Writing and directing for transmedia is an often overlooked part of world building in video games, but as consumers it is one of the most memorable elements of any game we play. Our host, David Taylor sat down with Neel Upadhye, a creative powerhouse who has left his mark on some of the most iconic franchises in gaming. 

From shaping the lore of Star Wars: The Old Republic and Battlefield 2042 to crafting Stories from the Outlands for Apex Legends, Neel’s work has been viewed tens of millions of times, defining what it means to merge storytelling with gameplay. In this episode, we explore Neel’s journey through the gaming industry, dive into his creative process, and what the future holds for transmedia storytelling.

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming practice, "Lightspeed Gaming," the firm is investing from over $7B in early- and growth-stage capital — the by far largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

David: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, David Taylor, and today we're talking about transmedia writing and world building in video games. It's an often overlooked part of game development but as consumers, it is one of the most memorable aspects of any game we play.

I'm thrilled to host Neel Upadhye, a creative powerhouse who has left his mark on some of the most iconic franchises in gaming. From shaping the lore of Star Wars: The Old Republic and Battlefield 2042, to crafting stories from the Outlands for Apex Legends, Neel has redefined what it means to merge storytelling with gameplay.

In this episode, we'll explore Neel's journey through the gaming industry, dive into his creative process, and what the future holds for transmedia storytelling. Welcome to the podcast, Neel.

Neel: Thank you so much for having me, David.

David: So just to kick us off, it'd be awesome if you could just share with us sort of your path into, into the gaming world.

I think there's a lot of people who are probably creatively inclined who just would love to understand how one breaks into the industry and, and then sort of, you know, has as much success as you have.

Neel: I started my path into gaming at USC where I actually studied film. And when I graduated from USC, I had two job offers in front of me.

One was in the film industry proper and postproduction. It would have been like a union job, dubbing tapes. One day I would have gotten to actually edit something. And the other job was to work at Electronic Arts, cutting marketing podcasts for the Command and Conquer series. And I chose that job because I felt like they're going to let me cut every day.

And I'm actually going to get better at my craft every day. Now, a couple of years in, I thought I'd made a huge mistake because all my friends had just sucked it up and were getting coffee for, you know, Seth MacFarlane, we're now assistant writers and, like, the writer's room for Family Guy, and I was like, what am I doing?

I'm in this other weird industry. But, you know, as we know, the industry has only grown and become more respected as a storytelling medium, and I've been fortunate to grow alongside it, I ultimately ended up working at EA for 14 years, both on the marketing side and the developer side on a number of titles.

I left EA and worked at a startup for a few years, and now I work for myself, helping various studios up their storytelling craft, whether that's in game or through other channels.

David: Awesome. So I think we'll sort of dive into a little bit more of each of those aspects of your, your life throughout the conversation, but just to help us sort of get grounded in the work that you do? What is sort of, and I know that you've, you've also written and directed a movie before.

So, you know, what's the difference between writing and directing for a movie versus a video game?

Neel: That's a great question. I think the number one difference between them is that the posture of your audience is different. So when you're watching a movie or a TV show, you're in what we call a lean back posture.

So you're passive, you're active. Ready to receive and you're, it's not necessarily less engaged, but it's a different form of engagement when you're dealing with games. You're working with an audience who is leaned in. It's an active participation. And so that means that your attention is just going to be different and you have to be.

Crafting your narratives based on the posture of the audience, a stance of the audience, right? So, if you're, for instance, if you're in a passive mode and receiving things, and you're not having to make other decisions because it's not interactive, you may pick up on subtleties. If you are in an active mode and you're participating in something, if the narrative is directly in line with the goals you're already achieving, you may actually pick up on it in a stronger way.

Like, let's say walking into a room and being able to look at everything that's on a table, but if the narrative is coming at you, , at cross purposes from the thing you're trying to do, let's say something is trying to give you world building while you're trying to make sure that another player doesn't shoot you, and kill you, and end your game session, then, It actually might be filtered out as noise in your brain.

So the posture of your audience, whether they're in a lean in or lean back type of posture is really important to know when you're crafting your content. The other big difference, of course, is interactivity. And that that's the easy part of the answer. That's what everyone knows is with video games being interactive.

That means that fundamentally. It's not the characters that are going to be making choices in their story, it's going to be the player, and you have to hold that in mind, and try to create as much immersion as you can, which usually means removing friction between what the player is supposed to feel and what the character is feeling.

