DAM Q&A With Insomniac Games’ Mike Acton
Mike Acton is the engine director at Burbank, CA-based Insomniac Games, where he works with a crack team of engine programmers defining the next-generation of PS3 technology. Mike is also the director and adminstrator of CellPerformance, a volunteer-based site dedicated to helping the Cell community.DAM took a few minutes of Mike’s time to discuss quality-of-life issues, education, and how the job of developer is changing.
DAM: Mike, apparently management at Insomniac Games has some strong feelings about quality-of-life (QoL) issues. Last year, Insomniac was named – for the second year in a row -- one of the 50 Best Small- and Medium-Sized Companies To Work For In America by the Society for Human Resource Management. How does your company differentiate itself from some of the other developers who may not seem quite as concerned about QoL.
Mike Acton: The hot-button issue on QoL is overtime. Crunch times have defined this industry for as long as video games have been made. We are addressing that by working toward more mature production techniques that will allow us to create our products without the often counter-productive crunch times typical within game development. We are also a pragmatic company and we know that those solutions are evolving. We recognize that when overtime does happen, it isn't without cost to our employees' lives and, at the very least, we can -- and do -- compensate them for their efforts.
At the same time
compensation is not just about pay; quality of life goes far beyond overtime. Insomniac takes employee satisfaction very seriously and we are pro-active about ensuring that our environment is both comfortable and non-threatening. We recognize that many of our employees have families and responsibilities outside of the office and we always try to remain flexible to those needs. We know that, when you
employ some of the most highly skilled people in an industry, those are exactly the people who will only be satisfied when given the chance to learn and grow as individuals and professionals, and we strive to give everyone that opportunity.
QoL at Insomniac is not, at its heart, about policy. It's about respect. We hire people because they are the very best at what they do, but they stay because they are highly valued as individuals and this is the only place they want to be.
DAM: 2. Similarly, education seems to have become an important focus at Insomniac. Tell me about how the company stresses education and how the continuing education of teams has helped the company remain competitive.
Acton: While the process of education at Insomniac is constantly evolving, we are dedicated to two principles: that we should not forget the techniques and lessons of the past, and that we should be as prepared as possible for the challenges of the future.
Insomniac, like the industry as a whole, has recently gone through a large growth spurt to accommodate the scope and scale of modern titles. Coupled with the fact that game developers are now much more specialized than they were in the past, we cannot assume that everyone knows everything about everything. What we can do though is share our
knowledge and experience with each other.
An example of this is the weekly presentation by our engine team; each week someone on the team presents the details of a system they've been working on, useful
techniques they use to solve specific problems, or just a general review of an interesting topic. These presentations are open to all our programmers and have been a great way to expose them to knowledge they might not normally encounter in their day-to-day tasks. We have also had guests from other studios present their techniques to our programmers
and we're actively looking for new studios that would be willing to participate in a presentation exchange.
In order to prepare for the future, we're constantly on the lookout for good educational resources, especially from other industries. Many of the problems we will encounter going forward have already been encountered in other domains. Rather than re-inventing everything from first principles, we would much rather spend our time solving the part
of the problem that's unique to our products and our hardware.
DAM: Talking about education, the next-gen consoles have required developers to learn new skills in order to take full advantage of the capabilities of the new technologies. What’s required of developers now that wasn’t required of them previously?
Acton: Actually, the real skills required by the job itself haven't changed that much from the previous generation. More often than not, the same people that were very
good at solving problems on the PS2 are also very good at solving them on the PS3. Of course, the hardware has evolved considerably and new knowledge is required, but our job is to figure out how to use the hardware and tools we have as effectively as
possible to give our artists, designers, and game programmers the most freedom we can to develop great games. Our job description is basically "understand the hardware and take advantage of it." Today it's the Cell and the RSX; in the next generation it will be something else.
That said, the most significant difference in the approach to any problem has to be the considerations of parallelism. While there was definitely multi-processing happening on the PS2, the PS3 and the Cell processor bring this to a whole new level. The Cell, in particular, gives us the ability to process huge amounts of data in parallel and finding new methods of optimizing problems not only based on cycle-counts and memory use, but now also on degree of parallelism continues to be an exciting challenge. For
example, we recently reworked one of the major effects systems which was already on running on SPUs to be more parallel and even less dependent on synchronization within the frame which gave us a significant improvement in our overall frame-rate. This was only possible because we were able to apply our previous experience with these types
of problems and the lessons learned from other systems in the engine.
DAM: I know that management at Insomniac believes that it’s important to “give back” to the industry. What does that mean to you -- and is that something that’s unusual at developers?
ACTON: I believe that what's good for the industry is good for Insomniac. Every person in this company and in the industry as a whole has built their careers not just on what they've developed themselves, but by building on top of the knowledge, experience, and products of others. It's our responsibility to continue that cycle and
contribute to the base upon which any future products, not just Insomniac products, will build.
Specifically, that means more public disclosure and discussion of techniques that we've discovered, including those we are using in production. If we are able to help improve the quality of another studio's title then that could only lead to a better library of titles for the platform which leads to more people buying the platform, giving us access to more people who are interested in our games.
So while my motivations are, admittedly, not entirely altruistic, I do believe it's somewhat unusual for developers to believe that it is not some specific piece of technology or line of source code that drives success. What makes Insomniac successful is how we take all those parts and put them together into a product we can be proud to see sitting on the shelf while working with people we trust in an environment we enjoy.
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