Welcome to OutsiderGaming, your portal to the thrilling, unconventional side of the gaming world. Here, you’ll go on an exciting journey inside the mind of a gaming master. We’ll learn all about Haz Dulull’s incredible rise through the ranks of the gaming and entertainment industries in this behind-the-scenes interview. Prepare to be inspired by his life-changing adventures, fresh perspectives, and the fascinating tales behind his award-winning works. We will explore the extraordinary swings Haz’s career has taken, from his beginnings in gaming to his ground-breaking work in visual effects and movies. Additionally, stay tuned for a first peek at Haz’s upcoming project, the highly anticipated video game “Moontopia.”
In this interview, we’ll be going in-depth, not just touching the surface of the gaming world. Haz Dulull is a genuine polymath of the entertainment industry, with experience in video games, visual effects, and movies. We’ll go into his formative influences, career turning points, and the motivation behind “Moontopia,” a game that has the potential to revolutionise the gaming industry. But that’s not all; we’ll also investigate his work with the gifted Katie Sackhoff and see how his many collaborations have shaped his career in interesting ways. Prepare yourself for an in-depth exploration of the mind of an entertainment industry pioneer.
With this interview, you’ll have access to hitherto unseen, fascinating aspects of the gaming world. Join us here on OutsiderGaming as we explore the fantastical world of Haz Dulull! Let’s get into it.
Paul:
Welcome to Insider Gaming. You’re here today with your host, Paul. I have a very special guest joining me today. He is absolutely a jack of all trades. He puts me to shame with all his different skills and different things he’s done in his career so far. He is a writer. He has a background in special effects. He has a background in computer games. He has won awards for his short film ‘Sync’. He has also made other films like the Beyond and very famously, the Katie Sackhoff film ‘2033: Origin Unknown’. And he reminded me earlier, he also has stuff going on with Disney, so I better throw that in! And so welcome everyone to Haz Dulull. Hello, welcome.
Haz:
Thanks, Paul. It’s been great, Great intro and yeah, happy to be here, man.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. It feels almost like deja vu. Um, so look, to start us off, your background and your career, with the computer games and the VFX and all that stuff. At what point were you inspired or did you not have enough on your plate that you decided you were going to open your own animation studio with ‘Hazimation’?
Haz:
No, I mean, I think it all stemmed back to, you know, like, I worked in video games back in 98 working on like PlayStation two games. I was working on a game called Motocross Mania, and I was an intern first and then became an artist. And I worked in cinematics. I didn’t go to film school, but I loved movies. Ever since my dad brought home the VHS copy of Blade Runner, I’m like, what is this? What is this? This is not sci fi. Sci-Fi Is Star Trek and Star Wars. What is this? What is a replicant and like really nerding out on like Philip K Dick books, you know, ‘Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep’ and so on. And then William Gibson became a freaking sci fi nerd. Um, so I always wanted to make movies, but my entry into movies is through video games because I was doing cinematics specifically the full motion video and not game footage. Yeah. So, I did that for a while and then eventually I’m like, I want to go work in movies, man. I want to work in games. Like I want to do it properly. So, I applied to work in visual effects and there was a level of snobbery back in the day. Like, you know, if you were an artist who had a game portfolio and like, oh, here’s my PS2 cinematic cutscene that I did, they’re like, Yeah, we’re making movies, man. We’re just doing the Hulk and Harry Potter, like, whereas now it’s a whole different thing now. Like it’s fricking rockstar if you work in games, you know what I mean?
Haz:
So, I started from the ground up in film. I was a compositor, so that meant taking CG. CG passes like a dragon or something and a photography plate, which is the live action. Put them together. My big break came from working on this movie called ‘The Dark Knight’, where I worked on the previews. Yeah. So that’s where a lot of my film school came from because the previous team back then were very small. On Pinewood. There was like, there’s a company called Envies who hired me. And, you know, our job was to take the script and build it on the computer and show it to the director and the supervisor and say, you know, this is what we’re thinking. And so, I learned a lot about editing, a lot about pacing, camera blocking, all that came from working on previously. And then you can imagine after that gig, I never had to show my CV again. Oh, yeah, you’re hired. You worked on that show.
