loved Martin and Jörg’s ending stuff – especially Martin’s voice after I suggested it should be more “Scooby Doo like” (by which I meant ‘more cheesy’ not ‘more like a cartoon dog’). In fact I liked it so much, I decided to film it right there and then, deliberately framing it to look like it was ‘behind the scenes’. Something I came back to… or will come back to… ah, this timeline stuff confuses me.

Those were two simple episodes, easily shot, easily completed. Editing Episode 10 was a little trickier than I imagined – doing the ‘subliminal’ stuff in particular was fiddly – but it didn’t take too long. The problem that became apparent later was the scheduling.

Originally this would have gone out right after Episode 9, which itself was supposed to debut on the Monday of GC week; so the first gag would have been “Ooops, we almost forgot the Aion demo” followed swiftly by a tease of the stand. Unfortunately, things changed, and our PR department decided to release all the renders before the show began. That meant when Episode 10 debuted, the gag was sort of null and void, as anyone who wanted to could find the renders. Luckily for us, no-one seemed to complain too loud. Not even you, loyal reader, so ta for that.

By the time both of these were shot and in one case edited, Episode 11 was still far off in the future – along with other episodes beyond it. Could I manage to shoot everything I’d scripted?

Kind of a redundant question, now. But hey, read along and find out next time in Part 6.

Episode 5: Looking forward to…

 This was supposed to be an easy episode. In fact, it was supposed to be the throwaway, edited quickly, filler episode between other episodes – hell, it was practically supposed to be a clip show. (Hmm. Could I do a clip show? Very possibly….)

Brief was simple; loads of people who are going to the Games Convention telling us what they’re most looking forward to. In one word. Or one sentence. Or one paragraph just please don’t monopolise the camera as there are others who need to be part of this thing thank you.

So I gave the camera to Spaff and off he went. On his first pass, when I downloaded the footage, I couldn’t help but notice something.

“Why… is Volker on the toilet?”

“He’s just sitting on it. He’s not really.. you know.”

Sure enough, he wasn’t. He was sitting, but not sh… you get the idea. But hey, that would make for good comedy, so bless ‘im, in he went to the rough cut.

First pass wasn’t enough though. Too many people rambling on camera, not enough good answers. So off Spaff went again, looking for more people; amazingly he didn’t even film everyone who’s going to GC (not even close). I knew I had enough material for a decent roundup though, so I started to cut.

I wanted a kind of upbeat, jangly, country style of track to go underneath the visuals; don’t ask me why. I just figured some brooding piece wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want some overused advert track that we’d all recognise. The track popped into my head near instantly – Western Skies, by Canadian country-rock group Blue Rodeo. I knew it had the right beginning, and a number of pauses that’d make editing to it quite easy.

Oh, how wrong I was. The problem with editing to a music track is that the beats start to obsess you. You think you’re cutting to them – but you aren’t, not always. Are you cutting to the beginning of the drum beat, when the stick hits the skin, or the end, when the sound sort of… reaches you? These things can drive you a little crazy.

After a few hours of work, however, I at least had what I thought was a serviceable beginning. I just knew this wasn’t a quick-and-easy filler project any more, though.

Luckily, I got saved by Marek. Having given us a pure comedy answer to work around (“Leipzig…? What?”) I started to build around that, and got inspired to add in the back-and-forth between the subtitles and what people were saying. When I noticed Jörg’s comedy eyebrows, that helped even more suddenly I had plenty to work with, and cutting it was just a matter of time.

With that done, it was on to the next one. Which wasn’t actually the next one. But just to ease confusion, let’s talk about the next one anyway…

Episode 6: Costume Competition Auditions

This was about where things started to get crazy. I mean, Episode 4 had been longer than the others, but this one was downright ambitious by comparison. We had props, we had costumes, we had a rap planned. I had no idea what I was walking into with this episode… although it got much, much worse later.

We shot this on a Wednesday, edited it on a Thursday and released on Friday, which is a crazy schedule, and just proof of how much I wanted it to happen. The original impetus to do this episode was Martin’s, who even came up with a script involving Solid Snake, Hiro and the Bling Gnome… James and I read it over though, and decided we could beef it up a bit. As we’d done a sort-of audition thing with Setting the Stage, we decided to go all-out with episode 6.

