After several days of revisions, reinstalling programs, and finding pretty pictures, I am please to present to you Part 2 of Jerich’s meeting with Marsh, which includes more in-depth details on the “Pioneers in Interactive Media” workshop. Read on:

Jerich Speaks with Marsh Lefler (Bebop) at the “Pioneers in Interactive Media” Workshop Part 2

This is a continuation from part I of this two part series. In the first post, I described some of the tidbits of information that Marsh gave me. Here, I write a narrative description of the event. I will highlight the most interesting parts in green, for those who don’t feel like reading the whole thing.

The Invitation

Thursday was a pretty busy work-day for me. Finals were drawing near to close and my students were coming in to make up last minute work. I am also a coach of our schools first Robotics Team and we are in the middle of the build season. That being said, I try to make a little time each day to log onto the Torchlight forum. That is when I noticed that Webbstre had PMed me. Basically Runic sent out the following tweet:

If you live in Seattle and are interested, the details are: Truly House UW Bothell Campus 18115 Campus Way NE Bothell, WA 98011 5-7pm 4:36 PM Jan 28th from web http://twitter.com/runicgames/status/8345590103

Programmer Marsh Lefler will be speaking at UW’s Bothell IOTA Game Program tomorrow for “Pioneers in Interactive Media” Panel 4:35 PM Jan 28th from web http://twitter.com/runicgames/status/8345568674

Webbstre, as you can guess, wanted me to go because I am the only staff member of RGF that lives in Western Washington. Of course, I said, “Heck no, I already have plans for Friday, Webbstre,” but then I started thinking that it sounded like a ton of fun. So at the last possible minute, with no interview questions written, I decided to bail out on my plans and go (don’t worry, I didn’t stand anyone up).

Getting There

Since I decided late, I only had about an hour and twenty minutes to get there. Luckily, I live about an hour south of the University of Washington Bothell campus. Unluckily, it was 5:30. Anyone who has ever driven in Western Washington during rush hour can tell you that it is about as fun as getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist. Actually getting my teeth cleaned may be better.

Anyway, after battling the twin beasts that are commonly known as State Route 167 and I-405 for an hour and ten minutes, then driving loops around the campus like I was in some type of Grand Prix race while looking for the place, I finally found Truly House, where the meeting was being held. I went in, grabbed one of the last seats and tried to figure out where Marsh Lefler was.

Meeting Marsh

Finding Marsh was hard. First, the workshop was being held in the living room of a house that had been converted to a place for the local College game students to hang out and play games. There were enough chairs for about 30 people and about 40 were already milling around with more coming in by the moment. Finding Marsh was not an easy task. I didn’t know what he looked like and also didn’t want to go around to everyone saying, “Hey, are you Marsh?” Wait till after the event to introduce myself didn’t seem like the best option, either.

What I decided to do was listen up to people’s conversations and see if I could locate him that way. Let me tell you, listening to twenty or so conversations at once is not an easy task, but I was able to hear the following snippet of conversation:

Dude #1 – “blah blah blah… Travis …. blah blah blah … baby?” (note, I started listening more closely)

Dude #2 – “(muffled noises)… already had her two days ago.”

Dude #1 – “Wow, already? Blah blah (something about talking points)”

Anyway, from this conversation, I deduced that Dude #1 was none other than our Marsh Lefler and that I should introduce myself before we began. He was talking to a woman, that he seemed to be with, but I figured that it was now or never. I inched within proximity of them, waited for a lull in their conversation, then said, “Are you Marsh Lefler?” I said it kind of quietly, but he looked up right away.

“Hello,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand, “My name’s Tim.”

He smiled politely and I continued, “You probably know me as Jerich from the forums.”

That seemed to ring a bell, and he introduced himself to me. Greetings finished, I asked him how Travis was doing, and if Wonder was on vacation. I sent both of them a PM last week and neither of them had logged onto the forums since then.

He said that Wonder was working, but they had been extremely busy. He could tell me this much. He hadn’t really slept much in the last week. He also said that the next patch was done and people could be downloading it as early as Tuesday if everything went perfectly.