Paul:
The Batman guy? Yeah.
Haz:
Yeah!
Paul:
Exactly.
Haz:
From there, I became a Senior Compositor and then became a VFX supervisor where I got to work on set a lot and to figure out how to solve problems on set. Like usually the problem is like, you know, we’ve got this big ambition, we’ve got this budget and this time how do we make that work? And that became my thing, right? Today, I still have that same issue that we faced. Um, but then while I was working in VFX, as if working in VFX wasn’t like long hours as it is, I was making short films in my spare time because I was so inspired of all the directors I was working with and stuff, I’m like, I want to make my stuff. And I did a short film called ‘Sink’, which was really cool. I had so much fun doing that. But then the one that broke out was a fake documentary called ‘Project Chronos’, where it was about putting human consciousness into a ball and then sending it out into space. And we make contact with extraterrestrials and they’re very, yeah, conscious. But it was all done using NASA footage. So, I would download all the footage from the NASA website, which is public domain, and using my visual effects background, I’ll composite and replace stuff and then I’ll get some actors and film them, you know, to say a bunch of scientific stuff and kind of cut it like a, like a documentary, like a Discovery Channel thing. I went on YouTube and everyone on YouTube thought it was real. Oh my God, how did NASA do that?
Haz:
It’s unethical.
Haz:
Like it’s not real. I got the Vimeo staff pick and that’s when things start to blow out of proportion. Like, you know, all these like well-known websites that io9 and all those places are covering it, and then Variety covered it and then there was a bidding war. I didn’t know what a bidding war meant. And usually, it means studios are fighting for that piece of property. I got signed to a manager, got signed to an agent and the whole Hollywood thing. Which is amazing. And I learned so much and got writing gigs to work with Paramount and Fox, it was amazing. But then two years go by, I’m like, So I haven’t made a movie going round in circles on this script that’s going to take forever to be made and had the problem that I was a first time Director It doesn’t matter how many short films you’ve made, it doesn’t matter how many awards you’ve won.
Paul:
It’s your first.
Haz:
You’re still a first-time director. So, I’m like, how am I going to do it? I’m like, So I had some money saved up for a house. You know where this is going, right? I’m like, What the hell, do I make a movie, buy a house, make a movie. Oh, fuck it. Let’s make a movie! And I’m glad I did. I would never change anything because it forced me to not waste a single penny. Like when it’s your own money, you shoot and that’s going in the movie. That shit is not getting lost, you storyboard the fuck out of your shots big time. Yeah.
Paul:
Like you plan.
Haz:
You watch every penny. Like no one’s having expensive caviar on set. Okay, all of that stuff. And we did that and then flash forward, it came out in 2018. It came out and it was number two in the iTunes charts next to, um, Blade Runner 2049 and Wonder Woman, which is kind of amazing because Blade Runner is my favorite film. Yeah. Um, and it became a very profitable movie. Um, like within April, we got our sales report back and we had made all my money covered. I had a bunch of people that helped me out on deferred fees or working on very minimal fees just to help me get the movie made. I went back to say, hey guys, you know, here’s the money you should have got paid. There you go. And they’re like, What? No one does this. But we had two visual effects companies that helped me out because obviously my relationship, visual effects, you make a lot of friends. They’re like, look, we’ll help you out. We just want to see the underdog VFX artists going to the dude directing. But I’m like, no, who do I send this check out to? So, it felt good because like when I worked in VFX as an artist, I’d worked on like, you know, everyone does that you work for free to get your portfolio going. Yeah, it’s, it’s a thing, right? And you never expect anything back from that. And I just thought, you know, wouldn’t it be great if one day I was that guy that, you know, the film was commercially a success and like I can’t go around telling the world, oh, the film’s commercially successful and these guys didn’t get paid their full rate.