If you and the character Are at odds in terms of the experience, then that's usually when you get bumped out and you're like, Oh, I'm watching, or, I'm in an experience, but I'm not immersed in it. And of course, there's also a change in terms of how the content is authored and how it becomes good. Right?

In film, we often talk about how the final rewrite is really in the editing room. And I'm an editor myself, and so I certainly know that. I love getting things on a timeline and then changing my own work. For games, I would say the re editing process, the final rewrite, is through playtesting. Can't stress important, how, I can't stress enough.

How important that really is until it's in the engine and you're hearing the line, you won't know if the line is too long, you won't know if the player is going to be running past it, colliding with another line that could overlap and whether, you know, It's even having the intended effect. Is it sticking in the player's mind the way you expect?

Is it really crucial information the player needs to know? And playtesting is the best way to get that. And so, that's kind of how I'd break it down. Interactivity versus linear. Posture of the audience being lean in versus lean back. And where does the final rewrite happen? In the editing room? Or through play tests?

David: Thinking about sort of the final changes that you make, right, if you get feedback from your audience that something's not working in either medium, I imagine it's a different approach where in one you're, you're working on with code and logic and changing mechanics. In the other movies, you might have to bring people back and reshoot on, on site. I'm curious if that changes the approach to when you do user testing or, or when you do those, those final edits just from like a production standpoint.

Neel: Certainly. I think that the way I approach it in some ways is the same, which is that. You want to start validating your approach to a story as early in the process as you can and do it several times through your process. And you want to move from using sledgehammers to make changes down to using paintbrushes to make changes.

So that just looks different in different mediums. So let's take film for instance. If you read a script and the story is not making sense, it's very easy in script form, it's a couple ctrl c's, ctrl v's, that type of thing, to make massive structural changes, and you should, you should make the most number of changes when it's just pen and pencil.

Once you're on set, you might be rewriting lines on the fly. Because you are having your own actors reacting to you saying, this doesn't make sense. I don't feel like I should be saying in this moment. You want to react to that, make changes. Once you're in post, now, yes, you can always resort to a reshoot.

Sometimes you have to, and that is expensive. But you want to try and use a smaller instrument instead of a. Wrecking ball at that point. And so perhaps reordering a scene will work perhaps doing ADR, which means just recording a line from the actor, maybe that's off camera. So you get that extra bit of exposition.

Perhaps you need to add in a little title card up front, you know, star Wars crawl style. Perhaps you need a lower third to let you know you're at a particular location because the audience didn't get it. So you use different tools at that point. Instance to make those types of changes, right? Perhaps it's just that the tone is wrong and the composer can put in a different piece of music that will entirely make the player or make the viewer Reinterpret how they should be feeling in that scene.

And so you want to move from most destructive to least destructive changes. And the same thing is true in games. So how does that look in games? Well, initially you're going to do something that's like a level layout, the blockout is. It's very rudimentary. It's mostly about design and getting people running through the space, moving through the space, and the art is usually just gray box, right, or slapping things together that you've been able to pull off of, let's say, the Unreal Asset Store or the Unity Asset Store.

So making changes there is pretty easy. Once you've done your few first few play tests, you'll be able to figure out if a level feels too big too small. You could have dialogue in there with no VO. So if you have to make a change, there's no calling actors back. A part of my process right now is actually recording.

AI voices for all the characters and putting it in and if a performance is really dependent on something that AI just reading a script won't be able to do convincingly and then I'll do a voice to voice AI change. So I'll perform all the parts to the best of my ability. Use AI to convert them into 60 year old man, 15 year old girl, whatever it might be.

And then at least I'm hearing the lines and. I can't tell you how invaluable that is, in terms of knowing whether something's going to hit. That process also applies to visual storytelling as well, in the level. And as you get further and further into the playtest, yes, it would be possible to make big changes.

And big changes usually do happen throughout production, but you want to try and move from using sledgehammers to using paintbrushes as you get closer and closer to final.

David: Yeah, makes sense. In my current job, I get to at least be a fly on the wall for for some of these early builds. And yeah, the voiceover is a it's hard to deliver humor in an AI voice.

And so I totally can understand why you would want to step in and and play both parts as a sort of rudimentary version of that.

Neel: Very helpful.

David: I'm curious. So you've gotten to work on some amazing IPS. I'm curious, like, when you reflect on, on working on Star Wars, Battlefield, Apex Legends, like, what are, what are sort of the projects you're most proud about?

