Today we interviewed Brie Code Lead Programmer for Child of Light. We talked about working on a small team and diversity and female protagonists.
1. What were some of the unique challenges that came up during the production of Child of Light?
At Ubisoft Montreal we know a lot about making big games with big teams. Before starting Child of Light, I was thinking it would be a bit of a break! But while it was refreshing and different to work on a smaller team, it turned out it was definitely not easier. Everything we knew about making games was not necessarily true anymore.
On big teams you can become highly specialized in your work. For example, during most of my career I’ve been coding AI systems. I’ve spent years and years on AI systems. But on a smaller team, everyone is a generalist. So we all got to learn A LOT. It has been a super rewarding experience to learn about all the different parts of the pipeline, all the different parts of the game engine. And especially to be able to get closer to the hardware and learn more about all the different consoles we develop for. We’ve got an AI programmer doing all the networking, and a gameplay programmer owning the sound engine. And this “everyone does a bit of everything” ethos stretched beyond the programming team. For example, our writer would run parts of the story by me, and one of our designers was doing very technical scripting. It’s been a really varied and fun experience.
2. How do you think the diversity of the Child of Light team helped the production?
You can find a lot to read about how diverse teams can outperform even more qualified teams, and it is not difficult to see why. Diverse teams bring a variety of personalities, backgrounds, and ideas. They tend to communicate more since there is no assumption of shared knowledge or previously-established social rituals to uphold. They also tend to bring multiple approaches to problem solving …or even to defining what problems to solve. And this last point is the most interesting to me.
I think it's a really good time to look to diverse teams for innovation. It’s no secret that the game industry suffers from a lack of diversity, and this shows in what the industry produces. We make games about guns and about the same protagonist over and over, from game to game to game. But what other games could we create?
3. What do you think about the burgeoning community of innovative game developers?
I love what is going on in the indie community and what they are doing to explore new gameplay, new stories, new ways to convey meaning. All my favorite games right now are indie games. And tech-wise, it is a really exciting time also. Partly because the tech has sort of stagnated, we have to look at innovating no longer just on realism but on everything else. And at the same time, so many people who aren’t gamers now have tablets or smartphones. Something I’ve seen recently is a remarkable number of my non-gamer friends inheriting previous-gen consoles, and wondering what to play. (They love Journey.)
So I think we can innovate, and we can expand our audience, if our development teams include not only hardcore gamers but also casual gamers, gamers who used to game but don’t anymore, and especially people who love culture and media but don’t game (yet). And I think we have a good mix like this on Child of Light. We’re mostly hardcore industry veterans, some of us are more casual gamers, we come from all over the world, and we have a good balance of gender and sexualities and ages. With all these different perspectives, we’ve had some great debates and we’ve learned a lot from each other. And I hope we’ve made a game that can appeal to a wide range of people, from seasoned Squaresoft fans to my friends who have just discovered Journey.
4. How do you feel about making a game with a female protagonist?
I think representation in media is very important. I remember one day while I was finishing Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, I was rushing through the metro, and I saw this life-size poster with the Brotherhood flanking Ezio. A teenage girl walked up in front of me, slowly, looking at the poster, and then she walked straight up to the female Assassin and reached out and touched her face and just stood there for a while looking.
I have at times debated whether this is the right industry for me. I’ve been attached to the computer since I was tiny and grew up loving games and loving programming. And this industry is an industry full of growth and opportunity and passion. And my colleagues are some of the hardest working and most friendly and intelligent people I have ever met. But at times I get lonely. It can be lonely to be the only woman or one of very few women on the team, or to be the only one with my own girly taste in film or books or whatever. But seeing that girl standing there, it made it all worth it, because I realized that it is worth pushing for more diversity within the industry and for a diversity of characters within the games we make.
That girl reminded me what it was like to be young and looking for role models and how powerful it can be to see yourself represented in the media that surrounds you. My favorite games growing up were Colonel’s Bequest and Zak McKracken. Later it was Starcraft, then the Longest Journey and Morrowind, and more recently it’s been Skyrim and Gone Home. Most of my favorite games have compelling characters, often compelling female characters, and I think that is not a coincidence.
For many years most films have had mostly male characters because it is assumed that while women will see a movie with a male protagonist, men won’t see a movie with a female protagonist. And so female-led movies won’t make money. But I think this last year may have disproved this. It’s exciting and you can look it up: In the top 100 grossing films of 2013, female-led movies grossed on average more than male-led movies. As well, it was found this year in an analysis of movies since 1990 that movies that pass the Bechdel test have netted higher than movies that don’t.
Can we prove the same with games? I want to.
And so it has been such a pleasure and an honour and a dream come true to work on Child of Light. I love the character of Aurora. She’s brave and tough and relatable and girly and cute and rises against adversity. She’s an interesting character.
And all of this is beside the fact that people in real life are just so interesting and so varied. People are fascinating. And in games, we are making virtual worlds, and so we can make anything we want. I think we have a responsibility then to create interesting, varied characters.
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