Last Acton Hero

After a lifetime of exclusive Sony development, which gave rise to Spyro the Dragon, Destructor, Ratchet & Clank and the Resistance series, Insomniac Games is going multiplatform. What might come of that arrangement is something that the studio remains coy about, but here we catch up with engine director Mike Acton to talk about what prompted the move to multiplatform, and what challenges the process involved.

Q: Insomniac is switching to multi-platform development for the first time, which must be quite technically demanding. Has it been a positive process?

Mike Acton: I think that it has. More than that though, it's hard to separate, from a technical point of view, our moving to a cross platform engine from our broader initiatives. Some things have changed at the same time. We've looked at usability. Traditionally we've looked at usability from a game point of view but at the same time we've now taken those lessons and applied them to engine development and tools development. So we do these regular usability tests with tools where artists and designers use our tools and we sort of watch them do that.

So I think if we look at the impact on engine development then those other initiatives have had a much larger impact on our engine development than moving from single to multiplatform.

Q: What prompted that switch to multiplatform? Many would argue that the PS3 has more life left in it...

Mike Acton: I think Insomniac, without putting words into Ted's mouth, is really just looking to expand its audience. While we love the PlayStation and we love that audience and continue to, I think there's this group of people that we haven't been able to reach, and this change allows us to reach them.

Q: How drastic has the process of engine development been? Have you gradually evolved existing tech or has it been a ground-up process?

Mike Acton: Quite a lot of our work has been rebuilding. Not because it wasn't directly portable or applicable, but because, again, we have these broader initiatives, bigger changes, that are impacting the way we make engines and tools. Those have necessitated us making more fundamental changes. The things that are important to us now are not the things that were important to us as a developer five years ago.

That's true of development in general. Our work reflects that. I wouldn't say that we had to change because we went to Xbox, we had to change for other reasons.

Q: Now that you have a multiplatform tool, would you ever release it as a middleware product?

Mike Acton: We don't have any specific plans to release middleware, but who knows what the future holds, you know? There's no immediate plans for it. I think our view is that we know what we want to do. We know what games we want to make, we know what we want to accomplish, we have a vision for our future. Our engine development is about getting to that picture. That's what we're focused on.

Q: There seem to be advantages and disadvantages to dealing with in-house tech as opposed to off the shelf middleware - what specific advantages to you see to your tech?

Mike Acton: Well, I think that fundamentally there's a couple of reasons that you'd build tech. One is that you have a vision for the future. You look at where you want to be in five or ten years and you say, "how do we get to that?" Sometimes it's the only way to get there, the only way that you can have enough control over your own destiny to ensure that you're where you want to be in five years. I think that the other important aspect in that decision is to understand your culture, your studio culture. Everything you do necessarily reflects the culture that it was built in.

If you look at a game, it reflects the culture of the developers that made it. That's true of all middleware as well. It reflects the culture of the people who made it. Unless that matches your culture closely enough, it's not going to be a fit regardless. Which is why you see, I think, lots of cases where that's not been successful for people.

Maybe you'll have a publisher who'll have an engine that one of its developers has built and maybe it'll try and shove it down the throats of a lot of its studios, and that will fail. It will fail, I think in large part, because the culture it was built in isn't compatible with the culture it's trying to be used in. Both those things have to be true to some extent.

Q: Do you think there's a danger of too many studios using the same engine and their games becoming indistinguishable?

Mike Acton: I don't think there's inherently a danger of that, but again, if you are using something because that middleware also sort of reflects your goals, then they're going to converge a little more than they might be expected to otherwise, I think it's the nature of it. You expect those things to be a bit more similar than they might be.

But, I also don't think that it's necessarily true. I think we've seen some developers who've taken a middleware engine and tweaked it in a way that creates a signature that's uniquely their own. So, it happens, but it doesn't have to be like that.

Q: What sort of leap in capability are you expecting from the next generation?

Mike Acton: I think that we can look at the state of tech outside the gamespace - maybe look at the PC space, see what people are doing. If we took all the stuff that exists today and compared it against the 360 or PS3, would it represent a massive leap over them? I think in some ways, it would. Especially when we look at how far GPUs have come in that time - there is a significant leap, and I would expect that, whenever the new consoles do come out, they would be more powerful than whatever exists now in the mainstream PC space. So yeah, there's definitely room to make a big leap.

In other spaces, like the CPU space, I think the trend we've seen in the PC space is maybe a bit of a flattening of the curve over the last few years as opposed to ten years ago, so I expect consoles to reflect that. I think that there are also new, and more interesting questions. I think what we looked to in previous console generations was a very narrow technical view of what represented a console generation. It's 16 bits now - that sort of thing.

What I think we see in the next generation is hopefully a broader view of what a console is and what it brings to the table. We look at things like PSN and Xbox Live, they represent the state of the art today, what can we expect to see in the future? Does it include space for things like free-to-play or connections to social spaces, whatever. Does it change the way that people interact? When we look at the computer/human interaction aspect then we see that Move and Kinect are the state of the art today, what are we doing there in the next generation?

I think there's a lot of new spaces to explore in the console space which will raise more interesting questions.

Q: So less about raw power?

Mike Acton: Yeah - we're taking a broader view of games and consoles, right? It's not just about this very narrow view anymore, now it's about all of these things and how they interact and how that affects game making.

Q: We hear a lot about the potential of a platformless future, brought about by streaming technology - what sort of possibilities does that present for you?

Mike Acton: Well, constraints are our bread and butter. That's what we do, as console developers, we've always worked within the constraints of a platform. So in that way it wouldn't be any different if that's what happened, there would be some constraints to that system. Obviously we look at a model like OnLive, which personally I enjoy, I've got their game box in my house, it's obviously different. Clearly there's extra latency, and some games just don't work with that. Unfortunately a lot of the games that don't work with that are on their system, but from a game design point of view, I think a lot of games can adapt.

I think there's also other places to explore in that model. What we're looking at is traditional game development, a game that's supposed to run on a local GPU, pushed on to that platform. The future of that model is that, what if you had access to, not one GPU, but a thousand. Or ten thousand. What kind of experience could you bring to the player? No local machine could ever compete on that level.

I think that there's a lot of space to explore there. I think there's still tons of technological problems that need to be answered to make it a practical method of ever replacing platforms entirely. So, let's see. I'm interested in the question and where things go. I think as game developers, we adapt. Should that be a viable model, and should it provide the advantage then that's where we'll end up going as an industry. I don't feel that, as an industry, we're particularly attached to being in this box.