The Story of An Inventor Trying To Start A Business In The Games Industry

Kevin talks about trying to start a business to help the games industry….

Note: here is a link to his interview last year…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-graphics.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin, Texas and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Kevin: Hi, I’m Kevin Bray. I’m a graphics programmer.

Interviewer: Yeah. So you were interviewed on this show last year. Can you talk about what the project was about?

Kevin: Yeah. I basically built an engine that had megatextures as its main feature, and the goal there was to try and build a good product that I could hopefully license to somebody and then raise some money. And then, hopefully, build a game, et cetera.

Interviewer: So you spent a number of years on the… what’s the status of that project?

Kevin: Well, I spent four years on it, specifically. Right now, it’s just kind of hanging out. It’s not really doing anything. In my mind, I have a business partner associated with it, so I have kind of legal constraints. I can’t just go off and do whatever I want. So, that’s one of the reasons I’m just letting it sit right now plus I’ve kind of gathered some other research, and I’ve just started going off in a different direction.

Interviewer: How hard was it to walk away from that project, and what do you consider that walking away? Is that quitting, or is it just you found a better iteration? An interesting metaphor that some people have said is that you can iterate on the same product, or you can iterate over several products.

Kevin: Well, it wasn’t necessarily my decision to do so. I would say it was complications with business, personal finance, a business partner and his personal finance. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to walk away from it as much as I needed money.

Interviewer: On the business end, what would you do differently if you came in with another partner? I think that’s something that isn’t really discussed, but when you’re starting up companies you’re doing small things. What are things you should have considered beforehand when you just jump in willy nilly with a partner?

Kevin: I should have taken the exit strategy a little more seriously. I should have had a plan for, well, what would happen if we need to get jobs, or what would happen if something got in the way of us being able to work on it. I just assumed that neither one of us would screw the other and neither one of us did. It’s just life kind of got in the way, and we both had to step away from it. Neither of us have really had the chance to get back to the opportunity. I guess, technically, I have but my business partner hasn’t.

Interviewer: Maybe, then, if you did dissolve the company, maybe each one would own the same rights or could resell the thing. And then, maybe, that wouldn’t have held things up.

Kevin: Yeah. I think having a plan for that, like what you said, any number of things really would have been better than what we had which is nothing, which is kind of we’re just in a position and we don’t know what do.

Interviewer: So, you spent four years. You didn’t gain any traction. What were you thinking at that point?

Kevin: Disappointed. It’s still disappointing. It’s a large part of my life, but at the same time I also feel like I’ve learned a whole lot from it. Prior to that project, I’d never really been a part of any project where I was able to try to innovate and try to do something different or new or complicated that I didn’t immediately have reference materials for. Leaving how to do that has really been invaluable.

Interviewer: How do you take those learning experiences, and what are you going to do with them? How are you going to apply them to the future to make your big hit?

Kevin: Well, for me I’m just going to adapt what I do. I’m going to change. I’m going to take the lessons learned and try to augment what I do and try to find a better thing, a better process. And the thing about research is that it’s not really obvious what you need to do, and as a result you often times need to not just research what it is you’re trying to research, not the topic but you’re trying to research how to effectively develop something new when there is no existing material for it.

Interviewer: So, you’re in the realm of invention and stuff like that.

Kevin: Right, yeah.

Interviewer: OK, so let’s talk about the next project that you’re doing. How is it different, and what are you going to do different this time? And what’s the end goal? You talked about thinking about some of these things beforehand, you know, these business issues beforehand. Let’s talk about what the end goal is for you?

Kevin: Sure. Well, I’m a tech guy so really what I want to do is I want to try to introduce new technology that I think would be useful to our industry. In order to really do that, my previous thinking was if I built a good engine, someone will come along and buy it regardless of whether or not there’s risk involved. And that really wasn’t the case whereas with this, what I’m trying to do now is I’m trying to invent some new tech and then build something on top of it and prove it and say, “See, look, this can work.” Hopefully, people will come and adopt it.

Interviewer: Why not just… The reason why people will adopt something is when they see a lot of money being made on it. And so, why not just then focus on getting players first? Once you get players, they can give you feedback. You can build a community. You can see where the tech actually becomes relevant to people. Instead of just pure research, it’s more people centric. Why not do that because it seems like a more potentially faster way to reach success?

Kevin: Well, that’s kind of what I’m doing. Basically, I started working on my current project about four months ago. It’s when I started doing any kind of serious research. My goal is to have a very, very quick turn-around time. Invent this piece of tech that I see as being very, very useful and then build a game on it. Build a game around it. Build a project around it.

Don’t focus on building a great engine. Focus on building a good game. Show people what it can do for them. It’s just, how do I get there? I can’t really… There has to be some period of time where I have to be building something and be it a new tech or be it whatever. I don’t want to invest a heavy amount of time. If my research of it turns out that it doesn’t pan out, then I don’t want to have to have built a game with the notion that I’m going to plug this tech into it later and then not have anywhere to really go from there.

Interviewer: Since you’re more into the technology, why not then just start an open source project? What’s preventing you from being something like ODE or some other open source tool that can actually be used by everyone else?

Kevin: Well, I haven’t really ruled that out. The reason that I haven’t open sourced my current project is I still don’t have everything fleshed out, and I don’t really see research as a community thing. And for me, it’s not really something I like to work with other people on. That’s just personal preference.