With that little tidbit, I could tell that he needed to be somewhere else, so took my leave and went back to my seat. Marsh went ahead and started playing Torchlight for the audience while we waited for the workshop to begin. I took the time to meet my neighbor.

The Workshop

Since you probably already read the first part of this post, you know what kind of star studded cast was at this meeting. For those of you who are arriving late, let me re-link the list:

Moderator

• Alex St. John: Creator of Microsoft’s DirectX media platform, founder of WildTangent and President & CTO of Hi5.com

Speakers:

• Marsh Lefler: Founder of Runic Studios, Created dozens of hit downloadable games including Fate and Torchlight (Jerich’s Note: This is actually Travis’ bio because Marsh filled in for him)
• Ed Fries: Created Microsoft Game Studios, Launched the Microsoft Xbox, Halo, Age of Empires, and many others
• Matt Wilson: Led creation of Microsoft’s Gaming Zone, MMOG efforts including Asheron’s Call 1&2 and Sony’s Agency MMOG, Founder of Detonator Games
• Steve Theodore: Technical Art Director for Bungee on Halo 3, Valve Half-life, Team Fortress and Counterstrike
• Patrick Wyatt: Created Arena-Net, VP of R&D for Blizzard Entertainment leading development of WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo

I hadn’t researched the event much at all because I decided to go at the last minute, so you can imagine my surprise as I heard the list of names. My jaw dropped a little bit further each time Alex went over the bio of a new person.

Fun Fact #1: Here is one interesting fact revealed during Marsh’s Bio:

Alex asked Marsh to clarify how well Torchlight had done. Marsh, responded by smiling and saying, “Doing better than we thought it would do.”

At this point all the other developers laughed and Alex said that Marsh was being way too modest.. Obviously, Marsh didn’t want to give out any numbers, but just to let us know, Torchlight had been number one on both Wild Tangent since its release and was even number one on Steam for a while.

Anyway, the talk might interest a few of you, so I am going to describe what I remember. (I really wasn’t taking good notes, so everything is from memory, if I get something wrong, I apologize ahead of time)

Question 1: How did you get into game Development?

• Marsh: He interviewed with Alex at Wild Tangent and demoed a game. Alex was impressed, hired him, and Marsh went on to work along with Travis on some of Wild Tangent’s Top sellers. His most popular game, Penguins! http://www.wildgames.com/games/penguins Travis then left work for Flagship on Mythos, and Marsh was the first person he hired to his team.

We all know where the story goes from here. Mythos was a couple months from being released when their parent company, Flagship went bust and they lost the rights to the code. At that time, the small Mythos team, had such a tight bond, that they decided to try to stay together and went without pay while they looked for someone to sponsor a new ARPG.

Funnily enough, they actually, interviewed with a couple of the other people on the panel. Marsh made a joke about recognizing some of them when he came in. Eventually they signed with a Chinese company called Perfect World, spent 11 months making Torchlight and are now heavy into production on their next project.

• Ed Fries: Ed got hired on early with Microsoft and helped lead the Excel and Word teams to dominance over Lotus 123 and Word Perfect. He then went on to lead the Microsoft game division, put out a bunch of PC games then eventually helped to launch the Direct X Box (which became known as the Xbox).
• Matt Wilson: Programmed a Frogger game when he was young and got it licensed by a Californian company. Started working as Q.A at Microsoft (I think I am remembering right), and then worked his way up to lead positions in Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2. He then went on to work on Sony’s up and coming James Bond-type MMO, Agency.
• Steve Theodore: He was getting his PHD in Roman Studies and used to sneak into the computer lab to program graphics. When he saw people in his department scanning obituaries to look for potential job openings, he realized that he should probably change the focus of his career. He interviewed with Valve, was hooked by the story telling in their Mod, and decided to apply. Several companies later, he now helps teams of people understand emerging technologies.
• Patrick Wyatt: Started with Blizzard making console games, saw some success and had just finished the Lost Vikings when the 16 bit console market bottomed out. People were waiting for the new 32 bit consoles, but the development APIs were not available yet. They were hurting financially and the bankruptcy of their parent company, Sunsoft meant that they stopped getting payment for games they had created.

