Mike Z On Game Design

Mike Z Game Developer Interview

As a game developer, you're going to have to put on a lot of hats and Mike Z is no stranger to that.

Mike Z

A lot of you might know Mike from titles such as SkullGirls and Indivisible.

Indivisible

Mike is one of my favorite people to have interviewed. As someone who wants to do a lot of things he has done, this is an interview I plan on reading more this Mike Z Game Developer Interview more than once and I recommend you do the same.

Favorite Games and Early Life

What type of games did you enjoy playing as a kid ? How has it influenced the projects you've done?

Mike Z: Let's list some favorites that I remember immediately:

ALUNDRA!!!!!!!!
Valkyrie Profile
Wild ARMs 1-5 (particularly 4!)
Star Ocean Second Story
Secret of Mana

Chrono Trigger; I never played any of the Final Fantasy games until college.

Battletoads and BTDD
The Peace Keepers
TMNT (arcade)
Turtles in Time (SNES)
Punisher (the Capcom beat-em-up)
Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
Denjin Makai II a.k.a. Guardians (our arcade had it!).
Whirlo. This goes in-between RPGs and platformers. :^)

Mega Man 2 (didn't everyone?)

Mega Man IV (GB)
Super Metroid
Castlevania Adventure (GB)
Mario 1-2-3-64
Donkey Kong Country 1-2
Sonic 2-3-K-3&K
Ristar
E.V.O. : Search for Eden
Kirby Superstar
Commander Keen (all of 'em).

Sim City (SNES), for days and days – none of the other Sim City games or other Sim games ever grabbed me at all, for some reason. Probably because the SNES Sim City was just enough removed from actual SIM planning to be fun, while still being unique.

TETRIS ATTACK (I didn't enjoy regular Tetris, and still don't)

Devil Dice
Lemmings
Sheep(!)
Cookie and Cream
Space Station Silicon Valley

BLAST CORPS (goes with the puzzle games!) and it wasn't "as a kid" but BABA IS YOU!

F-Zero/X/GX
Gran Turismo 1-3 (particularly 2)
Mario Kart (SNES)
Outrun 2019
Super Off-Road
BATTLE GRAND PRIX
Roadblasters
RUSH THE ROCK
Race Drivin' (arcade!)

MegaRace (it was a really bad game but "You win…a genuine Scottish accent!").

California Games (Lynx, and oh man the surfing scores..)
Mutant League Hockey/Football
Pilotwings (both)
Heavy Shreddin'. I didn't play many sports games, hahahah.
DESCENT
RADIX
Rise of the Triad

and…Half-Life, but not single player, and in multiplayer I really only played Severian's Mod. And Megaman Half-Life (oh how I wish this had become an official game!) I don't think I liked the actual basic Half-Life or FPS model much, I didn't particularly enjoy Doom or Wolfenstein.

Tyrian and Tyrian 2000, Gradius III, Super R-Type. Can you tell I had an SNES yet? :^P

ONE MUST FALL: 2097
KILLER INSTINCT 1 (and 2/Gold)
Mortal Kombat II/UMK3
Mace: The Dark Age
Marvel Superheroes/X-Men vs. Street Fighter/Marvel vs. Street Fighter/MvC/MvC 2
GGX

ClayFighter 63 1/3, the Vampire Savior/Hunter series. I played the more "regular" street fighters like SF2, Super Turbo, Street Fighter Alpha 1-2-3, SF3, and stuff but I thought they were slow and boring…and still do, hahah. Though I did play SF2:WW on SNES a lot.

So RPGs, Metroidvanias (before they were a genre), fighting games, platformers, and in general games that made you think, either on your own or vs another person, rather than just requiring reactions.

I wasn't a big fan of shooters, FPSes, sports games, trivia, gun games,

or like Robotron/Gauntlet/Pac Man/Tempest/Missile Command/super hard things requiring memorization or perfect reactions.

They definitely influenced what I wanted to make because of the fun I had and the sensibilities that they all had in common.

Be mean, but rewarding; respond to input properly; be intuitive about your control layouts; don't assume players are STUPID! Don't start with hours of tutorials, expect that people will hit buttons and discover things. Make random parts funny, even if your game is supposed to be serious. Be weird. And don't assume that following the rabbit hole on some particular part of the game is wasted effort – players who find the extra parts will enjoy them all the more if they're truly "extra".