Neel: I mean, Star Wars was definitely a dream getting to, you know, play on such a hallowed playground is, is definitely an honor. And I got to write and direct two short films that are based in the Star Wars universe that were produced by ILM. And, you know, I got to, I got to name a planet after my mom. That's pretty special. So I'd probably say that was a highlight.

David: Super cool. So maybe taking star Wars as an example, or if, if this is going to be, I know that Lucasfilm is a little bit cautious about sharing what goes on behind the scenes. But if you can use that as an example or another example, can you take us through your creative process for writing a script and directing an animated short?

Neel: Yeah, certainly. If I'm creating an animated short specifically for games, right, we're talking transmedia here, it has to start with the game. And so generally what I do is I start with a business brief and that includes. Why are we telling this story with this character right now, right? What's the tie in in the game gonna be?

Is it gonna be a skin that matches what the character looks like in the short? Is it gonna be taking place in a particular level? If it takes us 10 months to create this thing, are we lining up with a new level or new map that's gonna be coming out 10 months from now? Is it a tease for something that's actually not going to come out till well after that?

So you think about all these things, and you have to get buy in from the team. And make sure that everyone who's going to contribute to that is, you know, is bought in. From there, you go to an outline form, hitting out the beats of the story. You want to spend as much time in there really ironing that out and getting it locked in as possible.

Sometimes that also means writing to a budget or writing to a constraint. I'm a firm believer that short films are best when their scope is as limited as possible. Usually that means no more than four or five locations. Usually that means no more than three fundamental relationships. So that could be like three characters and it's the.

Triangular relationships between each of them, right? And once everyone's feeling really good about that, and you know you're not going to write something that is unproducible, then you take it to script. Tons of collaborative rounds of feedback on, on the Apex Legends, The apex legends team was amazing because you had animators that had been responsible for breathing life into these characters that knew them so well, that could give me amazing feedback as much as the narrative team could, right?

And the designers would get involved talking about the mechanics that made that character special. And I'd be finding ways to pull that type of detail in, in some small way. Sometimes it's a line, sometimes it's a shot.

David: So can I ask a quick question on this? Are you doing interviews with All of these folks before you start writing, are you writing something and then letting them react to it and then sort of going back and forth?

How? How does that work?

Neel: It's like any part of game development. There's meetings. There's bumping in people and bumping into people in the hallway. There's Hey, can I pull you aside and just have a brainstorm with you and work through this thing? I always try to get as much snowballed alignment. With a few key people as I can, even before you get to an official meeting where you're just rolling out a bunch of ideas, every studio works differently.

The studios that I've had the most success at are the ones that generally would prefer to feel like they were a part of the process of getting there than having a super polished idea presented to them. And so. In each studio I've worked at, you know, I've had to make my allies, I've had to make sure that people trust me, that I'm knowledgeable enough about the game, and respect what they do as storytellers, in that field.

Or respect what they do as storytellers through their own medium, that they trust that I'm gonna play with their toys in a respectful manner, so that when you get to something that's like a script review meeting, Most of the people in there are already kind of aware of what's happening, and there's no crazy surprises.

David: Yeah, that was definitely something I learned at EA, as well as definitely want to keep as many people involved in the process as possible before you get to that, that approval moment.

Neel: No doubt. I mean, and so that's really just all pre production, right? From there, the process follows much, much more the same process you would for any animated film.

So you're going to go through storyboards, editorial for animatics, sometimes there's motion capture or performance capture involved, VO sessions, and then of course editorial sound design and mix to get it out the door. The production of those Apex shorts or even the Star Wars shorts I did with ILM roughly took about nine months each to make.

David: Okay. How, like, just broad, I, just giving us a broad sense, not of any specific short, but I'm curious how much these shorts cost to produce generally.

Neel: It really depends on the art style you choose. You can tell any story for five dollars or five million. And the work I've done has generally been in.

The, the high several hundred thousands to a couple million. Got it. Okay. And the run time for those, of course, has been sometimes well over 10 minutes.

David: Got it. I might come back to this. I like, I want to ask about sort of how you make the argument internally to, to take the risk to build something that is not free, obviously.

Could you sort of give us a sense of like what you had to do, what, what the opportunity you saw, and how you were able to convince the broader Respawn team to, to take a risk on something that hasn't really been done widely in video games. Thank you so much.

