Making AAA Games: How Technology Sparks Creativity with David Champagne

Technology acts as a catalyst for the creation process in the video game industry, whether the aim is to improve the player’s experience, continually deliver new content or create ever-better, more immersive designs. Besides innovation, artistry also plays an important role in the gaming industry. This is where the Technical Director comes in, with the goal of creating a link between the artistic vision of a game and what its technical capabilities allow.

We spoke with Motive Technical Director David Champagne to understand how technology is evolving in the industry, how it enhances creativity and enables the development of increasingly entertaining experiences.

David has been Motive’s Technical Director since 2017. As such, he is in charge of all of the studio's operations and manages the technical resources necessary to support any and all projects in production. He has over 20 years of experience in the video game industry, spent among a variety of studios, and possesses a keen artistic flair which he started honing from the onset of his career in animation and rendering.

Prior to joining Motive, David spent 13 years at Ubisoft, primarily working as Technical Director on the renowned Assassin's Creed franchise, and was also involved in the making of Watchdogs. 

The role of a Technical Director, in the context of a game studio, is quite broad: from defining needs, to creating the necessary tools and anticipating potential hurdles—sometimes on multiple projects at once—. A worthy Technical Director must have a clear vision with a knack for strategical thinking. So, to start things off, how does one develop a technology-based strategy for a AAA game development studio?

That's a very good question.  I think that when it comes to technology, it’s important to always keep your goals in mind; regardless of what field we work in.  Our aim at Motive is to create AAA experiences, so our strategy must enable our creative teams to raise the bar to the highest level.

Once we’ve clearly outlined the requirements of a project, we can then define the technological components needed, see what's available and what should be developed.  These parameters help us determine what level of expertise the project demands.  Because in the end, it takes teamwork to build a solid technology-based strategy.

This actually sits at the heart of Motive’s philosophy: we work together, we share together…  We do this by identifying the common needs between our projects company-wide, but also by working in partnership with our central teams and other EA studios.

Finally, a good strategy needs to be flexible.  The gaming industry is incredibly dynamic. That's what draws you in, but it's also a challenge in itself, because you constantly need to keep an eye on the competition and on new technologies, to adapt and to innovate so as to better stand out.

Indeed, we work in an industry that is constantly evolving. So many changes have already occurred, changes brought on by technological progress, but also shaped by the players. You started in the industry 20 years ago. How were games developed in 2001, compared to today?

While our goal remains the same that is, to make great games for our players, the things they’ve come to expect have drastically evolved: there’s high quality visuals, HD audio, multiplayer, online services, Hollywood-level narrative content, gameplay, in-game physics and ever-more advanced AI. The list goes on, and all of it must run at 30, or better yet, 60fps!  We wouldn’t have it any other way, because this is exactly what drives us to go above and beyond, to innovate, and to enjoy our work after so many years.

But creating all this content and all those features takes a lot of manpower. Twenty years ago, 20 people were all that was needed to develop a game.  Nowadays, AAA games are developed by teams of several hundred people, often spread across multiple studios, each bringing their own expertise.

Technology has to adapt to this new reality and allow people to tweak a large amount of content efficiently, and often simultaneously.  Automation and procedural tools also play a critical role in assisting development teams, both for production and for quality control.  We’ve come a long way since the good old days of manual processes and batch files (though some still remain!).

Lastly, the lifespan of our games has also changed.  Launching a game is just the beginning, with patches, DLCs, and online service most often on the menu.  From a technology standpoint, this opens up a whole new world.  But let's save that talk for another time!

You’ve mentioned that “technology has to adapt in order to allow ever-growing teams to create ever-growing content”. At Motive, games are developed with the Frostbite engine, which enables different studios to share their technological processes with the help of a platform available to all EA developers. What are the benefits of working with a centralized, shared engine like Frostbite?

As you can imagine, there are several advantages to sharing the same engine.  It provides a common foundation that connects some of the world’s greatest game teams and developers, and helps prevent redundant investments.  For example, the work required during the release of a new platform or a new generation of consoles.  Sharing the same engine also makes sharing higher level technology that much easier and allows us to improve our velocity because we’re working with common foundations.

But sharing one engine also means learning to work together.  How do we give our developers the freedom necessary to adapt this technology to their needs while retaining control over its direction?  How do we watch over everything that's going on so as to avoid redundancies and divergence?  How do we effectively share changes across teams?

Even if all of these questions (and many more!) have yet to be fully answered, I believe EA and Frostbite have made great strides over the last few years. Our current philosophy is to use Frostbite as an internal open-source, or “inner-source”, platform to which different game developers can contribute in coordination with the Frostbite team.  

Your role requires you to constantly be on the lookout for technological innovations. As a “tech guru”, could you tell us what the next technological breakthroughs will be for our industry?

While the technology has had its ups and downs over the years, I believe we haven’t yet seen the last of cloud computing.  After music and movies, gaming is logically next in line. The only real obstacles, as of now, are the cost of servers and, in some cases, latency.  But beyond that, it's a technology that has the potential to revolutionize the industry with on-demand content, unrivaled power, near-zero player latency, no more long download times for digital copies and patches, etc.

Another technology that is filled with possibilities, in many fields too, is artificial intelligence.  For now, advanced AI, in its various forms, is primarily used to assist us and provide us with recommendations.  But who knows what the next 5 or 10 years could bring…

Would you say that it is technology that works to the benefit of creativity, or the other way around?

Ah, if only it were that easy.  Actually, it's both!  I think that when both are in harmony, we can achieve amazing things. 

The role of technology is not to restrict creativity, but to guide it.  Technology needs to offer a wide array of suggestions, and explore many possibilities, but also provide innovative solutions designed to help us go as far as we can.  Creativity, on the other hand, must be flexible while remaining (very) ambitious.  And this is a fine line to walk, as it requires raising the bar to just the right height.  As with everything, it’s all about balance!

Teamwork is essential in technological development. Our teams have been working from home for almost two years. How did the studio adapt to this situation? What are the main challenges in terms of operations, resource management and knowledge sharing related to this new reality?

From the first day onward, our priority has been to make sure that our teams have access to all the equipment they need at home.  Our IT crew also had to increase the capacity of our VPN twice in the first few months to ensure that our staff could work efficiently.

Then, as time went on, we learned how to work with different technologies such as Parsec and Citrix.  Our teams also showed a great deal of resourcefulness and came up with creative solutions of their own like using our internal cloud platform to run tests on our games, for example.

When all is said and done, the main challenge of remote working, in my opinion, remains communication. Especially in an industry such as that of video games, where everything is so focused on teamwork.  To that end, we learned to make the best of tools like Miro, Slack and Zoom, but there are many things about this new reality that we’re still figuring out!

Follow Motive on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to read all of our latest articles!