AnsweRED Podcast Episode 21 — Exploring Unreal Engine and Game Innovation

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paweł: Hello and welcome to the AnsweRED Podcast. My name is Paweł Burza and as always, I am joined by Sebastian Kalemba.

Sebastian: Hello, everyone. Today we're going to host Ari Arnbjörnsson, who is the Epic and Unreal evangelist, the one and only very special guy.

Paweł: Yeah, his energy is incredible. He has a lot to talk about. He worked on numerous projects. But you can hear a lot about his passion for Unreal Engine and it will show throughout this whole episode. So let's jump straight into it.

Ari: Welcome to the CD PROJEKT RED podcast featuring Ari Arnbjörnsson, the handsome, the funny, the intelligent and also humble evangelist at Epic Games. Let's get in it.

Paweł: We have a new host.

Sebastian: All right. I like the startup.

Ari: I do a lot of public speaking. You look like you've been doing this a while, so let me help a little bit, ease your burden.

Paweł: Thank you. Finally.

Sebastian: Exactly. All right, so Ari, let's introduce yourself. Let's start from that.

Ari: Hey, everyone. My name is Ari Arnbjörnsson. I am a — well, I used to be called an evangelist, which is a very weird name for a title.

Paweł: That's your title on LinkedIn.

Ari: I just changed it. So now I'm a —

Sebastian: The evangelist!

Ari: Senior software engineer for the technical developer relations team. It's quite a mouthful. It means that as an evangelist, I went to a lot of conferences and I talked to a lot of indies, but now my job has changed a little bit. So now I'm doing technical developer relations. Means that I'm now focusing more on the relations we already have with studios such as CD PROJEKT RED. And I'm going to way fewer conferences, but I'm spending way more time actually making the presentations. But it still means I'm going a lot on stage and talking. Which didn't change.

Sebastian: Okay. That's awesome. That's the difference in a nutshell. Can you tell us a little bit about your past? Because you've been a part of Returnal, for example, right?

Ari: I've been in the game industry for 17 years now. I started by doing Flash games. The website that got me into the industry was newgrounds.com. Did you hear of Newgrounds?

Paweł: I did, yeah.

Ari: Right? So it had this submission process where you could submit either your Flash cartoon and your Flash game. I got really inspired by that. I thought I wanted to make animations, but it was fun with computers. And I started making all these really crappy animations. I was not an artist. I liked the technical aspect. When it was time to go to school... I'm Icelandic, so I'm born in the north of Iceland, like beyond the wall and there they only had one computer course, and it's just called computer science. So I was like, computer, yes, please. And they taught programming there. And that's when I realized, oh, my God, like, if you take animation and programming and you put them together, you get video games. There was no turning back, like, screw animation. I'm gonna get into programming video games now. So, yeah, started making Flash games. Got a job doing Flash games in Iceland. This was during the birth of social games, before they were called free to play. So these were the Facebook games, the Mafia Wars.

Sebastian: Of course.

Ari: I feel so old when I say, do you remember Mafia Wars? It was an HTML game back in the day. All of the gray hair is real, by the way. I was there for 4.5 years. Then I met a Finnish girl and I moved to Finland for her. That's where I got a job offer to join Rovio. They're the makers of Angry Birds.

Paweł: That was a revolution in games.

Sebastian: The hours I spent with this game.

Ari: Before then, every time I told someone I'm in the video games industry, people were like, what are you doing? Isn't that for kids? Whatever. But then when I could say, oh, I work on Angry Birds, suddenly people, like, open their eyes. "Oh, really? Wow. Angry Birds." I felt a little bit more validated, like, this is a career. Oh, thank God. And there I was tasked with making the first Facebook Angry Birds game, which was free to play. It was a team, not just me. It was a bunch of us. We brought Angry Birds, which is a great premium game, and we made the free to play version of it. You're welcome, game industry.

Ari: Fast forward a little bit. Some mobile studios, some made it, some didn't. Actually, none of them made it except Rovio. And I got a job offer working on Returnal as a lead programmer.

Paweł: It's a big title.

Ari: It was a big title. We didn't know it at the time, when Housemarque asked if I wanted to apply, I was like, oh, you do those arcade games. I don't really like arcade games that much, but they're like, come talk to us. Okay, I'll talk to you. And there, the creative director, Harry Kreuger showed me the game, he called it the elevator pitch. I was sold. It's like, wait, this is an arcade game? It's like a AAA third person shooter. I was like, it's got a time loop. It reminds me a little bit of the movie Triangle. Have you seen the movie Triangle? He was like, I love the movie Triangle. Oh my God, okay. This is clicking. This may be a little bit inspiring for people watching this presentation. When they asked me to join, then they started questioning me on my skills. I came from mobile games. I was using Unity and Flash. They were going to use Unreal. This was the first Unreal title and they needed elite programmers. Of course, it helps if I would have known Unreal. So they asked, do you have any Unreal experience? I was like, oh no, I've never used Unreal. I've watched half a Udemy course, but that's it. And they said, we're also using C++. Have you used C++ professionally? And I was like, well, no, not really. I used it last time in university. Have you ever made a console game? I was like, no, not really. Mobile games. Have you ever led a team of this size? Oh, not really, no. But still managed to get the job. How did I get the job at all?

