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MythoWorks are working on fresh sci-fi concept Karyn and on narrative adventure Angelique, and here we talk about both projects but also about Aldous's past with Rockstar and about the future of actor performance in games.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, we are in beautiful Madeira for the Games Summit, and I'm here joined by Gethin, who, you've been having a lot of activity today, I saw you on stage, now you were having some of these roundtables, of course this is B2B, but many ideas shared here, so is there any takeaway that you would like to share, any talking point that you guys are seeing in common today?
I think my biggest takeaway at the moment is just around publishing, I think it's a big discussion at the moment, as to what the future of publishing is, what publishing looks like, is self-publishing better, we've got AI that can help us come up with ideas and move things forward, and I just finished a roundtable, saying is self-publishing worth the risk, and I think it was inconclusive, it was quite interesting, because there was a publisher on the table who at one point said something that nobody else knew, so that was like, oh, there is wisdom in a publisher, and there is knowledge, and there's a knowledge base, but is that worth 50% of your revenue, is it 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing, there's lots of little debates around it, so it was an interesting discussion, some people had self-published and done well with it, one woman there had been self-publishing for 12 years, every single thing she's done, she's had 43 million downloads, and it's done just fine, so that was a takeaway from what just happened there."
"Tell me a little bit more about MythoWorks, what do you guys do, I know about your background, we can talk a little bit about how you worked with actors before, but tell me, what's your main goal, what do you guys do, how can you help studios?
We're a little development studio, our goal is just to push the boundaries of storytelling in games, either by developing our own, we've got two games in development, one of them is a pretty ambitious one that needs quite a large budget, and one is a very, very low budget one, which still to me pushes the boundaries of storytelling, so I'm kind of excited about that, so that's the one we're focusing on at the moment, we had a push to raise funding for the more expensive one, and we didn't get the funding we needed, so now we're just like, OK, we'll do it the hard way, we'll make a small one first, and then on the side, we're available to support other studios if they need help with their storytelling, if anyone's interested in pushing the boundaries of storytelling in games, I'm interested in talking."
"Anything that you can share about the games you're developing currently?
As in what the games are about?
One of them is called Corinne, I'll do my elevator pitch, how about that?
Corinne is a 60-year-old real estate developer in the mid-to-distant future, who pays a vast amount of money to have her memories and her soul transferred from a 60-year-old body to a genetically engineered 21-year-old body, and the game starts when something's clearly gone wrong, and she wakes up in what she describes as a fat robot body, and she is not happy about it, and she wants to speak to the manager, and the game is called Corinne, it's basically about this woman who's a bit of a Karen, and then she can't control herself, she has to rely on this external entity to control her, and that external entity is you, the player, so you create this sort of personal relationship with her, and she basically wants to speak to the manager, and she's angry, but as the game starts to move forward, characters from her life start to show up as robots in the game, and we realise that what happened when they did the transfer, they underestimated the size of the soul, and the only place they thought could hold it was this experimental AI game engine, which then hijacks the whole thing, and makes a game out of her life to help it understand humans better, but it's still connected to her body, so as we go deeper into the story, it's less about her direct memories, and starts to be more about collective consciousness and archetypes, so it becomes, it's sort of a dark comedy, like Black Mirror."
"I was about to mention that.
It becomes this sort of exploration of consciousness, and eventually it becomes this sort of, the AI goes on its own exploration of what it is to be human, and then she goes on this sort of transformational journey, it's all based on the Heroine's Journey, which everyone knows the Heroine's Journey, it's a book by Maureen Murdoch, it's an amazing book, and hopefully you as a player become an ally in this woman's transformation."
"Where can I play that?
It's not available yet.
Which platforms are you planning to release on? PC first, I guess? When, more or less?
This is the one, it's on pause at the moment, so PC and console."
"And then the other one, which is the one we're sort of, I hope we're going to get out within the next year.
You got me hooked with the first one.
Yeah, it's fun, right?
Yeah."
"Yeah, it's a good, it's a great, it works, it's a great story, she's a great character, I'll show you an image of her later.
Yeah.
And the other one I haven't quite worked out how to pitch yet, it's sort of based on Stanley Parable, and the way I'm currently talking about it is a sexy French woman doms you into an enlightenment."
"Puzzle based as well?
Sorry?
Puzzle, you do puzzles as well?
It's sort of, there's a little bit of puzzle, it's more like Stanley Parable, just sort of walking around, kind of triggering things, lots of false ending restarts."
"Yeah.
But ultimately it's sort of this, the voice is kind of guiding you into enlightenment, but every time you choose the darkness, she's kind of into the darkness, because she's a little bit nihilistic."
"It's funny.
Where did that come from?
The idea?
Yeah.
Man, ideas just arrive."
"All right.
It's one of those weird things where I'm like, I was trying to work, it's based on Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Yeah."
"So I was sort of trying to work out how to turn that, and then the idea of a sort of French, it's weird how ideas arrive.
Yeah.
But with me, when they arrive, like I had an idea for a TV show that I'd been working on for five years, I was thinking about it, and then suddenly everything came, and I wrote it in a week, and we shot it last summer, and now we're getting into some film festivals."