Blizzard then decided to hedge their bets and make two kinds of PC games. Patrick, would start making a real time strategy game that was multi-player fantasy game similar to Westwood Studios Dune II, while another developer would make a crossword puzzle game. They figured that they had all their bases covered.

Eventually, as Warcraft progressed, Patrick knew he was on to something, the crossword puzzle game was halted and they put all their effort into finishing Warcraft. Here is one anecdote he told:

He was testing Warcraft with another member of his team by playing a game when it crashed. He ran in saying that it looked like they had crashed crashed, and that by the way, Patrick was totally kicking his butt. The other guy replied saying, that no Patrick wasn’t. He was totally destroying Patrick’s base. That is when they knew that there was a problem and they discovered the “Synch error” bug.

After Warcraft was successful, he went on to code the network code for Diablo, create Starcraft (it was originally considered “orcs in space”) then form Arena net and make Guild Wars. He is currently helping port an MMO called Tera to the United States.

Fun Fact #2: Diablo I started out single player and turn based!

After Blizzard published Warcraft, another company from California called Condor contacted them. Condor had also been sponsored by Sunsoft and was hurting financially, they asked for some help with a game they were making. Basically it was a mouse driven dungeon crawler.

As soon as they played it, the guys, knew it was going to be a big game. They offered to make the folks at Condor Blizzard North and help publish the game, which was to be titled Diablo. They wanted to change a few things, however. Diablo started off turn based, single player and had only one class.

Patrick told them that he could use his experience from Warcraft to make Diablo real time, multi-player and flew down to do the code. He says that over the next few months he put in so much work time, that he no longer has any memories of the time. I guess if you work too hard, your brain loses its capacity to form new memories. Wild.

Alex then came back and focused on the lesson from this section, is that if you want to be a game developer, the most important thing you can do is program games! Good game developers have such a passion for making games that they can’t stop themselves. They are also able to get games completed. Alex ended the first question by reminding the students that they need to complete games for their portfolio if they want to get hired eventually.

Question 2: What makes you fire someone?

This post is getting fairly long, so I am going to move much more quickly through the next few points and not focus on everyone’s responses, but mainly summarize. Marsh chuckled when he heard this question. He said something like, “I don’t ever want to fire someone.”

At that point, the other panelists laughed and responded, “Just wait, you will be doing it soon enough.”

Eventually, when pressed, Marsh finally said that the main reason to fire someone was if they were not being productive or a team player.

Other interesting responses came from Ed Fries, when he said that it is more about a persons fit with the culture of the development team. Some teams are a bunch of superstars where everyone is trying to be an incredible asset and some teams are more like a close family. He mentioned one developer who worked on Flight Simulator who was kind of flaky but who could do things no one else could. He didn’t work well with a team, so Ed typically selected the hardest task, gave it to him and waited. The developer would not send updates, but Ed knew it would get done eventually.

Patrick Wyatt (I think) said that he basically asks himself whether or not a specific person is speeding up the project or slowing it down. If the answer is that their presence is dragging the project down, they are a cancer and need to go.

Question 3: How much time do you typically spend working?

As I already mentioned, Patrick Wyatt programmed so hard while doing the development code for Diablo, that his brain lost the ability to form memories and he has no memories of that entire six month period. Most of the developers nodded at this, and I could clearly see that they all had done similar things.

Steve Theodore said that he tries to keep his hours under 60 per week. Basically, he found himself working 70-80 for a while and realized that he was aging himself prematurely. While Steve was talking, I could see Marsh thinking (Marsh pretty much always looks like he is thinking, but sometimes he looks like he is thinking more). Steve’s main point here was that as a programmer you need to learn to work smarter, not necessarily harder.

Alex responded to Steve’s comments by saying that programming games is not work. If you are on your butt typing for 16 hours a day coding games, you are not really being slave driven, you are playing! He used to code for three days straight then sleep for 12 hours and code another three days straight while working on Direct X.

Ed laughed at this and said that that was because Alex was a freak.

Alex laughed, but then pointed to all the other Direct X people who did the same kind of thing.