Paweł: It's an interesting progression.

Sebastian: Very inspiring.

Paweł: From like Flash to mobile and then you're going into the big stuff and also looking at going engine by engine. The Flash games are very simple. Unity for the simpler games kind of makes sense. Mobile games are developed in a different way. But also then you move to Unreal, which is a leap, right?

Ari: Yeah.

Paweł: But now you are an evangelist for Unreal.

Ari: Before we get there, I'll tell you a little more about how I managed to get the job. Because I always said no.

Sebastian: Like four nos.

Ari: Four nos. But there was also no "but". Because when studios are trying to hire someone, it's not a requirement, it's "we wish". It's like, I wish I could have someone that fits all these criteria. But oftentimes you will get a job by not fulfilling all the criteria, but just by being the best available at the time. Luckily for me, I was the best available at the time. Because first of all, they said, do you have any Unreal experience? No, but I do have Unity experience and I've seen some tutorials and I don't think it's impossible for me to just learn it. I can learn it with you guys. And I'm very thirsty for knowledge and I think I'll get up to speed quickly. Well, we'll see. And then they asked me, have you got any C++ experience there? I was like, no, but I have like 10 other programming languages. I know the pointers and references even though it's not exposed in all of them. So if anything C++ will be easier because it's actually explicit in there. Of course they were like, we don't know. They asked me if I ever made a console game. I said no, but I made phone games. If anything that's harder, right? Because it's an even more limited platform and there's so many variations of like Android phones, there's so many. If anything it should be easier. They're like, I don't know. Have you led a team of this size? No, but I have spent half of my career leading teams of various smaller sizes and I think it would be fun for all of us to learn together how to do this. And of course they were like, we don't trust you. We're going to make you do a C++ test. I did it and I was like, Google, what's more in C++. I was like, oh, that's smart. It's way better than what I learned in uni. I finished the programming test and they were actually like, oh, not bad. And they were still a bit skeptical. They said, we'll hire you as a senior programmer and then we'll see about making you lead. The team didn't have a lead and I have lead experience. And there was this lead shaped hole basically in the workflows, which I kind of just like got sucked into. So I was like, this needs to happen. Can you do that? Oh, we need to figure out workflows. So basically by the time, by the end of my trial period, six months in, they're like, I guess we have to tell you we're going to keep you and we should order your business card. So lead, right? Asking me. And I'm like, yeah, lead.

Ari: So hopefully this is an inspiration for anyone out there watching this podcast. You don't have to be the best. You don't have to fulfill all the criteria, it's like if they could pick someone. But the thing is, usually studios, they're offering money that whoever fulfilled this criteria wouldn't accept, you know. So you just apply, hope for the best. Hope that you're the best candidate they're supplying at the time. Because usually they're tight in time, they need to fill it. You can be the next best thing. Just good enough to get hired. I actually got reached out to Epic Games while I was working on Returnal. It was not because of my so called programmer skills. They saw I was doing a lot for the community. I was working on Unreal meetups, which previously actually I was doing Unity and Unreal meetups at the same time because I used to do Unity meetups. I was like, there's no Unreal meetups now that I'm using it, let's do Unreal meetups. I started my own conference called Games Helsinki. It's a small conference, 100 people, but I got a sponsor and that's where they saw like, oh, there's this guy, he's very community oriented and he has a presentation about tech stuff. He might be a good evangelist because we're trying to hire now. So the evangelist over Europe at that time, Stuart, he reached out to me and said, hey, we like how community oriented you are and apparently you're also technical. Do you want to become an evangelist? I told them no. I am making this game right now and this is the most important game in my career because I am part of all the processes. I'm seeing everything, how the sausage gets made, we're all learning together. And the game is so much fun. It's too important for me. I wouldn't give this up for the life of me. People would kill to get this kind of experience.

Sebastian: That's true.

Ari: The next day I was thinking about it, it would be kind of fun though. I reached back out to him. The next day I was like, hey, I've been thinking about it and it sounds like something I would love doing because it's already all the things I'm doing for free. You're saying you would pay me for it.

Paweł: Ha ha, idiots! I'm taking that job.

Ari: I would have done it for free.

Sebastian: Win-win, right?

Ari: This is how I got into the industry. Someone was willing to pay me for making games. You didn't even have to offer me the money, but since you're doing it. Don't work for free, people! So I told him after the project then I could be up for this. The project finished and I reached out to him and said it's done now. The next thing is to make another game. I've already done that. I would like to try this, being an evangelist.

Paweł: So they kept the spot open for you.

Ari: For like over half a year. They said we don't have anyone else in mind, so we'll keep it open for you. Super flattering.

Sebastian: That's nice. Yeah, super cool. Plus, you know, probably there have been people relying on your skills to finish the game.

Ari: Yeah, exactly. I didn't want to abandon the Housemarque people. I didn't leave in bad faith, basically. It was really hard for me. It's probably the hardest leave I've ever done because I love Housemarque. I love the culture there. If you see an open job at Housemarque, take it because these are absolutely wonderful people and the games they're working on are amazing. So yeah, it was really heavy hearted for me to leave them, but I basically told them, hey, if evangelism doesn't work out, I'll just come back.

