Chacko Sonny

Heavy Gear II

Current project:
Jurassic Park 3 for PS2/XBOX. As Creative Director, I worked closely with the Lead Designer and Art Director to outline the overall design of the game, ensure consistency with the movie property, clearly layout and design individual missions, implement specific level designs, spec out necessary code functionality for levels, and implement dinosaur/human enemy AI for each level. Further, I worked closely with CG artists who were creating our cut-scenes, revising models, and animation cycles. I also worked with the Cut-scene Director, revising scripts and storyboards. Finally, I worked along with the sound house, recording in-mission dialogue, sound effects and dinosaur sounds.

Academic Info

College: Stanford University
Degree: B.A. Economics, B.S. Electrical Engineering, M.S. Electrical Engineering (concentration: Digital Signal Processing)

Were there any particular projects or areas of study that you pursued?
Lots of DSP work is simulated in software before you build anything, so I had to simulate a lot of filter designs in code.

Did you do any internships?
IBM (Palo Alto), Intel (Tsukuba, Japan), and Microsoft (Redmond).

Career Info

Tell us about your first job in the industry. How did you get the job? What was it like? What were your responsibilities?
My first job was at Activision in 1995, as an Associate Producer working on the MechWarrior 2 product line. I got that job after leaving a job as a strategic management consultant at McKinsey & Company in NY. I wanted to get back to something creative and games seemed like the right combination of technical and creative work. I applied to a lot of companies at that time (LucasArts, Acclaim, Activision, etc.) and Activision was the only one who was willing to take a chance on someone who didn't have any prior gaming experience. Of course, I had to start at the bottom of the chain, and work my way up. My first project was to produce a demo of the Win95 version of MechWarrior 2 before the game was even finished, for the Microsoft DirectX Meltdown CD. It was just me and the two contract programmers, so any other product oriented stuff that needed to be done (i.e. re-processing assets, learning the game tools, debugging design issues, etc.) was left to me. I had to figure it out or have the product miss its date. It really was a bit of a "sink or swim" environment, but it worked out for the better, because it gave me a crash course in all aspects of game production from art generation to design tools to code. Shortly after that, I worked on the Windows 95 version of MechWarrior 2, including the first release of NetMech (using DirectPlay), and then took on the re-work of MechWarrior 2 using nearly every single 3D card that was being released. The 3DFX version, the ATI version, the S3 version, and even an nVidia version (the NV1 chip) that was never released.

What jobs have you held in the games industry thus far? Briefly describe the career path you took to get where you are today.
Shortly after that I started on Heavy Gear as Producer, along with many members of the MechWarrior 2 team. From start to finish, this was probably one of my most challenging projects, as we were tasked with finding a comparably compelling property as MechWarrior, creating a substantial step forward in gameplay, all within a very very short production cycle, mandated by competitive concerns surrounding the release of MechWarrior 3 by FASA and EarthSiege by Dynamix. In the end, people are divided on whether we fell short of or achieved our goal, but in either case, it was an incredible learning experience. After that I left Activision, with two other partners, and seven employees (all formerly of Activision, some from Mech 2, some from the console side) and founded Savage Entertainment. We spun out from Activision right around the time as Pandemic. Our first project was to be Heavy Gear 3. Our goal as Savage was to have one team where no one was a pure manager. Everyone would work directly on the project. I worked as a 3D artist on Heavy Gear 3 in addition to my role as Producer, and CFO of the company. Sales of Heavy Gear 2 didn't live up to expectations and Activision exited the giant robot combat market, canceling Heavy Gear 3. Fortunately, we had been negotiating the Jurassic Park 3 project. I served as Creative Director on that project. Due to a dispute with the publisher over payment, that project has been cancelled as well, and we're now looking for another project.

Advice

What fields of study, specific courses, or life experiences would you recommend to students interested in your field?
Learn programming. No matter what you end up doing, whether it is art, design or programming, it will always be helpful to know how things work inside the game that you are building. Plus, scripting tools for designers are very much like more traditional coding. If you have a handle on programming in some form, it will make it easier for you to acclimate to the industry.

