Agenda

One of our core challenges at Sucker Punch is building an open-world game that goes toe-to-toe with games built by much larger teams with much larger budgets. We've had some success doing this, and a large part of that success comes from harnessing the creative energy of our whole team, rather than expecting a small group of people to make all the creative decisions about the game.
That creates a challenge for us as Creative Directors. Most of the time, we're not telling the team what to do—rather, we're inspiring them with a creative vision, building an enthusiastic consensus, and standing back as the team uses their judgement to reach those creative targets.
The pieces don't always fall into place so cleanly, though—and sometimes we're much more top-down in our creative direction. Join us as we walk through the creative direction process for Ghost of Yōtei.
We'll talk about all the mechanisms we used for communicating vision: presentations, play tests, razors, pillars, trailers, demos, internal AMAs, et al. We'll give specific examples of providing a direction or vision, then watching the team build on that to create an iconic part of the game. We'll also provide specific examples of exerting more control during the game's development for some crucial asset like a game trailer, and other times as a last resort when a vision mismatch popped up. And finally, we'll identify the major inflection points where we course-corrected our vision to match the things we learned during the game's development.

Takeaway

Attendees will take away techniques for how to communicate a vision that inspires teammates to reach towards a shared goal. Coordinating creative energy can be tough, this talk will show people first hand examples of how the Creative Directors at Sucker Punch Productions go about it.

Intended Audience

This is a general interest session; no technical knowledge is required. While the talk is about working in Creative Direction, many of the techniques shared are broadly applicable. No matter what role you have in game development, it's valuable to be able to define and communicate a creative goal.