Paweł: We'll keep it open.

Ari: Evangelism has been working out for me and now technical developer relations and I've been now at Epic Games for 3.5 years.

Sebastian: That's awesome.

Paweł: Incredible.

Paweł: What sold you on Unreal in the beginning when you started working with it, what was the thing that you're like, wow, this really enhances my work, makes it easier, faster, I don't know, tell me.

Ari: I had to use Unreal because the team was using it. But, but before anyone fires me, I did really like it. And I thought Unreal compared to other engines was just so much fun. I really liked using the blueprint also, I really liked that I had the whole source code available to me. I didn't have that for example in Unity. So the difference was now it wasn't a black box anymore, whenever we had a crash or something weird, I could just check the source code and I still feel like I learned more of using Unreal for one year with the source code than I did using Unity for five years without it. That's crazy.

Sebastian: You can understand the context, dig deeper.

Ari: Say oh, I'm using this incorrectly. Oh, they expect me to use it differently. Being able to see examples of how other parts of the engine use that code. I was sucking up the knowledge.

Sebastian: That's super awesome. I'll actually follow that because what you said about getting the job at Housemarque, it requires having an open mind. Like I didn't know that, but I can learn. Of course they have to trust you and you managed and after six months they gave you this job. But, generally what I experience pretty often is that people are like, I would say maybe not stubborn but a little bit afraid of getting into the new tool. But this is just a tool, right?

Ari: Exactly. Yeah, it is just a tool.

Sebastian: And Unreal is way more accessible for sure. It is way more open as you said. I believe it's even friendlier to start with. But can you give anyone the advice of actually to have this open minded kind of approach as you're having? Because I don't think that people should be afraid of using new tools.

Ari: This is a good point because oftentimes people will choose camps like Unreal vs Unity, tabs vs spaces and code and stuff like that. And I've always just been of the mind that it's whatever tool gets the job done. People will ask what is the best engine to make my game. It's the one that you know the best that is able to enable you to make the game the best and well often case for bigger games, Unreal is going to be the choice because it's got so many tools that have been proven to make AAA games. But if I were to be tasked with making a 2D hyper casual mobile game that I had to get out in a couple of days, I probably wouldn't use Unreal because I wouldn't use all the features of it. A different tool for a different job. You have Godot and all the others. But there's a lot of tasks where Unreal is the right choice and also often it is just like what are you used to? Nowadays I've been using Unreal for so long, if I never used any other engine then it would be better to just make that hyper casual 2D game in Unreal. If it's in my skillset, it's all about practicality. So I try not to do too much favoritism unless, you know, my job depends on it.

Sebastian: That's true. Okay, you gave the talk. It's Promised Land here. We are expanding, it's not only about art. We say united in art, but there's no art without technology behind it. Especially in games, but more generally in movies right now, too. Could you share some tricks, tips, knowledge.

Ari: Share a little preview from my talk?

Sebastian: Yes.

Ari: Well, because you mentioned a little bit before we started this, general Unreal tips and tricks. So maybe I can do that without spoiling the presentation too much, because the presentation is going to go live at Unreal Fest Seattle in less than a month now. There's still a few tickets left probably. If not, sorry I lied, but it's going to be online like a few weeks afterwards. But I'll start with what I encountered when I was starting on Returnal and what I'm noticing that every other studio hits this roadblock when starting. That is the case of the references.

Ari: If you're doing anything in Unreal and you're starting to scale up a little bit, whether that's the team or the project size itself, and if you haven't encountered this before, you will, that is, you're going to have too many references, hard references, which are these dependencies. If you are referencing something, let's say the player character and it references another blueprint. Because you need to do, if I touch this blueprint, then do something special, or when I touch this one, then do something else. And you create these references to it by doing that. Now, before your player character can be loaded, it needs to load those blueprints and those blueprints can reference other blueprints and then so on and so forth. So you can have this tree of references that when you're loading into the game, you're referencing half the game's assets even though they aren't loaded there. Because, like, yeah, you might run into that object, but it's not loaded. Because you need to check for it, now it needs to load it. So you have super slow loading times and you have a lot of memory being used and you don't know why. And then you get — either you start looking into it or you get an outsourcing studio that will just come and look at it and say, yeah, we suspected this. It's the references. There's references all over and it's pulling everything in. And then you have to set yourself this discipline of not putting hard references left and right.

Ari: And this is just like a rite of passage that you have to go through. Everyone has to go through this. You have to screw it up before you realize it's bad. And if you do, don't feel bad. Everyone has. Like every AAA studio that I've talked to, they're like, we started by that and we realized it was horrible. And then we refactor everything to use soft references or use interfaces. I do talk a lot about it during my presentation called "Lessons Learned from a Year of Unreal Engine 4 AAA Development". It's on my website, ari.games. Check it out if you're making your first Unreal game or scaling to a team. And it has a lot of things I got burned on. And why the hell did no one tell me about all these things? That's how I tried to make most of my presentations.