Later on, as it becomes more of an engine and becomes more of a thing, if you will, then I wouldn’t mind doing something like that. It’s just in the early stage I don’t really want to do that.

Interviewer: You’ve heard of things like the Unreal 4 engine and stuff like that. Why do people want to license that because it’s got this huge game behind it that it’s proven. Why not? I don’t know. I guess, why not consider that? I guess it seems like, maybe you’re just more interested in the research and in the invention. And, maybe, the game stuff doesn’t even matter. Maybe, that’s…

Kevin: No, no, no. The game stuff does definitely matter. I definitely have an idea in mind, and I do think that it will be interesting. The kinds of environments that I want to do, the tech that I’m working on will effectively enable you to have… You won’t need triangles. As a result, everything becomes textured.

When everything’s textured, you can stream it real easily. And so, what I can then do is I can create a world that has effectively as much geometry as you have texels. So, your texture defines your world. So, you can have ridiculously high resolution stuff which allows me to then take something like procedural content.

For instance, I can take a terrain, and I can have this $40 million polygon terrain. And I can bake this into this texture data, and then I’m done. At that point I can stream it, and I can show it in all its glory.

Interviewer: How does that affect game play? So, let’s talk about how your inventions can affect game play because if it were to be a huge game, it’s going to have to be, in my opinion, and who knows whatever. But in my opinion, it’s going to have to affect game play in some way because you’ve got Unreal 4. You’ve got all these things that are already doing graphics and all that. How is your innovation going to affect gaming?

Kevin: Well, for me it’s more about removing limitations, right? You have to build art that’s heavily parameterized. You have to do all kinds of… Basically, artists have to jump through a lot of hoops just to get content into the game and the design has to work with art. And then, it’s being a very complex process, and it’s easy to get things wrong.

And so, I see that communication as a serious overhead that needs to be addressed, especially now. You see these art teams. It’s not uncommon to see a hundred man art team. To me, that’s astronomical, and part of that is that, well, not just making them make more stuff or making them make stuff that takes longer to make.

So, it’s like a two-fold problem. And really what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to address that issue and make it so a 10 man art team can just say, “Yeah, this is what we want to do” and they go and do that, focusing on the art rather than all these limitations of game play, normal maps and all this other crap.

They can literally just get down to what it is they want to do and their vision for the level and hopefully do that very quickly. And for the things they’re not really interested in, have some kind of procedural content or have something there to fill in the blanks. That’s not very possible.

It’s very difficult to do with current generation technology because of all the constraints, because of all the prioritization that needs to happen. That’s the goal of this technology. So, I guess what I’m getting at is that more. They can get do more stuff, and as a result they can deliver more content much quicker.

Interviewer: Now, what about people who are saying everything is going to mobile anyways, you know, the Web and stuff like that that doesn’t really need it. It took the graphics engine, and the graphics card doesn’t matter as much. Does that have an impact? Are you thinking about actually developing tools that work in mobile which is relatively new compared to the PC space?

Kevin: I don’t see the PC space as going anywhere, really. I see mobile as an interesting augmentation. I don’t necessarily think that people will sit down at their computer and pop out their iPhone and start playing an iPhone game rather than their computer, assuming they’ve got games on their computer and they like to play computer games.

I don’t necessarily, me, personally, I’m not trying to shift my attention away from the PC. I really like the PC as a platform. I like the open nature of it. I like the low barrier to entry, and I personally would like to see that platform have an extended life.

Interviewer: And so, in the pre-interview we talked about ways that you’re going to accelerate this project. So, instead of taking four years to find out it didn’t work, you’re going to find out sooner. What steps are you taking to actually accelerate this project, and things that other developers can learn in terms of ways to mitigate risk and find a way to reach success?

Kevin: Well, I think there’s a couple of keys to research that I’ve personally found. One of those is metrics. Having a clearly defined goal is extremely important. The other thing is trying to isolate the different pieces.

Oftentimes, an invention is a collection of lots of smaller inventions, and as a result it takes a lot of time to get to that point because if you’re trying to build the whole thing all at once, then you end up building something. And then, you realize, oh, well this piece doesn’t work. So, you’re having to throw it away and restart it.

Really what you need to do is isolate the little components and build small applications. Test it out. Have your goal clearly defined and then try to meet that goal for each one of those little components.

Interviewer: So, you made many prototypes, kind of how game developers will do that for a game design.

Kevin: That’s exactly right.

Interviewer: But how do you keep motivated being a lone developer now? I know that’s something that you prefer, but having feedback can help. Can’t it or no?

Kevin: Absolutely. That’s why I do events like this, really. I like to go out, and I like to talk to people. I like to bounce my ideas off of people, and oftentimes people will give me some feedback. They’ll give me some kind of insight, or they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve worked with X and I found that to be an eyesore” or they’ll say, “Oh, I tried something similar and it was really horrible.” And that gives me some ideas. Maybe, I should focus on this, or maybe I should kind of cut back a little bit on something else.

Interviewer: OK. Cool. Do you have a dev blog or something else where listeners can check up on what you’re doing and, maybe, give you feedback, stuff like that?

Kevin: I do. I go to… It’s www.bray3d.com.

Interviewer: How do you spell that, B-R…

Kevin: B-R-A-Y 3d.com.

Interviewer. OK. Thank you very much.