Neel: Well, I really took my cue from some success cases I saw at other studios.

So Riot and Blizzard had really paved the way with League and Overwatch shorts, respectively. And about six to eight months before Apex Legends came out, I saw that Apex had a similar profile to these games and that they were a new IP. Essentially, they really required players to have an affinity for these hero characters that they were going to be playing as, but there was no single player in the game.

And so the pitch was quite simple, which was that marketing can become your single player. But this was definitely easier than said than done because. The, the point that the narrative director on the game made, Mo Alavi, he's a great guy, was that the headcanon for everyone on the team was different because they didn't have to sit down and agree on all of these details because there was no single player.

Everything wasn't written down. That's always true when you're building a game documentation gets out of date very, very fast. And so as someone that at the time was a part of like a marketing central resource to come in and do something that was this closely tied to the game, the risk of it going wrong was incredibly high and they didn't have an appetite for it.

And so I remember them saying basically. No one that doesn't work in this building can possibly do what you're trying to do. And so I decided, I decided to call their bluff and I was like, okay, I'll start working from this office then. And I just drove across town an hour every day and stole a desk in that building and started working out of the respawn office instead of the EA office.

And they still were too busy to meet with me. The game was about to come out, but just bumping shoulders with them, you know, on the way to the restroom, I started to. pull out of them what characters they were really passionate about, what made the game special for them, and that ultimately allowed me to come up with an idea that got them excited.

And initially, again, it was all about risk mitigation. Don't set the story in the Apex games, don't set the story in the same map as the games take place in, because then you're going to write checks that we have to cash. If you have a spaceship crash in the map, then everyone wants to see that, we can't do that.

But as we really started to move forward with the first short film, , which was called Voidwalker and was about, The character Wraith, the team really got excited and invested and ultimately when that short came out there was a really strong tie into the game in the short film Wraith finds this underground facility and we added that as a secret discoverable level in the middle of the battle royale map.

David: Amazing and for those who haven't watched it, it's gotten 11.3 million views on YouTube. So this is, you know, not a small segment of the Apex audience who's following these shorts, I'm curious, you know to that end, what were sort of the indications when you, when you got the green light, well, actually before I'm jumping ahead, like, how did you get the green light finally to, to do it?

And then what was it like to actually, you know, cobble something together that would actually be well received by, by the Apex audience?

Neel: We got a green lit similar. I think I kind of answered that part of it. It was, it was really. First earning the trust of the team, and then coming up with an idea they thought was worthy of being told, and slowly addressing all of their risk.

Assessment questions about whether this could go badly and they were more concerned about it going badly than it not existing. If that makes sense. And that concern went throughout that was the smallest budget. We had to work with on any of the shorts and up until the very end. There were questions about about quality, whether this.

Would, you know, stand toe to toe with the quality of the blizzard shorts, for instance, and we certainly had a fraction of the budget as, as they did on that first short film, but when ultimately through some really hair raising experiences. I've never worked that many hours straight ever. I definitely thought I was going to die at one point.

 When the film did come out, I think it ended up garnering like between 7 to 9 million views or something in a very, very rapidly short amount of time. And it ended up trending number one on YouTube worldwide, as did the second short, and the success continued to snowball. And the Wraith Skin, the legendary skin we created that mirrored the look of the character in the short ended up being the highest monetizing skin in the game at the time.

And so that's when it became really evident that there was something here. And the second film followed that same mold, ended up trending number one on YouTube worldwide upon launch. And that skin became the highest monetizing skin at the game at the time of its release. And, uh, And so that really is what eventually convinced EA to continue investing in it.

You know, to a, to a point, you know, I would say there, I think is a point of diminishing returns and let me be clear what I mean by that. I don't know that I can say looking at the data that I have access to, and it's been several years now that I haven't been a part of that team, that doing these is a way of growing.

The user base. I think that it is more of an engagement and retention tactic than it is an acquisition tactic. And there comes a point in every live service game where the fundamental business priority shifts from new user acquisition to efficiency of scale and keeping the golden cohort there for as long as possible.

And I think that the budget for some of this bright and shiny stuff eventually needed to come down. And so, again, like I said earlier, you can tell any story for any budget, but it doesn't mean you should. And so it became incumbent on the creatives working on the game to find other ways to do storytelling.

Whether it was wholly in the game or through other channels, you know, we use Twitter pretty extensively on battlefield, for instance, to be able to do some of those same things. If you're talking to a more niche audience that's going to be hanging around anyway, for instance.