Ari: All of my presentations I make for my former self. This is for Ari just before he joined Housemarque. This is for me. Like, hey, you did not know how to debug. Silly little thing. Here's advanced debugging in Unreal presentation from a former self. You did not know how to profile your game. It was so hard to learn. Here's maximizing engaged performance in Unreal Engine. Go ahead.

Sebastian: That's a nice approach.

Ari: And now the presentation I just did here at PLAF was myth-busting best practices in Unreal Engine because there's so many of these that are going on online. Like never use tick, or don't use cast, or the data components' cursed. And I went through nine myths that I wasn't sure on when I was getting started. I wish someone had just told me this is how you use it. Some of these are true, some are false. That's what I did with this presentation. This is all for me and just happens that it applies also to so many other people.

Sebastian: Yeah.

Paweł: From where did the drive come to actually focus on the community aspect and also on the aspect of sharing your knowledge? Is it because you're doing this for your former self, let's say, or is it because you felt like, I really love the tool, I really want to share it with everybody and make their life so much easier so they can all come on board with it.

Ari: It's kind of because I went through all these trials and tribulations and it hurts my soul knowing there are so many people that are doing the exact same thing and they don't need to. I can just make a presentation, if they see it I've just spared them this pain. And it scales indefinitely because once it's online, you know, I'm hopefully preventing mass suffrage. By extension, making games worldwide better. And also it's a little bit like, I like sharing knowledge. And honestly, creating a presentation is the best way to learn a topic. That's why it takes me so long to make all my presentations. This one took me three weeks of just pure research, pure work. Like, I have to get this all before Promised Land. The last one I did was called "Setting Up an Unreal Engine Studio The Epic Way" for my former self because we were doing everything wrong in Housemarque and then we finally figured out a way to do it. I had to interview 12 studios for that one, including you guys.

Sebastian: We are grateful for that.

Ari: And thank you for all the input and it helps everyone else. I made it over the span of six months and I think in terms of raw hours, it took me two months. Pure work. This is the most research I ever put into a single presentation, but it just means I was learning so much. What I'm trying to say is if you have the ability or option to speak anywhere, if someone invites you to come speak, whether it's at a local meetup or just internally or at a conference, jump on the chance. Because if you already know the subject, it will take a week to throw together a presentation. If you need to do a lot of research like I do, I jump on the chance to make presentations because it's something I don't know and I want to learn it. It can take up to a month maybe, but if your company encourages you to do it, maybe you can spend one day a week of making a presentation. And I encourage you to do that because you always learn something because you do have to make a slide and talk about all these things. I never make a presentation where I already know everything. I have to research it.

Sebastian: That's awesome. It's really good for yourself.

Ari: It's a little bit of selfishness. Like, I want to learn this.

Paweł: It's like doing homework for the sake of learning the material. You need to really go through the materials in order to talk about it and also create a presentation.

Sebastian: Stanford approach, I would say. You do the research. I love it.

Ari: I was also a little bit selfish when I started doing all these meetups because for me I didn't know Unreal. And I was wondering, like, there are some Unreal studios within Helsinki where I live now, though I'm originally from Iceland. How can I get them to share their knowledge with me? I guess a meetup. They would share with everyone else and I guess that's like an extra benefit. But I just wanted them to share their deepest secrets and all their, like, practical knowledge with me. So I was like, let's do a meetup. You guys can host us or offer us pizzas and then you get the community over maybe if you're hiring, it's great for you and you get to be involved. And they were like, yeah, let's do it. And they usually give us a presentation about something that they've learned. And I'm like, this is amazing. And everyone else is like, yay. But it was mostly for me. I just wanted to know.

Ari: I made my own conference called Games Helsinki. Like I said, it's a small one. The first was 100 people. The second was like 250. That was just like, I want the executive producer from Remedy and the creative director from Housemarque and this guy who failed a studio. I want to know what are the lessons learned from failing a studio? And I just asked them all personally, can you talk at my conference? And most of them were like, yeah, I would love to.

Paweł: Really cool, just sharing the knowledge. That's also what Promised Land is about because we have people from the industry, but also not from gaming, also from the movie industry. All these things kind of like blending into one another. And we're all pulling from each other's experience, we're all learning. And sometimes it's actually better to learn from someone who already went through, like you said, the tribulations instead of, you know, making the same mistake over and over and then you're learning when it's a little bit too late, right?

Ari: Sometimes you might think I live in a small town in Poland maybe. And you might be thinking, but there are no meetups next to me. It doesn't take much to start a meetup. You just need a location and a topic and a community. And how I started it was I created a page on meetup.com. It doesn't need to be meetup.com, it can be a Discord server. It can be some forums, anything where game devs talk together online. You can say like, hey, let's do a meetup. Let's do it at this bar, take over one of the tables and just do a meetup. You don't have to ask for permission because you're just a group of people meeting there and talking about a common topic. So you basically what you've accidentally created is a roundtable. That's how I started it. We were like five people in the first one, just talking. And some people had some really cool things to share and we were learning. And usually you just need this spark. I call it a spark, the one who organizes things. It's the spark, but it's not the most amount of work. The work is the knowledge sharing, the presentations and the talking. That comes from other people. They're doing the work. But some spark needs to start to fire.

