Let's talk about innovation with ... Frédéric Markus from Feerik Games
Interview of October 12, 2018 by rOmain Thouy in Montpellier
10th article in a series of interviews conducted on the management of innovation in the field of creative industries (video games, animated films) of our region (note: Occitania).

Frederic MarkusFrédéric Markus, Chief Executive Officer of Féérik Games . Frédéric bought Feerik 3 and a half years ago. As director, he manages the studio from A to Z, so accounting, human resources management, but also design, and it even happens to code! Frédéric also teaches game design and history at e-artsup .

Training: Assembler programming on zx81 and MSX at home at night, BTS industrial computer day.

his first game: Starush, a shooter at Gradius
his first big hit: Midtown Madness
his latest big hit: Setting up the Lab Lab for Epic Games
" I learned to program in assembler when I was 16/17 years old, and I had my first job at Titus [publisher of Crazy Cars in 1987, for example], then I joined Michel Ancel, at the beginning Ubisoft, to start console games, we started programming Super Nintendo consoles, Jaguar and I was both a programmer and a producer, that's when we started Rayman , I was the first producer.
Then, after a few months of relaxation abroad, I went to the United States at Infogrames [publisher of Alone in the Dark, Outcast, V-Rally, among others], always to work in production and programming, even if was the design that interested me. And I had an incredible bowl at that time: I went to visit the studio Angels Studios near San Diego, with Mark Jackson, my boss at the time. And I came across Shigeru Miyamoto [co-creator of the Super Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero and Pikmin franchises on behalf of Nintendo; some of the games in these series are considered the best of their generation, such as Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time] and his team who were launching the Nintendo 64 and some games.
I came back from this meeting a little upset because I had seen everything that would happen in 3D in the next 10 to 15 years! It was like Steve Jobs visiting Xerox Park for the Mac! And suddenly, they took me as Game Designer and I went to work there. And for 2 years and a half, I worked alongside a Nintendo Japan mentor, Shigeki Yamashiro, who educated me about Nintendo game design, namely, how they make their games, how they prototyping, how they make their mechanics and rules, what their philosophy was, etc.
In the process, we made two games, then we went to Japan to sign Capcom, we made the game Red Dead Revolver (the first of the series). We were then bought by Rockstar because we made a car game called Midnight Club, which came from the Midtown Madness series of which I was the game director. I then decided to go freelance for 4 or 5 years, as a game designer, to help studios on their pre productions: startup, production, prototyping, clean up [literally clean up, at the end of the project, to help when everything is going badly to put the project back on track]. Then I became director of pre-production at Ubisoft, because Ubi wanted to revive the pre-production in the manner of Nintendo, that is to say, by the prototype and not by the story.
Then I went back to the United States, at Disney Interactive, as Director of Design. When they stopped the consoles, I received an improbable call from Lucas Arts: they offered me a creative director position, which I did for 2 years and a half. And Lucas Arts was bought by ... Disney, where I came from! One of my former boss then contacted me to work at Epic Games to set up a design lab. There, I built a small team and worked on the pre-production of Paragon and Fortnite. That's when I was drawn to design for mobile gaming. As we were not doing at Epic Games, I returned to France and bought the studio Féérik, which was going to close.
I needed to get out of those very big companies where money is unlimited and where we are not directly responsible for the success of a game. Nobody knows if a game really worked; even if we get rewards at the E3 [ Electronic Entertainment Exposition], we do not know why. You can have a game that has cost tens and tens of millions of dollars and has not made any money at all, and you do not know that. It disturbed me a lot. So I wondered if I could make video games and make a living with it. And it's been three and a half years now that I've been slapping myself in the face (since I took over Féérik), because managing a business is not like playing a video game in a company. I really wanted to rub in this: after 3 years and a half, it's not the same person who is now in front of you! "

Hello Frederic, first of all, how do you define innovation in your field?
Good morning. Innovation is the mother of invention! It is a necessity that causes innovation. And this need can come from many different areas. For example, at Nintendo, the need is empathy: they want people to play a game, be happy when they play it. All the innovations of Nintendo come from there. But the need can come from elsewhere too, like for example to run a business (it meets what Claire Zamora said in her interview, about niche games). The smaller a studio is, the more the need will be in the survival of its operations and so there will be innovations in that sense, such as finding a niche. But I think innovation in the best designer comes from empathy. Innovation can also be driven by technological limitations. You have to find a way around a problem. I propose 2 examples from Nintendo, which illustrate the need for empathy or circumvention of technical constraints:

about the need for empathy, let's take the trouble for people to get to play in 3D, with the example of Mario Galaxy: the majority of people are lost in 3D. So, to avoid this frustration, the game designer has added planets in the game: on a planet, if you run right in front of you, you end up necessarily in the same place after a while, so you do not get lost!
about the need to circumvent a technological limitation: what I'm going to say is valid for Fortnite, PUBG, or Mario. Take the latter, for example. Initially, Shigeru Miyamoto had not planned to play a plumber game. There was a big technical problem with the first NES consoles, at the beginning: when there were a lot of things to manage on the screen, they would start flashing and disappearing. So when you do a scrolling game like Mario, where there are little creatures that follow you, like the Goombas, well, after a while, they will accumulate, and because of the technical problem, they Are going to disappear. So to get around this problem, Shigeru Miyamoto put walls to hold this group of creatures. But he found that was ugly and that these walls were useless to the game itself. He decided to turn them into tubes, because we could get into them. And it became Mario!
One of the illusions we have in the video game is to think that because we have an idea that falls from the sky it will be super innovative. In all the great games that make them talk, innovations often come from a real need that designers or engineers try to solve. For many companies, the phase before pre-production is an intense phase of problem solving, otherwise they do not go into the project.

If you are satisfied with the way other games are made without getting to grips with the difficulty of players playing these games, you will not be able to see that there is a problem and therefore you will not find any innovation. This mode of operation was very present at Steve Jobs: he was hypersensitive to bullshit, to the hard things to use, and that's what pushed Apple to do simple things to use. Which does not mean that it is easy to solve or to manufacture!

How do you carry this innovation?
Today, the innovation strategy for Feerik Games is to find the business opportunity, and to differentiate ourselves. I am the one who carries this strategy. When you are so small, innovation must first be a market innovation. When I was at a big publisher, I was frustrated with the decisions because I did not understand them. I did not necessarily have enough knowledge for that. And then a lot of things were hidden (numbers, decisions). That's why I took over Feerik too. But when you put yourself in this situation [studio director], this is my case today, there is a fog that finally rises, and there, you better understand that there are editorial choices to make to pay the bills! Overall,

Why is it so important to innovate?
The survival of society pushes to make micro innovations: for example, when I see a game down in turnover, we must quickly find something to satisfy the players. We can remake the interface, add new characters, new game cards, change the way to monetize some game content.

How do you innovate?
The first step is to identify the need to innovate from what I said at the beginning: is it a need for empathy, economic survival of society or technology? Depending on the answer, I will not have the same iterative process. For example, for a need for economic survival, I could not do as many iterations as for a technological need. It's easy to reprogram a prototype 50 times, but not to make 50 versions of the company! On the other hand, the principle remains the same one: it is necessary a minimum of reflections on the idea, and very quickly putting it in practice.
What I learned at Nintendo is that there is no paper game design document as we know them here, it does not exist: these documents usually include questions, problems, and it is not by arguing that they will be resolved. These are usually problems that involve the cognitive sciences, the modes of functioning of the human brain: is the player able to see the information; do we understand the feedback from the players ... and solve that on paper, it does not work. You do not design an Apple watch on paper: you have to see if the components fit in the case, how to solve the problems of heat dissipation, etc. So you have to do it, and iterate very fast, as fast as possible. As soon as you have the idea,
An idea is good from the moment when it is going to be generating other ideas, that is to say when it will be able to be reused 1000 times (like the grains of rice on the chess board which multiply by 2 with each new row of boxes). It is the combination of possibilities associated with an idea that makes it worthwhile: when I have an idea, I immediately think with what I can combine it; can I put a vocabulary on it to describe it and explain it to others; can I gather around this idea; will there be things to say about this idea? If there is no reuse, multiplication of the idea is that to achieve it, it will have a production of crazy. C ' is the kind of methods we use in big studios to challenge ideas and see those that have potential. That's why for the big worlds, we prefer the emerging gameplay. It is not taught much enough. To have ideas, everyone has, the difficulty is how to bring them into a production. It's a little like the method of JK Rowling, who claimed to have written and conceived Harry Potter in his many train journeys: all the ideas that did not survive the train ride are not good.
Another example: in the making of the movie Jurassic Park, we can see Steven Spielberg who tries every 10 years to make Jurassic Park, and that, during 20/30 years in fact, and every time he tests the technology, and he finds that it does not allow to make Jurassic Park as he sees it, until the computer is ready, and he makes his film at that moment. The film was already in his head. Same process with James Cameron and his movie Avatar. Good ideas die hard.
Previously, my innovation was driven by the need to " go out a game ", but now it's about " running my business"I prefer my ideas and my projects by this filter There are some things that I would like to do in the blockchain for example, but I do not have the means to implement them for the moment So I keep them aside, in my head.