Battletoads was actually the game that inspired me to make video games…I thought the Turbo Tunnel, the Clinger Winger, and The Revolution were such cool levels, and then

one day it occurred to me that this game was made by PEOPLE.

Regular ol' people, living somewhere, made this game that I must have spent three years playing with my childhood best friend. I wanted to do that!

I didn't want to be rich or famous, or not have to work, I wanted to make something that people could find pure joy in playing. Something that someone could LOVE as much as we loved that game.

Something that could bring people together in the pursuit of fun. That's why I wanted to make games! It's why I took computer courses in high school; why I spent most of my teenage years alone in my room with a computer or playing games with friends (well I mean also talking to high-school girls is scary c'mon); and why I still to this day put in stupid amounts of hours working on the games we make.

It's because I know that the more love and passion I put into what I do, the more it gives to the people who play the final game.

Getting in the industry

When you first started in the industry, how difficult was it compared to what you expected ?

Mike Z: Oh, this is going to sound so egotistical. Fine, here we go. :^)

The hardest part of working in game dev for me is the schedules and the personalities, not the work. I'm not good at scheduling the order of things to be done in the future at ALL –

I'm good at waking up with an idea of how to do something and spending ten hours on it until it's completely done. It's a producer's worst nightmare, I'm well aware. :^P

Reading, understanding, and subsequently fixing other people's code has turned out to be something I'm particularly good at, and that was incredibly useful for working on teams with other coders. But that's not an innate skill

– the reason I'm good at it is that I spent most of my teens and college years voraciously finding, reading, and trying to understand other people's code in order to one day make my own games! I didn't wait for it to come to me, I went to it.

It was brutal, looking back, but at the time it was the happiest I could ever have been – there was so much to learn!

But the industry? It was easy. Almost effortless, because all the difficult parts of the actual work were SO MUCH FUN to solve! I mostly credit that to starting out at Pandemic on Star Wars Battlefront II, with a team of some of the best game developers I've ever met, who had already worked together before, and were willing to tolerate me, and all shared an infectious enthusiasm. :^) I also 'credit' them with my tendency to just write one gigantic workhorse function. :^P

I was a tester on Star Wars Battlefront. I found a bug – if you died while you were tow-cabling an AT-AT the game crashed. It got 'fixed'. I found out if you did it in multiplayer it still crashed. They fixed it again. I found out if you had two people do it at the same time, and shot each other, it crashed anyway. They fixed it again.

I kept submitting variations of this one bug, because the programmer who kept fixing it only fixed the EXACT BUG, not the root cause.

Finally, the person who would eventually become my lead programmer came down to the tester area and brought me up for an interview…which started with asking me how I'd fix the bug for real. I guess I passed.

Working on a team of like-minded creative people in pursuit of the same goal – fun – is pure bliss.

Working for someone who ~~is completely wrong about everything and refuses to listen~~ thinks differently from you about what a game should be is just torture. The game industry is a mix of both, and a lot of times the people higher up in the food chain either aren't gamers anymore or never were in the first place. Arguing "but it'll be fun" dies quickly in some environments, and that hurts. Really bad.

Leadership and important skills

How much control do you feel that you have over the work you do on titles?

This is a tough one.

On the one hand, in reality I have complete control, because I run my company so if I wanted to do some dumb thing for a game I can just do it. But on the other hand I can't ever actually DO that, because,

as the person in charge, it never is (and should never be!) about what I want, it's about what the team wants.

Eh, scratch that – it's about what the GAME wants.

It's about what will be the best game, the most fun, the most challenging, or the most evocative. It's about what will be most "worth it" for the players, and nothing else – whether that be refined mechanics, controls, support for voiceover, or some weird feature five people will use but those five people couldn't live without.

Is it worth five hours of work to allow one minor character to talk in a certain font?

Damn right, cuz it's funny.

Is it worth two to three weeks of initial work outside of normal hours, followed by seven months of support requests to add a system for sprite cutscenes, that everyone wants but we had decided against because of the time required to create it?