Sebastian: Someone needs to start it, right?

Ari: Anyone can be that spark if you just have the initiative and drive to do it. I really like to be that spark. If you live in some small town or even a big city and you have an idea for a specific meetup, maybe an Unreal meetup, maybe you want to do a programming meetup, maybe you want to do a UX/UI meetup, animation meetup, like game designers meetup, concept art meetup, anything, do it. Sometimes schools will offer to host you for free and they'll give you a classroom with a projector. Sometimes even the city will offer, like, oh, we have this incubation or anything like that. You never have to worry oh, it's going to cost me anything. It just costs you time. But in return you get to —

Sebastian: It's valuable time, right?

Ari: Everyone's sharing knowledge and it kind of grows the industry. Wherever you're doing it.

Sebastian: I love it. You said that you spent, the recent presentation spent like two months on research, but actually your two months comparing it to probably thousands of people are going to watch it and are not gonna fall into the trap. You saved so much lives.

Ari: That's the presenter part of it. The presenters are the ones doing the work. And oftentimes if people do want to share knowledge, they'll like, they'll do it. Like me, I love sharing knowledge. But getting someone to share the knowledge is just an ask, can you share your knowledge with us? I do both. I organize meetups and do the presentations. Presentations are way more work. But you do learn a lot. You get a lot out of it. And usually because you throw away, like, you don't show everything. You know even more about it than what you told everyone.

Sebastian: Yeah, yeah. Love it. Tell us, do you struggle sometimes or you have no problems communicating with both programmers and artists? Because probably you hit the studio, indie, whatever, even us. And you have a bunch of questions coming from all kind of disciplines. All struggled, let's say, with some pieces of Unreal or whatever. But they look for something different and you have to kind of like, find a common language, right? Do you have a solution? How to communicate?

Ari: Luckily I think I already know the common denominator, which is the programmers, they're the most maybe arcane thing. Producers will maybe say, like, the programmers speak their own language. Or they're unnecessarily direct or like, they're such introverts or something like that. And since I am a programmer, I talk to programmers all the time. I used to be super introverted. Like, you wouldn't believe how introverted I was. This is all just practice. You can become extroverted. I would call myself an extroverted introvert because after this I'm going to go home and I'm just going to play video games. I don't have to talk to anyone.

Sebastian: Does it cost you?

Ari: Yeah, it's a battery that empties. There are people that fuel themselves by doing this. For me, I'm on all the time. I'm like, smiling and looking in the eyes like, this is work for me. And then when I go home, I can just play video games now. I don't have to talk to anyone. My fiancée is like, Ari, do you want to — I'm like, let's just watch something together. I don't want to talk. She gets the leftovers. God bless my spouse, she's great.

Ari: But when it comes to talking to artists, they... I wouldn't say it's a different language. They do ask questions I often don't know. And us, Epic Games, we are encouraged to say, I don't know when we don't. So that's what I do. Like, we just had Meet the Artist. It's funny, I don't consider myself an artist. We had Meet the Artist, basically the Q and A after my presentation, and I got some questions and I was just like, I have no idea, sorry. And it's just being able to say, I don't know. If you're in a producer role where you do have to, where it's more important to be able to talk to all, you need to be able to just ask. That's the best way to learn something, by asking someone.

Ari: And I want to talk a little bit about impostor syndrome now, because we're now on this topic, asking. Like I said, I've always liked learning. I just love learning. Like knowing something new, ooh, yummy in my tummy, you know? To get that knowledge, you have to ask people. And I've never let that be a hindrance.

Ari: When I joined Housemarque as a lead programmer, here I am in this team of people that have been making console games for, like, longer than I've been alive. You know, they are super, let's just say that. You know, longer than I've been playing video games.

Sebastian: They're over 20 years on this.

Ari: It's the oldest game studio in Finland. You know, they're from the demo scene. I was wearing diapers during the demo scene, and I'm supposed to sit down there and just be their lead. Some people would probably get impostor syndrome, but for me, I know being a lead doesn't mean I have to be the smartest guy. It's a different role. I would call it an obstacle remover. I am there to make sure the team can be as efficient as possible. So for that, I need to ask questions. And there were these two people that knew the most Unreal in the project was Arto and Juha. And just every chance I got, I was like, how does this work? Hey, what is this? You wrote this code. What is this doing? Asked and asked and asked. Probably annoyed them, but that was my way of getting information. Usually leads and producers, anything in a communicative role, you need to be able to ask the team if you don't understand anything.

Ari: And I hear about people that have this impostor syndrome, and I think I probably would have had it if not for this insane thirst for knowledge. Because when you're suffering from impostor syndrome, you do not want anyone to know that you don't know things. And when you don't want them to know that you don't know things, you don't ask questions. That's the worst thing you can do. So you'll join a team and you'll bang your head against the wall on some problem that is just taking forever. Because you didn't ask because you didn't want them to know that you didn't know. I'll let you all know. I made one game, and then I'm suddenly like the spokesperson for Epic Games because everything I do all the time is asking questions and research. I ask my co-workers, I find the smartest co-workers that worked on specific stuff and I'm like, I don't know anything about this. Teach me everything you know. Give me your knowledge. And they do it. Here you go. They maybe don't want to go on stage, but I'm like, I'll go on stage. I'll do it, don't worry about it.

