Jane Ng had forgotten to eat dinner.
So had her two new prospective employers.
Over the course of five hours, nobody had actually managed to eat anything.
They were all too wrapped up in their conversation.
Jane was riding high.
She was in her dream job, working as an artist for Double Fine studios, making beautiful
visuals for narrative-driven games.
Before her were Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin.
The pair were flush with success after spearheading the first season of Telltale’s The Walking
Dead video game.
They’d responded to this success by quitting their jobs and forming their own studio.
They were desperate to tell their own stories, and they realized that this was the best chance
to stride out into the unknown.
Sean and Jake wanted Jane to join their team.
The pair were experienced game writers, but they lacked technical or artistic skills.
All they had were a few pieces of concept art that showed off their vision of a non-combat
game about taking long, slow walks in the countryside.
The pair didn’t have much to offer.
If Jane accepted their proposal and came to work with their new studio, she’d be taking
a 40% pay cut and would leave behind the wonders of security at a major game studio.
And yet, despite how risky this all sounded, Jane couldn’t help but feel the appeal of
working for the newly formed Campo Santo.
Sean and Jake were promising a flat structure for their company.
Everyone got an equal say in the development of their game, and everyone would be treated
fairly.
They wanted to give everyone at their new studio the freedom to explore new ideas and
develop new skills.
And so, Jane jumped, changing everything about her life, in the pursuit of a greater level
of creative freedom.
Jane Ng had always been obsessed by games.
When she was young, her older sister would treat her as a save system for her games.
If Jane’s sister got a game over while playing on a game, she’d hand the controller to
Jane, who would proceed to power through to the point where her sister had died so that
she could carry on again.
Jane’s family were eager to encourage her in her development.
They had moved from Hong Kong to Canada while Jane was very young, and were eager for Jane
to study at an American university.
Jane couldn’t decide between her two great passions: art and technology.
She initially started studying to be an engineer, before changing to focus on design instead,
while still minoring in engineering.
Her parents were supportive, even if they worried that she was going to be completely
destitute upon finishing college.
They needn’t have worried, as Jane very quickly managed to land on her feet upon graduation.
While still studying, Jane latched onto a visual effects professional, whom she convinced
to be her mentor.
Part way through her education, this mentor announced that they were quitting visual effects
to instead become a game artist.
This news hit Jane like a lightning bolt.
Was it actually possible to work in the game industry?!
Doing so would marry her two skillsets, as she’d be able to create beautiful art while
also dealing with the technical side of game implementation.
Jane pestered her mentor for an internship, and ended up working for a tiny indie game
studio for the summer.
Then, she returned the year after for another internship, before finally joining the team
as a full employee upon graduation.
This environment was wonderful.
Jane discovered that she could make jokes about characters like Guybrush Threepwood,
and her colleagues would actually understand what she meant!
The work was rewarding, even if Jane’s team was very small.
Before long, she’d learned a lot, and made her way to work for EA as an environment artist.
Jane rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the lead artist on The Godfather, the first
open world game that EA had ever produced.
After four years at EA, Jane left to work for Double Fine, a studio that she had admired
for a long time.
There, she created art for several key games, starting with Brutal Legend, and enjoyed a
wonderful six years in her dream job.
Then, came Sean and Jake, with their pitch for a new game.
They didn’t have a studio organized yet, and they lacked a lot of technical skills.
But, Jane saw something special in what they were trying to create.
She liked the idea of getting involved with more than just the art side of things, and
she looked forward to learning new skills.
The worst-case scenario here was that everyone involved worked feverishly for two years,
never finished the game, and then went on to find work elsewhere instead.
Jane was willing to take this risk, so she jumped in.
Working for Campo Santo was very different to Jane’s more recent gaming experience.
It was exciting to be back with such a small team after working on titles that had dozens
if not hundreds of people involved.
Sean had grown up in Wyoming, and the empty countryside of Shoshone was very dear to his
heart.
Campo Santo’s first game, Firewatch, was going to recreate the experience of walking
through the wilderness, enjoying beautiful vistas and golden sunsets.
The plan was to create a game that dealt with grown-up, genuinely mature themes.
Ideas of loss, of struggling with relationships, and slowly getting older.
A game about disappointment and emotional emptiness, and of making mistakes.
This wouldn’t feature any combat.
There would be no zombies, no shooting.
The gameplay would simply involve walking around, and witnessing the story unfold.
Nevertheless, despite the simple-sounding premise, this game was going to take a lot
of work.
Even with Jane’s expertise, things were going to be tight, and the small team had
a lot they needed to accomplish in just two years of development.
Luckily, Jane knew exactly what she was doing, and was well aware of how to work efficiently
as an artist and a designer to create something special in the least possible amount of time.
And so, Campo Santo set to work, and Jane put her talents to good use as they began
to build the world of Firewatch.
The idea of making a game about a fire lookout had come from necessity.
This was meant to feel like a very solitary experience; a walking simulator in the vein
of Dear Esther.
Yet Sean and Jake had wanted their game to feature conversations between people, even
as the protagonist wanders around alone.
So, the idea of walkie-talkies came up.
From there, the pair needed to justify why the game’s two characters were chatting
across long distances, and the most logical explanation was that they were fixed to their
posts as lookouts, keeping watch in case of fires.
Sure, the protagonist would wander away from his post with unfeasible regularity, but this
was in service of the core gameplay, so the inaccuracy could be overlooked.
Early on, the pair had turned to UK-based comic artist Olly Moss for concept art.