Fun Fact #3: When it came time for Marsh to speak, everyone looked at him expectantly. Most of them had been talking about how they work less hours as they got older and wiser, but Marsh had already told me that he had barely slept in the past week. He didn’t miss a beat and said with a grin, “Actually, I’m going back to work after this meeting is done.”

The audience and other developers laughed.

Question 4: What is the future trend in games?

Almost everyone agreed that we are on the cusp of a gigantic revolution and that the current gaming world has more opportunities for a developer than ever before. You do anything from working on a giant team to solo programming your own iPhone application.

Most of them agreed that the future of gaming is interactivity, and that gaming will soon be the dominant media that people consume. The term, gamer, will be irrelevant because everyone will be a gamer. One of the speakers commented that his grandma is spamming his Facebook account with Farmville items. When 70 year old women start getting addicted to games, you know our society has crossed a major threshold.

Games of the future will allow people to play together as they consume media in ways that we can barely think of. We are right on the cusp of a revolution that will shake the foundations of how we relate to information and each other.

Here is an interesting tidbit here. Marsh didn’t add much to this conversation, but I could see him processing and nodding. You can tell he is incredibly smart just by looking at the way he is thinking about things and I think I can go out on a limb here, that judging by his reaction to this question, they have some amazing social things planned for the MMO.

Q and A

The next part was a Q and A session. I think 4-5 questions were asked, but I only remember three of them. Sorry.

Breaking into the Industry as a Sound Recorder

The first was rather interesting. A guy asked about how one could break into the sound industry. I believe it was Ed Fries who responded. He said that now is a good time to be a sound guy. The reason is that there are a lot of small teams that don’t have a permanent sound guy on staff. This means that there is a lot of contract work available.

He went on to describe a guy in the sound business called, “The Fat Man,” who was well known throughout the gaming community for wearing a cowboy hat to events like this and creating sounds for 100s of games. Other developers would see him going down the street and say, “Hey, there’s the fat man.” The general rule here being is to make yourself seen.

Virtual Reality

A member of the audience then asked about virtual reality and the developers said that that they didn’t see it taking off fast. Marsh pointed out that one of the things he hates about Imax is wearing the glasses. He went on to say that he didn’t think VR would be marketable in the current environment unless it was a peripheral, much like the guitar from guitar hero.

Achievements

I then asked the following question. “What was the inspiration for Xbox Live achievements, how much do you think they contribute to the continued dominance of the Xbox and what do you see as their future.”

Ed Fries responded saying that that was after his time and that he really didn’t know the inspiration. He didn’t think the dominance of Xbox had much to do with them.

I believe it was Patrick who then talked about how achievements appeal to a specific kind of player, and mentioned the Bartle player types http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test.

I am going to add quickly here that I don’t completely agree with the Bartle types and I think that the core motivations for which we play games are more fundamental and that gamers cannot be neatly placed onto categories. While there has been criticism of Bartle’s theory, his theory is popular with the gaming community

Alex then responded by saying that he thought that achievements are just a type of virtual commodity that people try to get like any type of online exotic goods and that Xbox live has been shifting in that direction. I disagree with him slightly, in the sense that achievements are more permanent and cumulative than most virtual commodities and thus are more appealing to the achievement oriented players.

Talking with Marsh Afterward about the Next Project

After the developers were done talking, I made a beeline for Marsh. He was trapped behind Alex and Matt, who were both having side conversations and Marsh was stuck behind. I said “Hi Marsh, could I speak to you?” and they parted enough to let him out.

First of all, let me tell you, Marsh is a friendly guy. His enthusiasm for Torchlight oozes out of every pore and he is happy to meet people. We chatted a little bit about the forums and he introduced me to his Fiance Lienn. He thanked me for writing so many posts.

I responded saying, “I was a little worried when I wrote my critique post that I would offend people. I was a little big blunt.”

He said that they actually emailed it around the office and that everyone read it. He thought it raised some excellent points and actually sparked quite a bit of debate around the office.

I then asked him if he had read the speculation thread I had posted in the single player forum. Marsh paused for a bit here, and then answered very carefully. He said a few things, but I don’t want to misquote him, so I will quote a correspondence from him asking for clarification. In that he said “We are contractually bound to making the MMO – yes.”