Paweł: That's the best part of working with people, especially with people who have a broader knowledge about something you're trying to learn. But the hardest part is actually going, like, breaking through that wall and actually going out and saying I want to learn from you. I want to pull from your experience because it will make me better. And I feel like it will push the project in a good direction because we're not, you know, like, we should not probably talk because I don't know if I'm supposed to be doing this. And it pushes you nowhere because you're just stuck. You're always stuck. But that pushes the whole thing forward. And you're collaborating, right?

Sebastian: Exactly. That's actually, you know, servant leadership, kind of. You are actually removing obstacles. You help people. Like, I absolutely agree with you. Whenever you start playing the smartest person in the room, that's a dead end. It ends badly at some point. And it has to.

Paweł: It's interesting because a lot of people who we talk to, who have a lot of experience in a given field or in the industry overall, what they say is that, you know, younger people come, smarter people come, and you need to learn from them, and you're always as good as your team is. And also, you know, sometimes you're like, okay, I might have a background in this, but I'm really not the best person in it, so teach me how to do it. And that makes the team better.

Ari: As a former lead programmer on Returnal, I can tell you this because I have had to hire people, and it is impossible for you to know everything in the project or on the engine because we've been working with it. You don't know our code. Me as a lead, I already know what I'm getting when I hired you. You're not pulling a fast one on me. You're not like... People with impostor syndrome, they think they're super clever, hiding it from everyone. If they find out, it's like, well, you're giving yourself actually a lot of credit thinking you're able to fool everyone in the company. So the thing is, I don't expect you to know everything, actually. I expect you to not know anything about our project. What I do expect you to do is to ask questions. So if someone does not ask questions, that's when I get worried. Like, why aren't they asking questions? Why aren't they getting to know how the project works? Why aren't they, asking me, like, how are the workflows and process? And that's usually a warning sign. So if you're asking a lot of questions, that's good. I just don't want you to ask the same questions because then I get a little annoyed. But ask me a question. Write it down. Just don't be knocking your head against the wall for a week when it could have taken two minutes to just ask the next senior or principal or lead or peer or anything.

Paweł: Just makes work and life so much easier if you ask the question.

Ari: There you go. I just cured impostor syndrome all over the world.

Sebastian: Thank you for that. That's a good pill.

Paweł: That's the secret sauce, right?

Sebastian: And actually, what you said, like, just do things. Just ask things. You know, ask questions. That sounds simple, but people don't do that, right? You know, as you said, like, there's knowledge around. You just have to look and ask for it. And people are like, definitely, knocking the hat against the wall very often. Especially that nowadays it's pretty... I wouldn't call it smart. If you have knowledge literally lying on the floor waiting for you. Same with people, as you said, Discord, like there's every single channel on Discord you can find and gather the knowledge. You started from the Udemy, as you said, when it comes to Unreal. So that's the way.

Paweł: You have to be contacting people. And what I love also about technology now is that you have the ability, like you both said, just go on Discord, bother the people you want to learn from and pull that knowledge out of them. But the important thing is also to not have this preconceived notion in your head that, oh, I'm bothering them or I'm taking their time, they're super important and stuff like that. Because sometimes you learn that people that you really look up to, well, they just actually want to share the knowledge. And they feel happy that someone is coming to them asking these questions so they can share it.

Sebastian: It also happens, let's say with our REDkit or let's say the Nexus, right. People are asking like, how to become, let's say, a quest designer. Just do mods, right? Like really, how about a quest team? I think there are ex modders and they've been really asking. They've been a part of community. They were falling in love with the IP and they, they were trying to actually achieve something extra with the tools that are like open source. And that's actually. And they haven't asked the question directly to the company. We've been looking for them and kind of found them too. And that's actually underneath this dialogue between the creators, let's say, and the community that is happening also. So again, just do things.

Ari: Yeah. Do mods. Usually people ask me, how do I get a job in the industry? And like, for example, a lot of studios now using Unreal or whatever engine and some people are like, which tutorials should I watch, which courses should I take? And I'm like, well, you could do it the way I did it. And it's just, literally just make stuff, just do stuff. And people will think, oh, I have to make a whole game. Like, no, no, no, don't make a whole game. Make one mechanic, make a little sandbox, a little test project, something you spend one evening on. You can go through a whole Udemy course. And are you going to keep that all in memory? Because it's not until you have the questions and try to apply them and you have troubles that you start learning.

