Autodesk's Marc Stevens
The middleware giant's VP of games talks economy, iPhone, Facebook and the Uncanny Valley
Once of the biggest names in the videogames middleware space is Autodesk, with swathes of big titles being created using packages such as Max and Maya - but how does the company view the future of the industry, and the current trend towards handheld and social networking platforms?
To find out, we spoke to the company's vice president of games - Marc Stevens. He explains here how business has been through the difficult economic situation, whether they're looking to work with more indie studios, and whether or not we're any closer to crossing the Uncanny Valley - or indeed if that actually matters when it comes to inspiring the more tender emotions.
If you look at the industry as a whole, last year was a difficult year for people in a lot of different ways. People are struggling with how they produce and iterate on content more efficiently than having to have a team of hundreds of people working for two years... they put this big thing out, and it either sinks or swims.
I think it's much more the trend for people to try and get a good idea, work out how they get it out there, see if it works - and then be able to easily build and iterate on that. Autodesk is one of the larger providers of tools in certain segments, but the overall game development process is a pretty broad thing.
For a long time we've been very much a part of that, but mainly on the art and animation side - Max, Maya, and so on, those are names that people are familiar with. But then there's a whole other side to the game development process - all the game design, gameplay, interaction, runtime - all that happens and historically we haven't played a role in it.
One of the disconnects we see, that makes the process harder, is that having to constantly have different worlds you're working in - as a person that's working in the runtime environment, and something doesn't look or behave like you want, it's a lot of work to go back to the source content and change that. You're working in very different worlds.
So one of the things we've started to do is start to learn more about the realtime aspects of game authoring and play - that's why we bought Kynogon about two years ago, to understand more of that side of the development process.
We're learning there, but a big part of what we want to start to do is bring those worlds together - so the artists, when they're authoring, know what it's going to be like in the environment of the game, and how it's going to behave. It's about marrying the art and runtime processes, so they can be more efficient and people can iterate and create content more quickly.
If it took you 18 months with 100 people to do something, you probably don't want to change it that quickly - but if you've got something from a small group of people that took a few weeks, you can put it out there. If somebody says it's no good, then they can go back into it again.
Relating it to trends in film, if you look at something like Avatar - the big difference in that was that James Cameron was able to take his camera onto a virtual set, look into it and see the environment, with the CG characters running around. As a director, that's great, because you can see what's happening and tell people to make changes, whereas before you've have to do the mo-cap, look at it after - and if you want to change it, you have to get the actors to all come back in...
So it's something similar with games - we'd like to get more to a sense of what you see is what you get, that's live while you're creating content. If you look at our announcements and where we're going, yes it's still about creating great art tools and runtime solutions, but it's also about creating the bridge between those worlds.
Every company in the last year has had its challenges - Autodesk hasn't been immune, and when the world economy slows down, whether it's manufacturing or people building in architecture and contruction, or media and entertainment... we're not immune, but it does offer the opportunity to rethink how you're doing things, and make some changes.
We've come out of the last year by accomplishing some good stuff to set us up for the future. From what we're seeing, hopefully the worst is behind us - in the last couple of quarters we've seen things stabilise and start to go back up. We're confident that trend will continue - and on the same side, whichever industry you're talking about, there are changes that our customers are implementing now too, and what we've done enables us to be in a better position to help them move forward.