If you really want to get into art or design, an architecture course would likely be helpful. I didn't have the benefit of this so I've had to learn a lot about it from artists I've worked with at different game companies. Creating and designing buildings requires some degree of spatial logic and if you build something that looks like it just doesn't make sense, it won't fly in the game.

Obviously, if you want to get into art, you need to have some familiarity with the tools of the day. Learn 3D Studio Max or Maya, or Photoshop. Learn the concepts behind painting, modeling and animation. When I hire someone for an art position, I'm less impressed by someone knowing how to use a particular plug-in in the latest version of Maya, than I am by a reel that shows an animator with a good sense of "weight" or "exaggeration." If you learn the "art" portion of your job, learning the tools part of it is a snap.

If you want to design, take some classes on story structure, narrative and character development. Again, this was something I didn't get much of as an electrical engineer, so I had to pick it up from the great designers I've worked with over the years. It doesn't matter the medium, great characters are what attract people to your story.

If you want to produce or direct, learn a little bit of everything I've mentioned above. It sucks, but that's the truth. You can't talk to an animator about scheduling and evaluating his work if you don't know what's involved in skinning and boning a character model.

Oh yeah….one final really important thing: Play games. Play a lot of games. Play games outside of the genres that you normally play. But don't just play them like a regular player. Figure out what was cool about them. Write down places where you thought there was a cool puzzle, or a neat feature, or a great scripted moment. Keep this stuff in your head as your context of the stuff that has been done before. It's handy to have that, and it's a common language for dealing with other people in our industry.

Is there anything you wish someone had told you before you got into the games industry? Is there anything you would have done differently?
Making a piece of art for a business is one of the hardest things to do. By contrast, if you're just making an electronic device that is clearly designed and spec'd out, it's pretty straightforward to say what's good and what doesn't work. Making a game is very different. Yes, there's a code piece for which some might argue it's easy to figure out if it's right or if it's wrong. But even there, the features you choose, the way you implement certain things is all subject to your own design and interpretation. You might think that the new whiz-bang feature you added is the coolest thing, but nobody else does. With the art and the design, it gets even more complex as emotions and pride get in the way. Artists like their own vision; the marketing department has their own product goals and very often these conflict. It's that subjectivity which makes it so hard to put something together that pleases everyone. A lot of people enter the industry thinking they'll be able to make "the ultimate game" right from the get go. Be prepared to compromise on your vision early on, so that someday in the future, you won't have to.

If I could do anything differently, I would probably have started Savage as two teams instead of just one. As I've seen first-hand, the life of an independent third party developer can be difficult and to mitigate some of that risk, it would have made sense to have multiple cash-flows to support development activities.

As games increase in complexity, what are the various kinds of jobs that you foresee development companies needing in the next five years?
Technical artist: As games increase in complexity, the need for artists who understand programmer-ese will be huge. The pixel/vertex shading tool for DirectX 8.0 is a good example.

AI Programmer: This is an easy one. As less of the processor load is required for things like graphics and sound, more cycles will be freed up for making games seem more realistic through AI behavior. We'll need AI programmers who can handle this task and can migrate some of the techniques used in academia to games.

Cutscene Director: As in-game engine graphics come on-par with pre-rendered cutscenes, development companies will want directors who can script, storyboard and then implement using in-engine tools the game cutscenes.

Cross-Platform Programmer: This would ideally be someone on a team who is familiar with the nuances of the multiple platforms the game is being created for and would own any changes to the code that needed to be made to ensure consistency across SKUs.

Multiplayer Designer: Designing a single player game is very different from designing a multiplayer game. As consoles take to broadband, it's important to have someone (most likely from a PC multiplayer background) who knows how to design levels for use in multiplayer gaming.

Do you have any other advice or recommendations to share with students who are interested in doing what you do?
I'll repeat what someone told me and what has no doubt been told to a lot of other people besides me, and leave it at that: If you're going to get into making games, make sure you really love games.