Realtime Roots

Benni Hill is the Creative Director at Bonsai Collective developing Luna Abyss. Benni and I had similar trajectories into the games industry, founding our first studio together over 12 years ago (as of recording in 2024) so this discussion focuses on early trials and tribulations of making a game over 4 years without income, how Benni thinks about Creative Direction, and building a new team in Bon...

Ian Forrester is the Senior Firestarter at BBC R&D Ian specialises in open innovation and identifying new disruptive opportunities through open engagement and collaborations with start-ups, universities and early adopters. In this episode we talk about the R&D happening outside of the real-time industries on how they're approaching linear content. My conversations with Ian are always...

Originally from a Yorkshire mining community, Martin moved to London and became an animator over 15 years ago. Now a film visualisation supervisor, he has helped create huge action sequences for blockbuster franchises such as Jurassic World, Marvel, Fast & Furious, James Bond, and the DC Universe. His credits also include THE LITTLE MERMAID, ALADDIN, 1917, and THE WHEEL OF TIME. He has recentl...

In today's episode, we review the shifts realtime industries experienced in 2023. We talk about how processes changed across the year, the exciting new opportunities along with technology adoptions we've taken on throughout the year. About Haz Dulull Website: https://hazimation.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hazfilm/ About Peter Bottomley Website: www.whitepapergames.com X: x...

Today's guest is Mo Davoudian, CEO & Creative Director of Brain Zoo Studios.  Mo Davoudian is an Emmy Award-winning Executive Creative Director and CEO of Los Angeles-based Brain Zoo Studios, where he has overseen projects with partners such as Warner Bros., Disney, Marvel, Activision, Electronic Arts, Mattel, Hasbro, Microsoft, Lego, Sony and more. He’s been producing real-time animated...

Today's guest is Dan Pinchbeck, a founder and Creative Director of The Chinese Room The studio started it's journey publishing survival horror mods before releasing Dear Esther in 2012 which published to critical acclaim. Since then, The Chinese Room have released Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and  Little Orpheus. In this discussion we talk about the c...

Lina is a principle animation engineer at NVIDIA working on Omniverse, a real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines Lina has over 20 years of experience from working on titles such as “Battlefield”, “Gears of War”, “Paragon”, and “Fortnite.” During her 12 years at Epic Games, she focused on motion and animations of characters. She led the Unreal Engine Animation Sy...

Tim Repa-Davies is the General Counsel & CoSec at Sumo Digital Ltd which is part of the SumoGroup Ltd. He has an article series online called 'Contract Killers' which is definitely worth reading through. In today's talk, we break down a studio's journey into 3 sections: Years 1-4 - Shipping first projects Years 5-7 - Creating a strategy Years 8-10 - Preparing for investment...

HaZ is the co-founder of production company HaZimation producing animated feature films, series and video games based on their propriety pipeline utilising Unreal Engine. Currently the company is in post-production of RIFT (animated feature film) as well as several video games and metaverse projects.  In today's episode, we discuss the use of Unreal Engine as both a Pre-production & Post...

Adam is a senior lighting technical director & Lighting Lead at Industrial Light & Magic His work includes shot lighting and look dev across projects such as Transformers, Star Wars, Jurassic Park & Aladdin. Throughout our discussion we chat about how Adam thinks about real-time technology from a film, visual effects and lighting perspective. We talk about the tools and software he use...

Steve is a level and game designer most noticeably known for his work on Dishonored 2, Bioshock Infinite, Alba & more recently Tactical Breach Wizards.  Steve has spent most the last 15 years in the games industry as a level designer and has spoken about his work in various places including his 2017 GDC talk titled "An Approach to Holistic Level Design" which I'd highly recommen...

Jamie Smith is a Principal Game Designer at Sumo Digital with over 12 years of games industry experience. His experience has led him to work on Driver: San Francisco, The Crew, Tom Clancy’s The Division, FIFA, Hood Outlaws and more recetnly Call of Duty: Vanguard as a Campaign Systems Designer Jamie has judged multiple BAFTA games awards along with having experience as a Senior Lecturer in Games D...