Haz:
So it felt good doing that. Obviously, I earned a lot of brownie points doing that for the team and it’s great, but it’s an ethos and then when I end up making my second movie with, um, Katie Sackoff Origin Unknown, the producer on there and one of the producing partners on that was Paula Crickard, and she had worked on Harry Potter and worked on a ton of movies. She’s now my business partner. But how that happened was that she watched the Beyond because remember when I’d made my second movie, the first film hadn’t come out yet. So technically it’s still a first-time director.
Paul:
It’s still a first director. Yeah. Oh, my God.
Haz:
And it’s a lot of pressure because I financed like 95% of the film and the rest was equity financiers coming on and then, you know, government grants and so on. Yeah. Um, but there’s a lot of pressure, like, you know, I could lose a ton of money, like, you know, which I should have bought a house with. And you always have this doubt. Oh, maybe I should have bought a house. But luckily my partner in life, you know, she was so supportive. She goes like, just make the movie because you’re always going to say, what if. Right? Just, you know.
Paul:
You can always live in a tent! It’s fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Haz:
But she was like, look, do it. There are so many houses you can buy in the future. Like, just make your film, don’t fuck it up. And that’s like the biggest pressure. Like, no other pressure could come more harshly than your…
Paul:
Your other half, your missus. Yeah.
Haz:
Fuck. So, I remember Paula watching it. I don’t even know Paula. You know, she at the time, come on as a post producer, she goes, I really liked your movie. Um, I have some notes. I’m like, okay, go on. What’s your note? And she came up with some notes that I didn’t really think of, which was like, there’s a lot of visual effects in this movie for a documentary. I kind of thought, it doesn’t feel like it. Like your short film really hit the nail. I didn’t know if it was real or not, and I feel like you might have gone a bit too far with that because of the whole Hollywood thing. So, we ended up doing a couple of reshoots and she was really instrumental in that. And the film became a success because like partly she, she voiced her opinion.
Paul:
Tone it down to make it more real. Yeah, Yeah.
Haz:
Well, here’s the thing. I always share this story. So, we had a ton of visual effects shots that look gorgeous, right? And we screen tested and something I never knew I could do a screen test. And obviously Paula works for Lionsgate and so on. Yeah, he goes, we should screen test. I’m like, I want people to rip my film apart. But we screen tested and you’re not in the room. It’s fine. You get the cards, the scores later and the main note comes out like, well, it doesn’t feel like a documentary now. When you watch a Blumhouse found footage, it’s like the following you’re watching is found footage like Blair Witch. You don’t get that in there. It felt very and that’s because I was surrounded by the world of Hollywood. I had a manager who was like, make it big, make it big. And in reality, you should just like, you know, we’re going to talk about fortnight later and embrace the medium to get the best possible story. You know, Blair Witch is still a terrifying film in my opinion. Like I don’t go fucking camping because that terrified the shit out of me. Um, but you know, when you make something small and it’s all about the story. So, the note was like, you know, so much visual effects. But here’s the thing. The distributor already bought the movie. They liked the movie. They go, we love the movie. Like we’re going to release this in three months time. A company called Gravitas Ventures, a lovely distribution company. And I’m like, you know what? I want to hold back the release of the film. They’re like, Wait, what? I want to release the film and I want to do some reshoots.
Haz:
And, um, and I want to strip out the visual effects. They’re like, What? No, that’s the marketing. No. And explained to them, there’s like two guys that work at the time, a guy called Josh Spector and Scott Kaplan, who are no longer there. They’ve got their own thing going. But they I guess I was very lucky because there’s always horror stories of distribution companies like especially indie filmmakers getting shafted, right? Big time. Yeah. I was just so lucky that these two guys genuinely liked the film. They were quoting scenes from the film like My God. And they’re like, you know, what has been made from what you want to make, you know, we’re here. We’re still going to distribute the film, like and like, Yeah, because, you know, I hear horror stories like, oh man, they’re going to shaft you, man. They’re never going to make any money in your first film. And I was prepared for that. Like, I’ll take the hits kind of. But we did it and. We still have to address. How do we make the visual effects look shit, right? Because they look so glossy.