David: So just to make sure I'm understanding, so you're saying that the audience for, you know, stories from the Outlands became sort of the, the golden cohort, the ones who were sticking with the game.

And. Over time, did, was that there were other levers that the team wanted to pull in order to retain that audience? Or, was it just that that golden cord had shrunk into a point where there weren't as many players who were interested in watching now.

Neel: I'm not saying that the people who watch stories from the outlines were the golden cohort.

Okay, not necessarily. What I am saying is that every live service game is going to have a tail generally won't continue to just grow and. The performance of every single channel, every trailer you drop and everything is going to be dependent on how rabid and whether the, how rabid the fan base is and whether it's on a growth trajectory, right.

In terms of the users, like daily month, monthly average users, for instance, let's say, right. So, what I'm saying is that I think that at some point, multi million dollar short films for apex legends was not the best deployment of those. Resources and that doesn't mean that the storytelling isn't still as important to that game, but you have to be honest about what's going to move the needle and what metric are you optimizing for?

So. One of the reasons that we did Stories from the Outlands really early on with these high budget shorts was because we found that the Apex channel, which had gone from zero subs because the game had a ghost launch, to pretty substantial in a very fast amount of time, was a great channel to invest in.

It was driving traffic. And the way that the algorithm was set up at the time, again, YouTube changes how these things work all the time, but the way that the algorithm was set up, it favored watch time over just views or clicks and a long form piece like that, that was done at a high quality and had high retention.

And we were getting signals from players that they wanted this type of stuff meant that when we dropped like a nine minute video like that. It ended up being the most watched video on the channel and then the entire channel got promoted, which meant that the more traditional ads and launch trailers for new seasons also perform better.

And so there were other ancillary knockoffs and it wasn't just, hey, we need to invest in storytelling. It was a, I think, a very smart decision to say. We seem to have a golden goose with this YouTube channel. We need to invest in this YouTube channel. And a part of the way that I got a green light was also using this argument that unlike a launch trailer that comes out and then has a very quick drop off and things that are narrative or tend to be evergreen, which means that they have a much longer tail, they continue to.

Aggregate views over a very long term, as you can see, I think, like I said, when Wraith came out, it had 7 million views or something like that. And it's up to 11 plus now, right? That's probably not the case for, let's say, the season one launch trailer. Yeah. There's no nostalgic reason to go back and watch that.

So. Those are the calculations that I think every team has to make on why are we doing this and it can't just because it's cool. You know, I don't think that transmedia in and of itself is some kind of golden bullet. I wouldn't really buy that argument.

David: Got it. And so, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, and it's super interesting to hear that, like, you know, you're also developing a separate asset, like a YouTube channel.

 I don't think many game developers think about, , their, their activities in those terms, but obviously a YouTube channel that is , popular is, is a very strategic asset, especially in a time when there's so much noise and so much, you know, , attention that's scattered through various platforms and not necessarily even within gaming, but, you know, , on Twitch and YouTube and Twitter, et cetera.

I'm curious, you know, you had done stories from the Outlands and then you, you worked on Battlefield.

Neel: Battlefield 2042 was a pretty special experience for me. It's because that's the game that really took me from doing purely trans media work into making that shift slowly into being on the developer side of things.

Battlefield was creating. It's first fictional setting in a very long time coming off of battlefield one and battlefield five, and they were also experimenting with having a. Hero shooter specialist kind of mechanic in the game and wanted to create fleshed out characters and seeing the work I'd done on Apex Legends.

I was asked if I would help flesh out and refine the narrative and and the theme of the game. Well, more specifically, I was asked to help define how the, the fantasy of that game could best come across no matter what channel it was really. And again, I was really a marketing asset that was on loan to the team and the team had its own world director, narrative designers, and writers that were working on the game.

And I ended up coming in to really supplement and help them. And it started with something that was really just going to be focused on fleshing out the backstory. The team knew that they wanted to do something that was set in this cli fi setting. And the question became, well, how do you make that feel integral to a war game?

And the thought that I had was that if you have these massive climate disasters, The, the thing that is germane to a war game is that it would create the biggest mass migration of people in history, and that's going to create geopolitical conflict. And so, that's how the idea of the no pats came along.