Des is the founder and CEO of Altered Gene, a remote games studio currently working on two unannounced titles for PC. Des has over 24 years experience starting in the games industry 1998 and has since won 2 Develop Awards and a BAFTA award. Des is also the GamesAid vice-chair, a board member UKIE and a founding member of POC in Play. We discuss omni-channel games and experiences and what current s...

Today I'm speaking to Dan Da Rocha, a game creator who made QUBE, recently re-envisioned for its 10 year anniversary release. Dan has worked in the industry for over 12 years and has been named on the Forbes under 30 in 2019 as well as being an avid industry speaker whilst growing a strong network of collaborators. Dan currently runs Jaw Drop Games and has 2 projects being developed; Deathgro...

Hannah's work has ranged from AAA production at Ubisoft reflections to smaller, independent titles at Coatsink with many side projects and team collaborations along the journey. In this discussion, we talk about her approach to seniority and how Hannah's developed her approach to feedback over the years. We dive into what she looks for in studios and elements of company culture she belie...

Today I speak to Peter Harries, a senior Game Designer on Wardogs at Bulkhead. Peter is credited on 8 game titles across his 10 career in the games industry. Peter's roles have seen him starting in a AAA game development environment before transitioning to smaller, independent games and then back up to AAA projects before coming to Bulkhead who are a 100 person independent developer in the UK...

We're doing something slightly different today and chatting about real-time tools. Digital security is an important topic that I wanted to dig into for my own knowledge which I also hope benefits a lot of other creative studios who maybe don't have it on their list of priorities due to pending milestones and deadlines. We tried to keep the information concise and succinct to give you as...

This week I spoke to Jon McKellan - the founder, writer & director at No Code. No Code are best known for Observation & Stories Untold and Jon's background among other projects was the UI / VHS / DLC guy on Alien Isolation. He's a BAFTA award winning developer & No Code have been awarded one of the best places to work awards twice over among many others. We discuss No Code&ap...

Today I'm chatting to Ryan Garry, the founder of Unlimited Motion. Ryan works on a wide range of projects including performance capture, virtual production, 3D scanning & visual effects. Recently his work has been featured on the BBC show Strictley Come Dancing where he presented virtual dancers in real-time to dance alongside a real performance, live on national television with millions...

Barry Meade is a Co-founder & Director at Fireproof Games. In an industry where we can sometimes fall into the trap of believing the more followers and likes you get are the key to your projects success, Barry simplifies it down to key perspective: Great games are made my great teams. That's it. From starting as an art outsourcing company for the first 4 years and almost going out of busi...

Joe Brammer is the Studio Head of Bulkhead, a game development studio with projects such as Wardogs, Promod, Battalion 1944 and The Turing Test under their belts. A lot of us can relate to the moment you have to step into a new role as a team grows, in Joe's case, this was a leadership position from being a 5 person startup and the trial by fire that came with it. Joe's candid nature and...

Rachael Rose a producer at Bithell Games where she works on titles such as the solitaire conspiracy & Archsmith. Rachael's roots are in production but go even further back to studying architecture for 7 years before making the leap into the games industry. Although she's mostly produced titles in the video game industry, we identify the comparison with other real-time industries wher...

John Tearle is the co-founder and CEO of Flix Interactive. John's grow a team from founding to over 100 people. Flix have supported the release of some large AAA titles such as Sea of Theaves, Zombie Army 4, Crackdown 3, Worms Rumble & more recently the first person shooter, Hell Let Loose. John thinks a lot about his team and how he can best support them. In this conversation we discuss...

Today’s guest is Jonathan Burroughs, a co-founder of Variable State. I really enjoyed this conversation, Variable State are a peer of ours in the games industry and create narrative driven experiences heavy with great animation and strong voice acting. We open with talking about what the video game industry looked like in 2014 with the emergence of walking sims and transition into discussing the i...

Today’s guest is Andrew Crawshaw, the found of Thunk’d. Thunk’d design evening sized games and this was a great opportunity to pick Andrew’s brains about the processes he has in place when designing these shorter, more narrative driven titles. With his 20 year history in the games industry, he's shipped titles at The Chinese Room such as Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and A...