So actually I just got this question during the Meet the Artist and I told them, I have a mission for you. Make a small game that is in this example, you can make whatever you want. Think of something more fun. But it's like, put a tree in the scene. Like already you have to figure out how to find a tree and make a tree or something like that. Maybe find a free one on Asset Marketplace. That's going to teach already a lot. Have apples on it and make it fall every once in a while. Make it so that you can control a bucket with either the mouse or keyboard and you can catch the apples. Make the apples fall faster and faster and make it take like 1 minute, the gameplay and then at the end, make a high score screen that shows you the score that you just got, how many apples you gathered. It's a super simple game idea. You could probably knock it out even if you don't know what you're doing in like a weekend. But the thing is, all of this gives you a tool that you can put in your belt. It teaches you to put an asset in Unreal. One tool, now I always know how to do that. It teaches you like, oh, how to like, start physics and make it stop. First tool. Oh, you have to learn to make one UI element. It's just a high score, nothing complicated. You don't need to learn first how to make a menu to learn how to put an object on screen and increment the counter. Another tool in your belt. And then physics collision. This tiny little project teaches you so much. And then next you can add to it, what if you add a little character that's holding it and yeah, and also if during this you decide you're not having fun, scrap it, throw it away, do something else. You're trying to figure out what you like and don't like. In game development there's so many things you can be doing. You could put on many hats and be that indie developer that does everything. Or there's maybe one tool in Unreal or outside of Unreal that you really, really like using. Guess what? In big AAA studios, there's a role only for that tool, I promise you that. So you can focus only on that, but you need to figure out what you like.

Paweł: And it gives you a broader knowledge of the whole process. It shows you a lot more. And then you can decide what you want to specialize in, so you go in a specific direction. That part of the whole project that appealed to you.

Ari: If you spend one week, only the evenings making janky prototypes, I can promise you you will learn more than spending an entire week doing a professionally taught class, but without doing anything.

Sebastian: Yeah. That actually reminds me, like, it actually applies to every single thing. There is this very famous, I think, interview, and I think he even puts it in his book, Stephen King. Now there's a question, like, can you give me advice on writing? What should I do?

Sebastian: Write. Just write. Just make a routine and write one hour a day and ultimately, it will make you a writer at some point.

Ari: That's actually a really good point. It's the same with my presentations. People say, oh, Ari, you speak so well. And I'm like, I used to suck. They ask, what's your secret? I used to suck at it, but every time I did a presentation, I suck like a tiny bit less. Maybe 1% less. But now I've done 100 presentations. Every time you try to make a game, you'll suck in the beginning. But you'll always learn something. You'll suck a tiny bit less. That's how I got to where I am to being a lead programmer on Returnal became four BAFTA awards, including Best Game, 20 Game of the Year awards. I just made enough shit and every time I got a little bit less shitty.

Paweł: There is the 10,000 hour rule that if you do something for at least 10,000 hours, you will get good at it. And also trust in the process, because we're very focused on the end goal, getting to the finish line. But we're not thinking about how to get to that finish line or how to progress. We just want solutions very quickly. Well, this is a process that requires a lot of work. I need to trust the process.

Sebastian: It requires some grit. It requires some, I don't —

Paweł: Determination.

Sebastian: But still trust the process, because that's the thing.

Sebastian: But the funny thing is because your ex-role, the Unreal evangelist, makes people think that you have literally an answer for everything. And then you ask questions or say, I don't know, but I will get back to you.

Ari: It's also funny because, yeah, people see evangelist and like, I go to a lot of studio visits and I'm supposed to know a lot of answers, like, sure, I'll know what's upcoming because I see it on internal channels and Slack and stuff. But the thing is I shipped literally one game in Unreal and then I've just been traveling around and speaking. So many people that I talk to actually have more Unreal experience than I do. But I do research every presentation so I'll know that topic. But if people ask me anything outside of these topics, they'll ask how do I use behavior trees? I'm like, I don't know. I've never done that. I don't do animations. I don't know. I saw some video about it, just check out the video.

Sebastian: But you know, as you are like in the middle of the Epic, like you have the hub for knowledge for people. There are great experts there in your company, right? Like I meet with them like people at Polaris Project, we have constantly checkups and meetings and stuff. Like great, great experts. At least you can point the direction and that's enough, honestly, because people are lost sometimes. Just simple as that.

Paweł: You just need the North Star to kind of guide you to the right direction.

Sebastian: Exactly. And you are the North Star.

Ari: Are you calling me your Polaris?

Paweł: I see what you did there.

Sebastian: That's a good one. That's nice.

Paweł: So what's next for you after all this? Like you're less evangelizing now. More... If you can share, of course.

Ari: Yeah, I can share. More knowledge sharing. So as an evangelist I used to go to all these conferences. But I would repeat the same presentation over and over and then basically we're thinking like, how about instead of going to all these smaller conferences, I just go to like some of the bigger ones or the most strategic ones and with the time, instead of visiting, I'll just make another deeply researched presentation. Now what people can expect from me are hopefully double the amount of well-researched technical presentations. It used to be one a year. Now I can do at least two a year. And yeah, that's what I'm going to keep doing because I really like it. I don't know any other workplace that would allow me to spend, you know, six months on making a presentation. I don't know where else I can do it, but I really like it and I like learning and Epic enables me to do that. So I'm quite happy with this.

Sebastian: So I can definitely tell that what inspires you are the people that you actually can help.

Ari: Oh, yes.

Paweł: You took my question.

Sebastian: Sorry, Paweł, but you ask this question always.

Paweł: Because I love this question. Like, asking the question here. What inspires you is always like — because Promised Land is all about inspiration.

Sebastian: Networking, inspiration.

Paweł: What inspires you?