The script was pretty much a mish-mash of different ideas thrown in by just about everyone, including some that came together during the shoot, and others during the edit. The basic structure and many of the lines were mine, including The Shark (You gotta love continuity gags), Jörg’s desire to wear the Ghost Widow outfit, GenericHero235 and the Bling Gnome doing a rap – although full credit to James, he can rhyme and I can’t, so he handled the lyrics. (Well, with the possible exception of ‘street’ and ‘excrete’, which was mine.)

One thing I will say about the script is that it has – to date, considering we’re not finished yet – my favourite line of the entire series, which is The Shark’s aborted origin, “Born of fish and man…”. It helps that Martin’s delivery of it reduced me to helpless, take-destroying laughter on more than one occasion. You’ll hear that on the (eventual) Blooper Reel.

As you’ll see, we ended up remarkably close to the written word. Feel free to read along:

Download: Quest for GC Episode 6 script

As normal, we shot out of sequence for this, starting off with filming all of the audition stuff. It was a fast shoot in a timeslot in the middle of the day, taking over a much-needed meeting room, so we were against the clock on it. Jörg came in first, doing his bit in a bath towel (somehow, we forgot the furry cape; the towel was funnier) and then, after a few fluffs, his Ghost Widow piece. Honestly, beyond that I can’t remember the order we shot in, so here’s just a few thoughts from each bit.

Martin, as The Shark, had been thinking about how to do this for a while and was raring to go when we filmed. The ‘helmet’ he wore was brilliantly constructed by Chris that morning, and probably sold the gag more than I ever expected. I started laughing the minute I saw Martin walk into frame with it on. Then when he did the lines, I literally had to stop filming I was laughing so hard. More than one take spoiled there….

Alex actually suggested the “But I do have a knife” line, which was better than my original; he’s always up for terrible Australian gags, it seems.

Loic also had loads of ideas for his GenericHero235 thing, but most involved props (and time) we didn’t have, so all we ended up doing was his entrance, which was priceless. He did the jump you see in the final film on the first take, and the framing (by accident) was so perfect, I didn’t see any need to do it again. Unfortunately, he then took about ten takes to get his lines right, so that balanced things out….

The Orange Box isn’t a reference to Valve. It’s actually the real writing and design seen on the infamous boxes in Metal Gear Solid, which is of course what we were referring to in the ‘exclamation point’ shot. Tom Kiss made the box, which actually only started with three (of, I guess, five) sides, but was subtly positioned so you couldn’t see the missing sides. Oh, and that’s Tom’s eyes, too. By the time you read this you’ll have seen Tom front and centre in Episode 8.

Volker, of course, stole the show as the Bling Gnome. We came up with a lot of stuff on the day for him; walking in on his knees, taking the microphone, even the entrance. A lot more got added in the edit which wasn’t in the script, either. To make the rap work we had Volker do the audio a few times, and then shot lots of ‘coverage’ of him doing lines which I then cut together. The only problem was, he kept forgetting what the lyrics were, which we covered (a bit) by having him hold the microphone in front of his face.

As for James and I, we were of course consummate professionals, getting everything in one take… ahem… well, I’ll save some surprises for the blooper reel. As you’ll see from the script, us dancing at the end wasn’t scripted – I wouldn’t script myself to dance!

Post-production on this was a nightmare, although in comparison to later episodes it was almost easy. I actually got all the footage into Final Cut Express that day, as I recall, and started to hack away. What I figured out early on was that (a) I was going to need music and (b) that Volker’s rap was going to be near-impossible to edit.

By Thursday morning I had a workable Bling Gnome rap, basically made up of the few takes I could actually match in speed and recognisable lip movements, and with plenty of gaps between. Thank God for our dancing stuff, which I could easily slip in-between. By the end of that edit I had a lot more respect for music video editors; so much footage must be shot just so that you can get that fast-cutting style. I also found that stupid transitions can cover up some sins, too….

The next step was pasting over some cracks with music. Luckily, Chris is a huge music fan (and a composer, to boot) so he slapped together some clever cues that play under Martin and Loic’s respective entrances, and really helped to sell the gags I think.

There’s actually quite a lot of clever editing in this one too, although you wouldn’t/shouldn’t know it. That’s kind of the point. But I know it’s there, and I’m proud of it.

Six episodes down. Potentially, eight to go. Did I make it? Right now even I don’t know….

Right now, despite what this post is telling you, it’s July 22nd where I am. The Games Convention in Leipzig is just under a month away, and we just released Quest for GC – Episode 3: Languages.