Olly drew a stylized version of the Shishoni wilderness that formed the basis for the art
style in the game.
It was then Jane’s job to make this a reality.
As the sole full-time 3D artist on the game, Jane had to make almost everything.
One other contractor helped making a bunch of objects to fill spaces within the game,
but it was Jane’s job to create the environment.
She needed to recreate Olly’s sketches in 3D, and this was no small task.
At first, the game didn’t look like much.
Jake made a series of simple 3D grey boxes in which the story was to take place.
In early tests of the game, these were barren, empty spaces with text at the bottom of the
screen representing the dialogue that would be passed between the game’s two core characters.
Things didn’t look great.
It was hard to get a sense of the game, and what it would actually feel like to play.
Simply put, it was boring.
So, Jane started filling the spaces with rocks and trees.
As she worked, slowly the areas got more and more interesting to walk through.
Colors and lighting helped to make the environments really shine, and later in the process, once
the voice actors had recorded their lines, the game really began to look beautiful.
For the most part of development, the team had to hope that things would look out once
they were finished.
All they could do was have faith in Jane’s talents.
With such a lot of work to do, and so little time to accomplish it, Jane always made sure
to do the barest minimum work on any art asset.
This game was meant to be a huge natural environment, but even so, Jane cheated in order to speed
things up.
She made just 23 tree models for the entire game, and arranged them carefully so that
nobody could notice.
Similarly, just 10 rocks were used over and over, in different combinations, to create
huge mountains and tiny boulders.
Jane’s strategy was to spend 20 minutes working on an asset.
If, at the end of that time, it looked great, she’d keep it.
If not, she’d put it to one side and look at it again the next day.
Most of the time, after leaving it alone for a while, she was convinced that it was good
enough, and started using it anyway.
Then, she’d copy and paste over and over and over.
If anyone else noticed, then she’d need to design some more assets, but if nobody
mentioned that things looked repetitive, she figured she could get away with it!
It was kind of like building with lego bricks!
The other benefit of reusing assets over and over was that it saved memory and improved
load times.
It wasn’t initially the plan for Firewatch to be an open world game, but as development
progressed, it became clear that the player needed the freedom to explore an area without
restrictions.
It was therefore Jane’s responsibility to make sure that the big, open area loaded properly.
She had to carefully hide environments so that the game didn’t need to keep the entire
area in its memory all at once, all while giving the player the sense that they could
see across the entire countryside.
Jane also had to figure out ways to block the player from certain areas until the right
moment in the story.
This game needed to open up slowly as the player visits each new area, and that meant
using sneaky tricks to justify why certain areas are off-limits at the start.
Sometimes, these points would feed back into the story and the gameplay itself.
At one point, a fire rips through part of the game world, exposing a previously inaccessible
area.
At other times, the player needs a certain item to progress.
Jane wanted to build the game’s exploration elements so that there was a logical reason
for each gated-off area as things slowly opened up.
As if the production schedule on the game weren’t tight enough, in the last few months
of development, the team decided to scrap the final act of the game and start over again.
Having built most of the game, all of Campo Santo agreed that the last third of the game
was boring.
It was structured so that there was no communication between the game’s two main characters,
which took away the most charming aspect of Firewatch.
So, things were rewritten, work was scrapped, and the game’s release date was pushed back
by a few months.
This also meant that, in order to accommodate the new ending, the team needed a new character
model that they hadn’t required previously.
Human beings were one of the more time-consuming elements to build for the game, which is why
they show up so infrequently.
Jane was less than thrilled at needing to produce another character model in such a
short time.
So, she quickly hopped into an online asset store, and bought a pre-made character model
that someone else had designed.
It dropped into the game perfectly well, and Jane figured that nobody playing the game
would notice!
In fact, a lot of the assets for this new game ending came premade from asset stores.
Jane justified this by thinking that, by this point in the story, the player probably wouldn’t
notice if the art style for a few of these objects didn’t quite match up with the style
of items at the beginning of the game.
This approach did the job, got the project finished, and allowed a small team to complete
a very big endeavor.
Only slightly delayed, Firewatch launched.
Two years of hard work had resulted in a game that everyone at Campo Santo could be proud
of.
Their work had borne fruit, and based on the early response from players, they’d achieved
their goal of making something special.
Firewatch made back its financial investment in a single day following release.
Over the next year, it sold well over a million copies.
All of these numbers were nice and all, but Jane and the team were most excited by one
big thing that came from all these sales: they had gained the funding to make another
game.
Campo Santo began work on a new game, titled “In the Valley of Gods”, shortly after
the release of Firewatch.
Jane’s one request of the game was that it featured large walls without windows, so
that she could effectively hide elements that were offscreen in a way that she couldn’t
with Firewatch.
The moral of the story is that sometimes, you need to keep pushing forward to achieve
your dreams.
When you’re in the thick of things, it always doesn’t seem like anything’s going to
work out.
Jane Ng spent a lot of time working on Firewatch worrying that nothing was going to turn out
right.
It was often hard to see the wood for the trees as she was building environments.
It’s okay to be discouraged, and to worry that your lofty goals might not work out.
Sometimes we can be distracted from our ultimate vision by the roadblocks we meet along the
way.
Jane and the team at Campo Santo remained steadfast as they worked towards building
something special.
It took a lot of work, but eventually their vision for Firewatch became a reality.
Keep working hard, and you’ll get there.
In Jane’s own words: “It takes work to make decisions with intention.
The right decision is one that honors your values.”