Paul:
We were too good at our jobs. We need to do worse. Yeah.
Haz:
It looks shiny. It’s like, oh, how do we make it gritty? And even if we went in and did like additional gritty parts, it takes, you know, like 120 visual effect shots. It’s a lot of time. So, I just had this like, and this is what I mean about when you’re put in a box and you’ve got no money, no time, sometimes your best ideas come out and I’m like. What if? And I had an Apple Mac retina screen. I’m like, what if I get my cinematographer to come around with a black magic 4K camera, get some black sheeting, blacked out the room and played all the visual effects shots into the camera, right? So now you get all of this free stuff like Chromatic Aberration was doing rack focusing by keeping a bit of handheld. Now when I cut that footage of my visual effects shots playing into the camera next to the talking head footage, it looked like it was the same cinematographer that shot the shot, the visual effects scene and then we released the film and we’re getting reviews. And one of the reviews was from Cinefex, which is an amazing visual effects company and visual effects magazine. And they said, well, we would expect the visual effects to be that good because they look like they’re shot on camera, they’re that good. And I’m like, they were shot on camera. They’re like, No, it’s just the same. They look good. I’m like, No, no, no. We shot it on camera. And they’re like, really? So, I always tell this story because it’s the most bizarre lo fi approach to getting visual effects done in camera. And it worked. It works. A documentary, right?
Paul:
Yeah, very good. Very good. So how do you go from there and the world of Hollywood and films to let’s go make aims.
Haz:
Well, okay, so after we made the second movie. Paul Ricard to myself was like, Now Paul is a 30-year veteran. Tons of movies. The last film she did was Expendables four, and she was like, we got to the point now in our careers where we should make our own content as opposed to like, you know, being a hired director, being a higher producer, because this is essentially what we both were. Well, why don’t we just set up a production company? And the thing about Paula. She’s like, I’m like, let’s go make a movie. She’d be like, Hold up. Let me read the small print. She’s like, right. I’m like, And I wanted someone that was the opposite of me, but still shared the same vision. We just want to tell good stories, right? And figure out really interesting ways to make films as opposed to following the traditional legacy of making films, the traditional ways. Um, so we decided to set up a company called HaZ Film originally, and it was a vehicle for me for all of the projects that would go and make them live action. And we had a few that were going into production and then the pandemic hit like, oh, live action is being put on hold, what are we going to do? But I was using a game engine already, a very early version, like Unreal Engine for 16 or not for 12 for 12. We’re like Unreal Engine five, which is 4.12. And I was doing pre-viz, you know, like, you know, CG animatics of what the film could be like. And I was showing these animatics or these pre-viz to studios or financiers or even talent, and they’re like, what are we watching?
Haz:
I’m like before. I’m like, No, no, no. We’ve seen before it’s gray blocky, you know, kind of crappy. We get what looks like fully rendered motion capture. It looks like a game cinematic or a first pass animated film. And I’m like, Mm What had an animated film? So, I’m looking around. No one’s made an animated film in the Game Engine, and I’ve talked to a few of my animator friends. They’re like, Yeah, it’s a game engine though, isn’t it? I mean, proper animation is like Pixar, DreamWorks or you have teams of hundreds of people. You have the Maya Houdini pipeline; you have an expensive render farm. You’re not going to render an animated film on a game engine. I’m like, Yeah, but you know, we’re in a pandemic. What do I have to lose? So, I pitched it to Paula, and we had done a bunch of short films. We did one called Battle Suit. We did a sizzle trailer called Mutiny Zero, which is now the film that we’re working on. And so, we and we had a lot of exposure already on that. Um, so Paula was like, well, if we’re going to make an animated film, we should make an animated film that reflects the medium of animation. You know, Spider-verse is one of the best examples. I always say that it could not be made without animation because it respects the medium very well. Yeah. Um, and so it’s got.