Instead of expats, no pats. All these countries that have become failed states, all of them at some point had their own type of, Elite special forces, right? Whether it's Mossad or Grom or MI6. And if those states fail, what do these people with very particular skills do? And who are they fighting for now?

And that ended up being a lot more interesting than just, let's say, a generic mercenary. And it also allowed us to say that they're really fighting their own war. And they're have, they're fighting for this displaced people group, and that may sometimes align with what these superpowers are doing in this world war.

But they're not fighting just for America or for Russia and it created this nuance that was really interesting and the other thought that we had was that the game was going to be set in these really exotic locations and there was an opportunity here to tell a story that felt like it could only be told in those locations instead of feeling like a James Bond film where just some European dudes to go to all these locations and it's just set dressing right and so.

I pulled together a writer's room with a South American writer, an Indian writer, a South Korean writer, a Singaporean writer, a writer that had shot, some, some Netflix originals in the Middle East, to come together and create backstories for each of the maps in a way that then connected and became the world history of the game.

And so that work ultimately. Was handed over to the dev team that figured out how to make that work show up in the game What does like the no pat logo look like how does this fit into the types of backstories? we want for each of these characters, let's say and then I Took that same material and started to develop out a roadmap for Where the marketing could feel like a part of the storytelling and from the moment the game was announced that there could be this drip feed of content that would tell the story that led right into the first moment of you hitting play and going through the first time user experience and into the game.

And so, on that title, I was the creative director of the transmedia portion, which was again, the single player that wasn't in the game, essentially working very, very closely with my partners at DICE, who were working on taking that and having it realized. In the game very special experience and we used a variety of mediums to tell that story twitter interactive websites that had maps almost like an Indiana Jones map that you could follow the reporting of a made up investigative journalist that we said was embedded with this population this boat of refugees as it was going across the world all leading up to a giant short film that we produced.

That confirmed that a character from Battlefield 4 was returning. And, you know, set the hype on fire right before the game came out.

David: Got it. And that was Michael K. Williams likeness?

Neel: Yeah, exactly.

David: Amazing. All right, well, I'd love to move on to talk about your experience, uh, working for a Web3 game company.

I think this is an interesting topic because I imagine that there are different elements that you need to consider when, when, uh, building a web three game. I also know that your role evolved there. You had a production role and just curious to understand sort of how you took that creative background and applied it to, to this.

So I guess two questions. One is, you know, how did, because I know that you continue to work on the creative side, like, How did working on a web three game change your approach to doing, you know, creative transmedia, creating transmedia moments? And then two is, you know, what were the different roles that you, that you had and how did you leverage your background to, to have the biggest impact there?

Neel: I'd say the big thing that changed for me, building narrative and developing IP at a Web3 company versus a traditional company was the focus that Web3 companies put on building in public. And there was a desire for these companies to show that they were transparent, to show that funds were being used appropriately, to show that there was concrete gains being made on the project.

And so the, so the need to continuously put your work out there. While you were still in really an early stage building and pulling things together that created tension on the team, honestly, because I think the traditional way of building games is hold, hold, hold, wait till it's polished, right? And that was a big shift in me to operate that way.

Ultimately, I would say. That both Azure Games and a majority of the Web3 studios out there have found that they were doing build in public the wrong way and that the traditional gaming market has been building in public just in a different way than what Web3 game studios decided needed to be the way to do it.

And what I mean by that is great things come out of constant iteration and change, and sharing all of those things, sharing concept art, where the art style isn't baked yet, sharing characters that might get cut, sharing backstory and lore for things that definitely will end up changing dramatically in terms of how they evolve, end up presenting in the final game is not incredibly helpful, I think, because for one thing, it ends up, it makes it harder to create a real moment that feels like it is a canon burst of excitement because there's been a little bit of a drought of you saying something. I like building tentpole moments, but also it can actually make the game feel more incomplete because something doesn't feel cohesive yet.

I think the right way to build in public is to do playtests, then you're taking a certain slice of code, you are bringing in outside opinion to help you validate your assumptions, but you're not screaming it on the internet, and you're not making your decisions based on Twitter polls or comment sections, you're actually getting and making, you're actually getting information and making your decisions.

Based on people with hands on code experience. So yeah, I'd say that most web three studios that started off with this. really big initiative to build in public, ended up backtracking on that and becoming more of a polish in private and, you know, speak when ready kind of approach. And, and I think that that is the right approach to create the best possible storytelling experience for your players, provided that you are playtesting, in closed groups early and often so that you're not in an echo chamber about the actual state of the game.