I felt like he was telling me all he could at the time, so I decided not to press him on that any more. Instead I asked about this: “Perfect World seems like a good company, I hear they even do some things similar to what I proposed in my Moonlighting thread (Marsh didn’t seem to recognize that name. I doubt he has read it). Anyway, how much control does Perfect World have over what you guys do in Torchlight? Do you have creative control over the content and things like the item shop?”

Marsh replied that they had creative control over both, but quickly qualified it that they would listen to PW’s input strongly, especially on things like porting the game to China and MMO type things like holidays.

With that said, I noticed that some other fans were waiting to talk to Marsh, so stepped aside and waited. While I was waiting, I got to chat with Marsh’s lovely Fiance Lienn.

Talking Marshes Fiancé Lienn

Lienn also works in the game development industry. She works at Monolith and as far as I can tell is a game programmer / content developer and does something similar to Marsh.

While she couldn’t tell me much about Monolith’s up and coming title, she could tell me some about working in a larger corporation. We also talked some about whether someone as old as me (I am in my early 30s) could break into the gaming industry and she said definitely.

About this time, Marsh was done talking with the other fans and I started talking to him again.

What is Runic’s Hang up about Loading Screens?

I already felt like I had asked him a lot, so I decided not to press Marsh too hard. I remember hearing about Travis saying that Runic had a crusade against progress bars or something like that. One of the things that I dislike about Torchlight is the fact that it doesn’t have any progress bars. I find myself sometimes loading the game for 30 seconds to two minutes to switch areas and a progress bar would make the wait a lot more tolerable.

Marsh said that they had been shocked when they found some people were waiting that long. At their office, when testing, it only took the slowest machines about 10-20 seconds or less to zone with some machines taking 30 seconds at max. He told me that what he currently was working on was a way to make loading faster for the MMO.

Basically he had gone through all the assets and gave them a unique id number instead of referencing them by String (the sentence long name). This seemed to help the loading time considerably. The time is less than 3-5 seconds on his home computer and 6-8 seconds on his work computer. Unfortunately this change is fundamental and can’t be patched in, because it would break TorchEd (and custom mods) for single player.

As far as the vendetta against progress bars, Marsh basically said that it came out of the massive amount of progress bars in WoW. The running joke around the office was that WoW was a game where you mainly stared at progress bars.

Author’s Note: Personally, I like progress bars. I think it is a huge mistake not to have them just because some games may overuse them. I used to play Everquest and remember when they added a sub progress bar so that you could actually see your experience move with each kill. It made leveling much more fun. This is the same reason that Disney puts small turns and goals into their ride lines. People need something to measure their progress against. Anyway, Runic is entitled to their own opinions. Every game needs some idiosyncrasies.

Marsh’s Reply: Concerning progress bars. That’s what I said so I don’t want to change what you’re saying there. I just wanted to point out we aren’t against all progress bars. We have one of XP for example. We just hate progress bars when there is no reason for them. For instance picking a flower in WOW or so many other MMO’s of today; why do I need a progress bar for that?  Your note about the micro progress bars in Everquest for XP – awesome. (John “Volbard”) Dunbar so fought for that in Torchlight. We just never really could get it working in a nice “feeling” way.

I guess I agree with the way they think about progress bars after all. As long as loading is down to 3-5 seconds, the level loading screens probably don’t need a progress bar. (It would still be nice however)

Idea for Forums

At this point, I could see that Marsh was ready to head out, so I ended with one last pitch for a Developer talking point of the week. I think one of the biggest things that Runic has going for them is their reputation for dialoging with their fans. They are pros at it. Something like a developer question to the community for the week would help strengthen that reputation.

Marsh replied after reading this, that he has already told several people around the office this idea.

With that we exchanged a few more pleasantries then I thanked him and said goodbye to Marsh and Lienne.

The End

After that, I talked to a few more people, got in my car, drove to my Cousin’s and played some Rockband 2. I hope you enjoyed reading about this trip as much as I had going there.

- Jerich

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