If all goes according to plan, by the time you read this, we’ll have released all fourteen episodes.

Of course, I just need to make the other eleven, first….

A note on chronology

It might seem a bit strange to you, from your privileged position in the future, to read me talking here in the past about stuff I haven’t done yet. Hell, it is to me, and I’m writing it. However, I figured it was smarter to talk about this stuff while it’s happening, or just happened, as opposed to waiting until it’s all over and I can’t recall the salient details.

Besides, between here and where you are, there’s the Games Convention itself. That’ll obliterate any memory before it.

So, forgive me as over the next few posts – which I’ll be writing in my future – I talk about stuff that hasn’t happened yet. In your past. My future.

No wonder paradoxes happen.

The crazy fool idea

I can’t quite remember why we decided to do the Quest for GC videos. I think, perhaps, it was a chat between myself and Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl, where we said it’d be cool to do some videos teasing our Community team’s presence at Leipzig. It’d get the community interested in our booth there, it’d be fun, it’d show a different side to the team – all the usual reasons why applied.

While we riffed on what we could do in these videos, somehow we got around to the idea that Martin playing an incensed organiser would be kind of funny. In the initial chat, I said something like “We’ll have you being like ‘What, we can’t have a shark tank?’” and that was pretty much that… at least, for the initial idea.

After that, the ideas for the other videos came pretty much naturally, most of them promoting stuff from the show (all of which, I hope right now, will actually happen) and some just promoting – well, us.

As for how each episode came together… here’s the first two.

Episode 1: The Weight of Water

This was the initial idea taken form, and in actual fact, was sort of supposed to be a ‘pilot’. We shot this thinking that if people internally didn’t like it, we could just give up then.

It’s basically just the one gag, so it was easy for me to write; I put Martin and, er Martin in it because I knew we wanted to also shoot a second version in German (after all, our primary attendees at Games Convention will be / were (!) Germans). Sebastian only had one line in German, so that was easy too. Besides, he had to be the guy opposite Martin – that’s where he sits in real life.

We shot the whole thing after work one night. Martin took a few takes to warm up, but got into it remarkably quickly. The funniest thing for me was trying to direct him to shout “Lose the shark tank!” ever louder, which was interesting as one person in the open-plan office was on a conference call at the time.

Sebastian, to his credit, actually did the entire line “What is it this time?” in German, which didn’t just translate to “Was?” as you see in the German version – but frankly, his “Was?” was funnier.

Martin knew from the script that he was supposed to get water thrown over him (yeah, that was my idea; hey, you can’t go wrong with a good pie-in-the-face gag). Martin came up with the idea of him ‘saying goodbye’ to the shark, and once we had that agreed, all we had to do was soak Martin.

As Martin had no change of clothes (he lives really near the office), we decided we had to get it right in one take. We moved everything that’s out of shot out of ‘splash distance’, Martin Kerstein stood to the left of shot with a big glass of water and I called ‘action’. Thankfully, he got it right on target first time, and we all managed to stifle our laughter until I’d stopped the tape. But only just….

Episode 2: Damn those Bureaucrats

Thanks to the magic of editing, if truth be known, this was actually shot just before the glass of water got thrown in Martin’s face; if you look, he’s wearing the same clothes in this video.

Again, the idea was the same one – Martin gets upset when an idea of his for Games Convention gets turned down. We’d written ‘wall of flames’ on the whiteboard you see in Episode 1 as a bit of an in-joke, but were surprised to find that a few people apparently hoped it was going to be at the show… ah well, there’s always next year.

We didn’t intend to shoot this all in one master shot, but after four or five run-throughs, the guys got it, which was pretty darn impressive to me. The one problem which I didn’t notice until afterwards was that the microphone, which was hidden under the desk out of shot, picked up every fingertap very distinctly (you can hear it at the beginning). Lesson learned there.

I love Martin Rabl’s delivery in this; I had a feeling hearing him say “Why must I compromise my artistic vision?” would be funny in a Bavarian accent. The music was a lucky find too; it’s an Apple loop from Garageband, which is just what I wanted for that ‘freeze frame’ moment.

We had no idea when we shot this if it would actually see the light of day, but figured we might as well shoot it anyway, just to have it in the bag. The reality was that everyone liked Episode 1 so much, releasing this was a no-brainer.

I just knew that glass of water would be a hit.