You bet! (Although I'm bad at knowing how much time followups often require, heh.)

Is it worth as many hours or days as it takes to fix editor or system bugs so the rest of the staff can work more easily?

HELL yes.

Should I take it upon myself to figure out how to fix builds and do other busywork so that the rest of the team doesn't have to?

Yeeeeeeeeeep. Without a second thought.

Is that what I want to do, myself? Not really. But it's what the game wants, as a finished product, and that's the most important thing.

Only later is it worth spending my time to make the specific parts of the game that I like into what I'd like them to be. I guess that's me acting as I think a leader should, though.

As for our company, we try to keep a flat hierarchy, so everyone can have input on anything, even though the final decision will be made by the person in charge of that area/feature/discipline.

I know a lot of bigger companies aren't like that, and the argument is that you need a regimented hierarchy to get everything done, but I disagree.

What skills did you have to learn once you got into the game industry?

Mike Z:

How to talk with civility to people you don't like.
How to do what people you don't respect tell you to, because they have a title that says you have to.
How to avoid being in that situation the next time.
How to take responsibility for your actions.
How to apologize in person and mean it.
How to accept blame you deserve graciously.
How to give credit you don't deserve to the ones who really do.
Realizing that 99% of the time you don't deserve the credit if you think hard enough.
How to listen.
How to triage.
How to make a final decision that you can't ever, ever change.
How to really give everything you have for something you believe in, and how to accept the detrimental effects that will have on the rest of your life.
How to let go of something that used to be yours, once it belongs to the world.

How to ignore words on the internet.
Realizing that derision often comes from envy, and that envy says more about the envious than the envied.
Deciding whether you would rather be respected or liked.
Struggling to really be the person you know you want to be, under the full onslaught of the rest of humanity.
Learning what integrity means to you, and whether it is more or less important than everything else, because it is always one or the other.

Print debugging.

As a project manager, how do you make sure the team is working in a way that leads to the same vision for the end product?

Mike Z: I'm not a great manager. This is a serious statement, and I know it. I don't want to be a manager. I don't even want to be in charge! I'd rather be working on the innards of the game. But…I also don't want someone else making a decision I wouldn't make. :^P

Managers, good managers, are good at working with people – at getting them to work with each other, keeping them facing toward the same goal, and making sure they are all personally fulfilled. I'm bad at that, I'd rather be working (^.^) so instead I'll tell you what a good leader is, in my opinion, and what makes a good game[/creative product of any kind].

A good leader:

Has a cohesive vision. They know what they want the final product to be, viscerally. This vision doesn't change later based on having recently played some other game or seen some movie. It can be expanded by recent experiences, but it fundamentally remains the same.
Can answer any question about that vision with certainty, even if they can't always articulate why they answered the way they did until after they have answered it.
Is able to clearly articulate the vision to the others so that it becomes a group understanding. "Articulate" is not the same as "dictate"! They can clearly communicate, or demonstrate, their vision so that other team members can share it, and decisions they make will be in line with it even if the leader isn't present.
Trusts the team. Does not want to be personally consulted on every decision, and encourages team members to solve problems themselves first.
Is not a micromanager. If micromanagement is required, they have not communicated the vision clearly enough, and they should fix that.
Is willing to make tough decisions in the service of the vision, such as cutting a feature that isn't going well rather than forcing the team to do more work just to satisfy the initial requirements.
Recognizes that although they may be the architect of the vision, they will not be the engineer of it.

tl;dr – A good leader makes their personal vision a group vision, then trusts the group to execute the vision and to improve upon the initial idea. A good leader does not try to hoard their ideas and be sole arbiter of every decision.

How and when did you decide you wanted to get into the game industry?

Mike Z: Oh, I already covered that. Battletoads. :^P

What are some of the skills you learned in school(and/or early life) that you believe have been useful in game development?

Mike Z: I started taking computer programming courses in high school, both at my school and at the community college. In college I majored in computer science, and I went to a regular old college because game-dev colleges didn't exist.

I…actually would recommend AGAINST going to a specialty game-dev college,

because I don't think much of what they teach is esoteric enough that you can't learn it yourself if you're motivated, but they definitely don't have poetry classes or fencing or pottery! It was the Real-Time Systems class that really allowed me to start programming a game as homebrew on an actual Dreamcast, and for that I'll forever be thankful.