Paul:
Different frame rates and everything going on. It’s crazy brilliant.
Haz:
It’s like it breaks the rules, but does it so well, yeah, I love it. Um, that was a big inspiration for us as well. Um, but then, you know, as with every production company, you have a bunch of scripts in development and so on. And one of the scripts was this script that, well, this outline I wrote called Brother, which is about this big brother breaking out his little brother out of a medical facility because his little brother has special abilities, I think a carer and um, and they’re doing experiments on him and, but he has the ability to distort time and space and every time he’s brother fails, he resets the switch like Groundhog Day. But every time he resets the switch, he’s getting weaker and weaker. So, out of the billions of possibilities, is he going to find the right one? And does the action and consequences affect the reality of finding the right outcome? It was very, very deep and stuff.
Paul:
It sounds like it could be a good game as well. That trial and error, I’m.
Haz:
Going to tell you that one in a minute. I’m going to tell you. All right.
Paul:
Like Dark Souls. Yeah.
Haz:
Yes, exactly. Nice! You know the reference. Damn it. Busted. Um, I mean, I’ve got a camera poster right behind me now. I mean, come on. I’m inspired by lots of stuff. But. But, yeah, so we had this script called Brother, and there were a lot of action sequences like physics, defined action sequences, gravity bending sequences that you like. It’s unshootable unless you’re James Cameron or something. So, we’re like, let’s make that. So, we bought a radical Stavros from Bally’s who had worked for a working title and so on, and he came on. We did a script pass, and we just went ahead and made the film and an epic came on and said, hey, you know, we love what you’re doing. You know, the fact that you’re, you’re, you’re doing proper transmedia here like you really are making a feature film, um, we’ll give you some funding. So, they gave us a little bit of money via the mega grant scheme, which has been phenomenal because they not only give you great money, but they also give you a lot of support and everything to help us guide us the right way and stuff, which is great. And having the epic seal of approval kind of makes you look badass in a way. Yeah. So, which was cool. And so, we finished that movie. That movie comes out early next year. But while we were making the movie, there was like, if you see in the trailer, it’s a big car chase scene. And to animate car physics, like having worked at companies like Codemasters back in the day working on Colin McRae Rally, I know how hard it is to animate cars in physics, but I also remember playing the game.
Haz:
There’s a lot of physics. I’m like, what if we stuck a controller in and I just drive the car and we record the animation of the free in-game physics.
Paul:
Play the scene? Yeah, yeah.
Haz:
And then just baked the animation into a sequencer, which is the timeline in Unreal. We did it and I’m like, that was cool. But you know what? That was so fun. What if we made a game and we just ended up doing a game jam session on weekend, which grew out to like two. People, free people fight people. Now, we got signed with Microsoft Xbox, which is the independent Developers program for Xbox, and we have Xbox dev kits in our homes now and we’re making a nice game called Max Beyond. We didn’t want to call it Rift because the movie called Rift is great. Calling your game rift is a problem because there’s hundreds of rifts.
Paul:
Yeah.
Haz:
So, we have to rethink that one. So, we did that. And then from there we just got the bug to make games. And, you know, the funny thing is, when I left the game industry back in like 2003, I’m like, seeya, I’ve got to work in a circle.
Paul:
Circle, full circle.
Haz:
Full circle. But also, it’s blurred massively, dude. Yeah, I mean, I. I read somewhere Blumhouse, you know, the guys who make the horror films like Insidious and Conjuring and. And The Purge. They’ve got a gaming division. Bad Robot. Yeah, Bad robot. J.J. Abrams Company got a gaming division. Skydance has got a gaming division, and.
Paul:
Even Netflix is setting up a game section.
Haz:
Netflix got a dedicated building, just making games, right? So, it just shows you how much the lines have blurred massively. And now, you know, like, you know, one of the biggest animated hits of the year was Mario Brothers, right? Do you remember back in the day, the original Mario or the Street Fighter movie that came out, which.
Paul:
Was so bad!
Haz:
So bad.
