Skydance Interactive

Around May of 2016, The Workshop Entertainment was purchased by Skydance Media, and officially became Skydance Interactive (SDI). This was great for the studio, because it allowed us to transition away from work-for-hire projects (in which we helped other studios complete their games), towards becoming a studio that created its own titles and new IPs.

Our First VR Game

Our first title as SDI was Archangel, a VR-based mech-themed on-rails shooter. It was, by design, a fairly simple game - chosen to be that way to avoid motion sickness issues. It’s worth noting that at that time, VR was still very new, and motion sickess was a top early concern. Two things were known to trigger it: low framerates and unrestricted player movement. For the latter problem, developers were coming up with all sorts of creative work-arounds. Ours was to not allow free movement at all, hence making it an on-rails shooter. For the former problem, well, making an on-rails shooter helped here too, as it meant we had a lot of control over what the player could see and do, and thus lots of options for controlling performance.

So, keeping the game simple was a way to reduce risk as we entered the uncharted VR landscape. But simple doesn’t mean bad, and Archangl demonstrated that handily. One look at it, and it’s clear that it was created by very talented, very experienced, developers for whom this was not at all their first shipped game. The game oozes production quality and high-end games craft.

As Project Lead

If I’m speaking pridefully, it’s because I’m proud of it! And more than just because it was great: This was the first game for which I was responsible for the entire team - I was the Project Lead. I’d had numerous smaller leadership positions before this: At pandemic I provided creative and production leadership for the Mercenaries cover disk demo, the Mercenaries 2 E3 demo, various prototypes (such as one that help green-light Saboteur), and much more as an Assistant Director. At The Workshop, I provided tech leadership on a Lumberyard-based FPS demo, for a Unreal tech demo, and for our work on X-Com 2. But all of these jobs were smaller in scope and came with training wheels, typically in the form of team leadership above me.

But for Archangel, I ran the team. I set our goals, our milestones, and our strategies. I defined the key processes that ensured good communication between departments, constant and tangible forward progress, a healthy culture of try-it-and-see, positive “us with them” (instead of “us vs. them”) relationship with upper management, and a controlled march to the finish line.

The Results

It was a big career step for me, and I was nervous taking it. But as I said, I’m quite proud of the results. There were a lot of things going against us, and the challenges were extraordinarily high (some for self-made reasons, but that’s another story), but we pulled it off. Looking back, knowing the whole story, it feels like a minor miracle. If the game had gotten canceled, that would have surprised almost no one. So to just see the game launch was sweet enough, but then to have it turn out so well, made our success just that much sweeter.

In the market Archangel did reasonably well for an early VR title, and I think still today, when people play it, they are impressed. But it didn’t exactly make the studio rich and famous either. Which is well enough. This was only our start. Bigger and better things were yet to come.