Ari: The thing is, nowadays, after I've created these presentations, they had a little bit of time to ferment and spread throughout the community. Now I'm starting to get people to tell me, because now when I come to either conferences or studio visits or anything, people will go like, hey, you, I know your face. Where do I know you from? And then I'll tell them, maybe some of my presentations, they're like, yes. Oh, I watched the profiling one. It helped me profile my game. That makes me feel like, oh, so you made a better performing game because of me. That makes me really happy. And that's what I'm getting kind of more and more of now. It didn't used to happen in the past because I just gave the presentation. People said, oh, cool, maybe I'll put into practice. We'll see. But now the presentations have been out there for a year, two years, three years, and I'm seeing the effect, like, people say, Ari your presentation helps us make our game so much better. It didn't necessarily used to be the drive, but now I'm like, oh, my God, this feels so nice.

Ari: I just... So I did this one presentation called "Maximizing Your Game's Performance in Unreal Engine". It was based on how to profile and find slow stuff for your game. Not necessarily about fixing it, but finding them. And I never expected such, like, a technical talk to become popular, but just like a week ago or two, it went over 100,000 views.

Sebastian: Wow.

Ari: That made me feel, oh, my God. So this talk is actually helping people make better games.

Sebastian: Honestly, I don't know if there is something more rewarding than that impact that you're having. That's super awesome. That's amazing.

Ari: That took a while to get there because I've been just throwing stuff into the darkness, like, let's see what happens. And nowadays people are like, hey, I watched your presentation. Like, you're that guy.

Paweł: That's the best thing. It also really validates your work and the things that you do for the people. They actually resonate with the stuff that you're putting out. And sometimes you don't know, like, you said you're putting in a void and you don't know what the impact is. But then when you go to, like, a conference or you get messaged by someone, you see, like, you're that guy. I saw your presentation. It helped me. That's very, very validating. You're like, it really puts the purpose into what you're doing, and that's always very important.

Ari: So I recommend people, like, find out what, you know, gives you that drive.

Sebastian: The drive, right. Exactly.

Ari: For me, it was never about, like, the fame or whatever. Like, before Covid I was completely unknown. And then after Covid, I had a shipped game and just started at Epic Games. And already when people see this logo, they treat me like I'm famous, but I'm like, I'm still that same nerd who used to program and do little meetups.

Sebastian: There's this mission, right?

Ari: Also, like, if you see someone from, like, companies like CD PROJEKT RED or Epic Games, even though it's a big logo and famous, we're still people making video games. We're still humans. We're still nerds. Yeah. I was surprised when I came and visited CD PROJEKT and they were like, hey, you're Ari. Wait, why are you acting like I'm the famous one, you guys are famous one! You're The Witcher guys.

Ari: But you're the Epic guy!

Paweł: We all nerd out on each other's stuff, and it resonates with us. We're excited by it.

Ari: Children being starstruck by the logo. But you did that thing. Yeah, we're not intimidating. We're not some, like, you know, oh, my God. From that big famous company. Because if we all were to quit our companies to start our little indie studio, suddenly we don't have the logos anymore. I bet you we'd become way more approachable by everyone. It's just a t-shirt we're wearing. Epic representative. Human.

Sebastian: And the North Star.

Paweł: Yeah, our Polaris.

Sebastian: Exactly. All right, Ari, thank you so much for coming to us.

Ari: This was fun.

Sebastian: That was amazing.

Ari: I thought we'd talk about a lot of technical stuff, but we actually talked about a lot of practical stuff for people wanting to get into this.

Paweł: That's kind of the focus. Because the whole idea behind the podcast is to share the knowledge and also showcase how we work and how others work and what kind of drives them and how to share the knowledge. Because I feel like the podcast is for someone who is either trying to get into the industry or is in the industry or is pretty much facing some, you know, maybe harder times in order what to do, how to do it. And we're kind of providing the knowledge.

Ari: I really like that. Always for me, if a company is trying to hire me, I always look at like how much are they knowledge sharing or interacting with the community. So for me, like this makes CD PROJEKT RED like an amazing studio.

Sebastian: Thank you so much.

Paweł: Community has always been in the core of how we do games and how we interact with the community.

Sebastian: We really care about gamers and about our relationship with the community in general.

Paweł: Always collecting feedback, staying in touch with them, keeping it very also informal and personal. So yeah, that's super important.

Sebastian: And it's not business oriented. It's very true.

Paweł: You need to know your community in order to make your products better. That's the number one thing. And if you become detached from a community, well, that's when bad things happen.

Ari: So not only thank you for having me over, but also just thank you for everything you're doing for the community in greater with sharing all your knowledge at, you know, all these conferences, GDC, Unreal Fest, and even with this podcast because apparently the others weren't enough for you guys.

Sebastian: Thank you so much for coming.

Paweł: The more the better. Thank you.

Sebastian: Had a blast. Thank you.

Sebastian: Thanks a lot for watching and we hope that you did enjoy this episode as much as we did.

Paweł: It was an amazing one. And as always, don't forget to comment, like subscribe all that jazz. Let us know what you're thinking about the episodes. And as always, let's stay in touch and we'll see you in the next one.