"And it's the same with Corinne and with Angelique, like both of those games.
Yeah.
Corinne, the idea just came one day, and it's just like, that's it.
And I can't, I try and sort of intellectualize it and try and come up with something else, but it doesn't, this thing in my body just says, nope, that's the thing you're going to do."
"You're going to use actors for both games?
Yeah, 100%.
You've been working with actors for a long time?
Yeah.
You know, I've always been interested in performance capture and how it evolves from the original archaic motion capture, right?
So yeah, what can you tell me about this, about this evolution and the ways we deal with actors now for game development, and perhaps what we can expect to see in the near future in that regard, or you hope to see?
We saw fantastic performances as of late, such as, you know, Troy Baker for Indiana Jones, for example, and then now the whole thing is captured, not just the face, not just the movement, but the whole..."
"No, we've been capturing the whole body for a long time.
I mean, since, I mean, I started Rockstar in 2010, and we were capturing the whole body there.
There's a separate thing where we capture just the voice for the sort of in-game stuff."
"You know, you capture the body and then create the animations out of it.
But, I mean, you know, and the future of it?
Yeah, like the next step.
I feel like, you know, where we're going is right."
"I mean, I've seen some really great examples of AI being able to create three-dimensional animations out of two-dimensional videos.
Yes."
"And so that's the game changer right there.
I mean, you know, a proper motion capture studio is pretty expensive.
You need very high ceilings, and you need, you know, a lot of processing power."
"And, you know, there's not an enormous amount of user cases for AI in games I'm really excited about, but that one particular one, the stuff I've seen, I forget the name of the company, it's a young guy I met recently, but they're doing some really clever stuff with it."
"Perhaps it can help us also integrate cut scenes into like environmental narrative, like it's not a cut, so that you can get some more dynamic response from the scenes, and it's easier to integrate into the worlds, where you don't see it."
"As in not, you know, you're in the world, you then wait, see a video being played, basically.
As you want sort of player control in those sort of, we used to call those in-game cut scenes."
"Yeah, I mean, that technology.
Yeah, that technology exists.
I've always, my boss used to say this when I was at Rockstar, he's like, he sort of saw cut scenes as a reward."
"So you've done all this thing, you've had this battle, you're like, oh, and then you put the controller down for a second, and then you just, you know, and so it's not like, and that's our job as sort of filmmakers in video games, to make sure it's compelling enough."
"You're not like, this is boring, let me just skip through this thing.
So I think there's, you know, to me in sort of storytelling games, there'll always be a place for them.
Like I, in the game Corinne, I was making a point of trying to tell most of the story in-game."
"Yeah, that was the excitement for me.
But there's still moments of cut scenes, where I want to just sort of make a point of some scale, and some camera movement, and some, you know, and sure, you can do that, and still be able to sort of move the character around a little bit, if you like, and sometimes we do that."
"So yeah, I don't know.
I think there's a place for the cut scene.
I think there always will be.
And you've worked, if I'm correct, with Rockstar, on both Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA V?
Yeah."
"Yeah, so which would you say was the funniest thing, regarding dealing with actors, with cut scenes, with cinematography in those games, or something that you are super proud of, that you worked on?
I mean, the thing about Rockstar, it's such a collective, you know, it's such a massive team, and it's like no one sort of does anything alone."
"And, you know, it was, I mean, I was, one of the things I had to do in Red Dead 2, was do this thing that we call random events, which is basically these little moments that you, motion captured moments that you run into in the game, depending on how you react with them."
"They might go this way, they might go that way.
That was really, as a director, that was really exciting to do, because you had to sort of, had to create a very compelling performance, but within these real constraints."
"We had to be very, very conscious of where they are.
So, yeah, I'm pretty proud of that.
That was a very exciting to work on that, and be a part of the creation of that."
"And now everybody's expecting, waiting for GTA 6.
Of course, you've been with Rockstar for 12 years, if I'm correct.
I left three years ago."
"Three years ago?
Yeah.
For 12 years?
12 years I was there, yeah.
12 years."
"What are your expectations from this game?
It's going to be the biggest release in entertainment ever, after working with them for 12 years, in these games that we've mentioned."
"I am so excited, because I get to play it as a player.
This year, hopefully, as a player.
As a player, yeah.
Yeah, exactly."
"So, I don't know what's...
I left there.
I've been in part of the development for a little while when I left, but I'm so sure it's completely changed at this point."
"So, for me, after being so immersed in it for so long, to actually get the experience of being a customer, yeah, man, I'm day one.
Day one, I'm buying that, taking a week off work."
"I'm so excited for them.
I'm so excited.
My sense is it's going to come out this year.
Yeah.
But I do know that when it does come out, it's going to blow every single record out."
"It's going to be something.
Okay.
Yeah, but I think about 4,000 people working on something for, what, five, six, seven, how many years?
Yeah, yeah."
"I mean, it's just like...
And not just 4,000 people, 4,000 people who are the cream of the crop of this stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"But other than a player, you're a dev as well, so I'm looking forward to playing your new games eventually.
Thank you so much for your time.
Enjoy the rest of the Summit in Madeira."