David: Yeah, makes sense. It sounds like Web 3 sort of went in the, the extreme opposite direction of what AAA does, which is sort of to not really playtest, , with, with the public because they don't want any leaks. And then, it's sort of a, a roll of the dice when, when the game launches because it hasn't really had, as much flighting as like an indie game might have.

With, you know, play tests from all through development and, and early access partially to fund the game, but also, you know, as part of shaping the direction of the game.

Neel: Well, let's dig into what you just said, right? Both AAA and Web3 have. Let's define it this way. Both traditional game studios and Web3 studios can make the mistake of putting out a bad product.

And it's always because there was either a misaligned vision, there was mismanagement within the creative process of bringing that game to fruition, or there wasn't enough play testing. The, the build in public thing I think is, is just noise. You know, the, the Web3 games that went out there and failed.

May have been sharing art and lore and Q&A's and AMA's on Discord all the live long day but they weren't actually getting code in players hands. And then they failed. And there's plenty of huge games that, you know, in traditional gaming that work for five, six, seven years, then come out with a crazy flashy launch trailer when everything is super baked and super posh.

And they fail too, because they didn't validate their assumptions with play tests. So it all comes back down to play tests.

David: Yeah. Keep play testing. Makes sense. I want to, I want to zoom out and talk about just sort of transmedia broadly and get your perspective on that. Did you, did you watch secret level by any chance?

Neel: So yeah, I did.

David: Okay. So secret level just for the audience is essentially like it's made by prime video where it's on prime video made by the creators of Love, Death and Robots. And I, I've actually only watched one episode. But I'm curious, Neel, what your perspective on it was, given that you've made a lot of, of, of shorts based off of video game IP in the past.

Neel: I thought the execution was quite beautiful. I loved the art styles. I've worked with several of the studios that came together to create that anthology piece.

Love, Death and Robots is so special certainly has found its way into this and I think it was a great great idea I will say that I'm disappointed in how Extremely violent they all were Kind of disturbingly so even rather innocent IP like Pac man.

David: Yeah was interpreted in kind of the one I watched

Neel: Yeah, it's like the most horrific interpretation of it possible Interesting. Not necessarily, I would say brave or insightful to do that.

David: Yeah.

Neel: Perhaps, closing off how accessible it can be. And, I would say the same thing of, of the Fallout series as well, to be honest with you incredibly gripping opening. There's no question that the actors and the craft on display in creating that series is incredible.

I didn't need that level of violence, and, and, and I'm not sure why the creators went in that direction. I personally would have loved to see that be a little bit more accessible or clever in the way that it hit those same tonal markings without being as gory. That's kind of my honest review of it.

Yeah. Executionally quite brilliant. Some really great ideas. It's just a lot of blood for no reason.

David: Yeah. I mean, I, I'm also surprised by, by the Pac Man one. I'm surprised that Bandai Namco signed off on that for, for a kid's IP, and on the fallout side, I kind of get it. I mean, that they're sort of doing what probably most players do when they play fallout is just shoot everything.

But I, I'm also kind of curious, you know, do you have a perspective on why this sort of amalgamation of very different IPs were sort of slapped together in sort of format?

Neel: It took a long time to pull that piece together. I remember that there were discussions about Apex Legends being a part of it.

And when they were talking to EA about Apex Legends or some other IPs being a part of it, The general question was, well, who else is in it? And nobody wanted to be the biggest fish amongst a bunch of tiny fish, but no one wanted to be the tiniest fish either. And so, I have a feeling that the final cast Of Secret Level kind of came about through just a lot of churn and burn and just straight up chutzpah from Tim to not give up and keep pounding the streets and keep pounding the town and getting people to say yes.

There, there's probably a couple really close ones that didn't make it in. I believe there was supposed to be one for Concord, which got pulled out. And who knows, you know what it could have looked like if Some other IPs had said yes, and some other IPs had said no, it really depends on the, on the priority of those games, the, you know, there's a couple that really makes sense to me, like, New World is in, is actively, , it's an active live service, having New World on there is smart, it's on Amazon, all of that makes, makes sense.

A ton of sense. Some of those IPS are kind of dormant on the gaming side. And so I'm curious if they have other projects that are on the brink. And this was part of their marketing beats to getting there. Some of them may have been purely brand place. And, , as some of those without being a part of the production team, I couldn't really, , speculate more than that, , as to why this was the final lineup in secret level again, brilliantly, you know, brilliantly done , even if, Aesthetically, some of them weren't to my taste.