Come on, Frédéric, can you tell me a little more?
It's a lot to iterate, very fast, because the game will quickly tell us if it wants to be or not to be. As long as you have not explored what you imagine, you can not know. A very simple example: take a mobile game, so on a small phone screen. You can have an idea and when you put it on the phone screen, there is no room, or it would be way too small, and people would not see anything, so in the end there will be no game ! In this case, the game does not want to be!
Another method to challenge ideas is the " 5 why?99% of the ideas are unfounded, are not thoughtful.This method allows to dig up to their foundation or eliminate them before.It does not prevent that ideas can also occur in the shower, walk, etc. For some ideas, as I know a lot of people in this field, I rely on experienced people when it's really necessary, but it's also extremely important to be able to talk to people not at all. If you only talk to players (" nerd versus nerd "), you create games that buckle on themselves, you do not go out. so it's essential to open up to other people outside the video game world.
To get feedback, you have to do playtests. For the mobile game, the playtest room is outside: when a mobile game comes out, it is not finished, it will be finalized with the players and their feedbacks. Doing playtests well is a very complex job. You have to have specific questions and expectations in mind that the answers will allow you to check something. Then, it is necessary to pay attention to the conditioning, as much at the level of the team as the participants in the playtest. So the playtests, it's a real science. We do it from time to time: we give the phone to someone, we go behind him, and we ask him to describe what he thinks, without any censorship.
Playtests are often done on small projects, and often on POCs. Less often on big projects even if some boxes have become experts on the subject. In the playtests, you have to be careful with the questions you ask: it's like giving someone 3 T-shirts and asking them to choose one of the three. He'll do it, but he will not go back to your store to buy one, actually. That's why pushing the test out and having analytics [data to analyze the game, data on the behavior of the player in the game] is very important.
At Nintendo, it was a lot of testing. For Shigeru Miyamoto, it was even called " employee kidnapping": For example, he sometimes asked a secretary, who was there, to test a game, immediately.When I was working at design lab, at Epic Games, we had set up playtests, with Célia Hodent, an expert in UX [User eXperience, therefore user experience] and cognitive science: it is she, in particular, who has cleaned the interface of Fortnite.The things that come out of a design lab are very disturbing. that we had real problems with games in production without being followed by decisions to change that.These are things we understand better when we are on the business side rather than the lab side.

How do you stimulate innovation?
What is important is to educate people to innovation. After, in business, there are time constraints that make us unable to test all ideas. Hence the interest of going to see experts in a particular field at certain times.
For example, it's very interesting to talk to a doctor about a game. With an artist. A musician. Everyone will really bring something new and rich, in their field of expertise, that will allow you to go very far. So, before asking for innovation from people in the company, the most important thing is to stimulate innovation education: do these people already understand what we are doing? For example, if you give me game ideas for pc or consoles while we make games for the mobile, it will be a real problem. First, you need to understand how a mobile works. And it's also important to break down existing games to understand them: it's not
That's what I do with students, for example, I try to help them " read " the games. A game that works is something to be wary of. But it's true for everything. When it seems simple, it is that behind, there are often things crazy.
I teach e-artsup , so I'm in contact with the academic world. I've always done it, I really like it, and I want to warn students. We have trouble finding mentors today. Our education system does not teach them enough to learn. Because the school can not interest them, they go elsewhere. They do what adults do who do not have a good job, they put themselves in front of the TV, youtube and Cie.
One of the keys is to be able to get rid of all this filth, by offering them access to real knowledge, practice by themselves: how to stick two glass walls without making bubbles, how does this glass button work? [the round button of the iphone].
So, in my interventions, I show them what a transistor, I explain to them what a Hertz, I have a kit of ZX81 [an 8-bit personal computer marketed by Timex Corporation in March 1981, whose case was black with a membrane keyboard], I show them what an electron gun is ...
I try to educate them in their thinking process. Because otherwise he reinvents Pacman, and there is no need to reinvent things that exist. On the other hand, it's important to understand Pacman: do you understand why Pacman works? Do you understand the feelings experienced in this game: the feeling of fear of being eaten, that of revenge? Do you know that there is assistance in the controls so that you can take 90 ° turns? No, you do not know it. Hence the interest of learning the basics, of seeing the things behind things.
If you do not do that, you will only be a consumer. Since my background is IT and electronics, I stimulate my own innovation by keeping abreast of everything that happens in these two areas. You have sites likeScience Daily , where you have pages and pages of real scientific information based on articles. With this site, for example, you have access to the source of information.

A little scoop, on the near future?
The release of our game Battle.GG . A fast, fun game, a cross between Clash Royale and Splatoon! Another title, very original, with procedural creatures, fun to see and play. And many others : )

Thank you Frédéric for sharing your vision on innovation.
Very good continuation!

Translated with Google's page translating option,hope it's good enough.