MATRIX MATH and sorting and searching and assembly language skills have all been exceptionally useful in game dev, especially designing my own scripting language. BASIC PHYSICS also, projectile motion and things, and intro calc like derivatives and integrals. Matrix math is used allllllllllllll over the place, and so is basic physics – you wanna hit a moving target with an arcing projectile, that's both of those right there!

Other skills that are really useful are learning to really focus on a task, and learning to begin somewhere rather than being intimidated by the total amount of work required.

How many roles do you play and how much work do you put into each?

Mike Z: I'm a weird person – I don't particularly want to be in charge, I definitely want to do actual nitty-gritty work.

I'm the project lead, which means if there is a decision nobody else can comfortably make then I make it, for better or worse. Our team is excellent, and as a result this doesn't come up very often!

I do company-owner things like talk to other companies, help make legal decisions, help make policy decisions, and stick up for the employees when another person or organization tries to be crappy to us. This involves a lot of meetings and planning sessions and takes up more of my time than I'd like, and honestly I generally hate it, but if me doing it means everyone else gets paid and doesn't have to worry about stupid junk, I'll do it.

I do PR – that is, interviews, cons, panels, and other public-facing things I probably should not be doing. :^P

[Management and scheduling is other people who are much better at it than I will ever be, yay!]

I help people who have problems with any aspect of the game (except art) – builds, coding, scripting, planning, writing, sound, music editing, you name it. I do design and programming work.

This is the majority of my time, and I LOVE it! I scripted all the characters for Skullgirls, all the Incarnations for Indivisible, I wrote a bunch of the game engine, lots of systems, designed the main character's moveset / platforming controls / battle system / etc. There are lots of other wonderful team members helping me do these things, and I couldn't do it without them!

I generally work between 60-80 hours a week. I regularly work nights, weekends, and holidays. It's not required to do that, for me or anyone else, but I do it because I want to.

What important skills do you believe aspiring lead designers should learn when trying to get into the industry?

Be an actual designer first, don't aspire to be the lead. Have a solid idea of what you want.

Basically, see the "leader" question up there.

Remember that making a game is about FUN, not balance or tournament viability or loot boxes or skill trees or any of the individual things that you get lost in when making a game. If something is fun, even if it isn't intended, try your damnedest to keep it!

In terms of game development, what are your plans for the future?

Plans:

Finish working on Indivisible – the 9 guest characters, Sangmu, Antoine, polish, and the missing things for existing characters.

Sleep. Finally.

Keep the company alive by finding another project. :^)

I don't do personal projects, because my personal project became my JOB!

If I were gonna do a personal project I'd try to turn it into a real project instead – that way, a team of talented people would work on it along with me. :^) The only time I worked on personal projects was when my previous jobs weren't fulfilling, and at that point it's time to find a job you want.

NASH OUT.

Game Developer Interview: Lessons to take from Mike Z

Lesson #1: School alone isn't The Key

There are a lot of you who might be unsure if going to school for game development is for you. I was in the same boat when applying for college, but I ultimately went for CS. Everyone might have different opinions on this, but I agree with Mike, if you have the motivation, you can learn all you want about game dev. I would go a step further and say you can do this for anything you want to learn(Within reason).

This isn't to bash on school, but it's important to understand school alone IS NOT the solution. Mike put the work in. He said he wanted to do something and he did it. He didn't wait for permission from someone, he gave himself permission.

Lesson #2: Apply yourself!

During his free time in school, Mike spent hours on learning others code. It certainly paid off, but you need to understand HE DID THIS. It wasn't an assignment, but his own passion and focus on what he wanted to accomplish. Because of this, he was able to turn his personal projects into his Job! That's something I know many of you, including myself, want and he's given the solution.

Lesson #3: What it takes to be a leader

If there's one thing you take away from this interview, I'd highly recommend you copy the leadership list. As Mike said, "it's about what the GAME wants". It's important not to mistake being a leader as someone who bosses everyone around. You put your game and the team before yourself; keeping/moving the vision and the direction of the game forward.

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