David: Got it. Let's zoom a little bit even further out now and talk about, , the different attempts, bridging the gap between video games and movies, like with Netflix's Bandersnatch, for example. Like, I'm curious, do you, do you think we're going to move in that direction where the, the lines of, of movies and video games continue to be blurred?

Or are we going to always exist in a world where movies complement video games and video games complement movies?

Neel: I think we'll see more executions that experiment with that. I don't think that one is going to go away. The, the need to have passive entertainment is, I think, always going to be there, you know, technology has changed how we consume passive entertainment, we've become a little bit more in control of it, being able to hit the pause button, you know, those types of things are certainly true.

And, and I can see something like Bandersnatch becoming. If there was a breakout IP, I think, or a viral moment with one of those that really hit an audience that's already used to watching their passive entertainment in a semi leaned in way, let's say on Tick Tock, just the speed at which you're scrolling.

I think there could be something there that really blows up and becomes even more mainstream than Bandersnatch did, but I don't think that's at the cost of linear entertainment or purely interactive entertainment.

David: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I, I found that to be the biggest issue with Bender Snatch aside from that.

I didn't love the story, but like also if I'm in a leaned out position, I don't want to have to lean in to progress the movie. Nope. And so finding a different medium, like, like Twitter, or maybe there's some other medium that doesn't exist yet that will come around, makes a lot of sense, as we're sort of wrapping things up.

I would love to just, because, you know, I came to you, you know, four years ago when I was at EA, and I was thinking about, , narrative design and storytelling in video games, I wanted to just make sure we had some time for, you know, for someone looking to break into narrative design or creative direction in the gaming industry, what advice would you have for someone like that?

Neel: My advice for anyone breaking in is You know, take, take any door that opens to you. I've had a very non linear ha ha ha ha, career path coming in through marketing, becoming a world builder, a game writer, and then, you know, working now both in marketing and. In the, in engine, right? Like, I don't know anyone else that does what I do.

Where half my day is spent in Unreal, and the other half is spent, you know, on set, you know, directing a live action commercial or something. That's very, very odd.

Aaron: Yeah.

Neel: But, it's possible. And, the very, and it's possible for me because that is the intersection of my skill set. And so if you lean into the things that make you particularly you, I think you can create opportunities that just actually don't exist as a job to apply for a role that could be filled by anybody else.

And so that would be, that would mean by, that would be my advice. Don't say no necessarily to stepping in and getting experience at a studio because it's in a different department or discipline from the one that you want to be in. If you're early on, continue to do side projects that are refining your primary skills that you're interested in.

For instance, the entire 14 years I was at EA, I was also still a filmmaker and I got a development deal at Disney. Disney. And I created a pilot there. I fundraised, wrote, and directed a feature film that's on Amazon Prime. And I wrote five screenplays in that time, while still working in marketing. And it's the marketing that got me into the video game jobs.

And strangely enough, it was the transmedia films that I did for Star Wars. That eventually got me an agent in Hollywood, right? So the crossover there is a little bit crazy, and I think that that is possible for people that are breaking in from all sorts of other things that at first glance might not seem to line up exactly.

So don't say no, you just, you have no idea where strange opportunities could open up. Then. It is at least 60 percent based on you earning the trust of the people that are on the other side of the table.

David: Yeah, I feel like what I'm, what I'm hearing is sort of, you know, continue to refine your craft, even if you may not be doing exactly the thing that you want to do long term, you know, like with you making movies while you're at EA.

I think that also, you know, recognize that you're getting more opportunities in the thing that you are doing and that there's room for growth, like your journey at EA. And then one other thing that I sort of heard you say earlier in our talk was just like, you moved to the Respawn office when you saw an opportunity that you really believed in.

And I think Being creative about how you pursue the things that you are, have a lot of conviction about is really important because if you are creative and you show that you care, people will, you know, open doors for you. Absolutely. Well summarized. Awesome. Well, as we wrap up here, what's the best way for people to get in touch if they have more questions or, or just want to chat?

Neel: Please find me on LinkedIn. My profile is just my name, Neel Upadhye. And I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have there or engage with you.

David: Awesome. This has been an enlightening conversation. Thanks so much Neel. Great to have you on the podcast.

Neel: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Happy holidays

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