Paul:
I still liked the Mortal Kombat one, though. The original I was gonna say was very cool, that kind of.
Haz:
But that was done in a way that was like because I think Mortal Kombat had that live action feel in the game because they were scanned.
Paul:
It was scanned. Yeah. Motion capture.
Haz:
Yeah. So, you’re like, that works and it has a great soundtrack. But Street Fighter felt very cartoony with Jean-Claude Van Damme and so on. Great actors, just, just. And they didn’t know how to make those kinds of films because, yeah, the games market in the film industry just wasn’t gelling, You know, the film, the film executive government redesign everything and was now like, Well, hang on. This plays in the world of the game because the game just spent a decade creating that world. Why would we re-engineer it? Let’s just bring Hollywood and games and create something of an experience. So, I think that’s why Last of Us, the series, worked so well. I mean, I even got the game director Neil Druckman to direct an episode.
Paul:
He did an episode. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the characters are playing big characters in the show as well. But it’s kind of like games went Hollywood first, like they went, Let’s go narrative, story driven games. Let’s make it very immersive, very real. And now Hollywood is coming back to the game saying, oh, this is an untapped resource. Let’s start making films out of the games. And I was like, Yeah, they stole it from you first. But yeah, it’s good to see.
Haz:
Exactly. But it is a really interesting time we live in. And, and I think, you know, a lot of this is because accessibility is a technology like we wouldn’t be able to set up an animation company if we didn’t have the ease and access of tools like Unreal Engine. Yeah. You know, I mean. Yes. Yeah. Even Photoshop and Premiere play a big part in that, you know, to be able to edit your own stuff on your laptop and make a movie, you know, back then you needed expensive cameras, expensive edit suites and stuff. And it’s the same with game development now. Now you just download Unreal. Download Unity and make something. I mean, there’s people making really great games in Roblox or Sandbox. Yeah, yeah. People are making these games and these and these developers are like 16, 15-year-old developers are doing some amazing stuff. I like it, so I think it’s a very, very interesting time.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned Unreal Engine and I know it’s something you’re in love with. I mean I can see all your work through the years and you’re using different iterations of the Unreal engine as you go and obviously now, we’ve got Unreal Engine five. We’ve seen some of the capabilities and it’s the future we’ve got. The Matrix showcase was phenomenal with all the different things that showed off the nodes and things like that and showed the lighting effects and, and we’ve even seen people run with that, grab the ball and run. We’ve seen where they’re bringing AI kind of into NPCs where they’re having more natural conversations. You can ask a question; they’ll give you the answer like this. It’s exciting and it’s evolving and it’s very fast. Are you guys feeling that excitement? Are you also going to go and run with the ball and see what else you can do, especially as Unreal keeps developing?
Haz:
Definitely. And the thing that you mentioned is actually a company called In-World that’s creating these. It’s one of the highest funded startups and it’s set up. One of the founders is a guy called John Gaeta. He is the visual effects person who created the bullet time thing in The Matrix. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, John Gaeta is one of the founders of that company, In-World. And I met those guys, not John Gaeta, but they met the team at In-World at GDC. And it’s phenomenal the stuff you do. I mean, you’re going to get to a point where every time you meet this character, it’s like a new experience that you play the game. You’ll get one set of answers. I’ll play the game and it’s all dependent on what I’m doing and it’s reacting to my actions. It’s phenomenal. Like, I mean, look, I remember playing Zelda on a Gameboy, right when I was a kid, right? And I really believed that I was buying freaking magic potions from someone in the store. Oh, my God. This person sold me a magic potion, and that’s a kid. And now we got to a point where I have emotions and can, like, have a conversation with you that feels a little bit natural. Like what? That’s exciting. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned it’s kind of a dirty word and not a dirty word like it is.
Paul:
Yeah. As long as it’s not stealing people’s jobs and just making things slightly better, I think it’s okay.
Haz:
I think it’s okay. It’s not stealing people’s work, which is why Mid-journey has had a lot of stick about now. I love Mid-journey. I was one of the first to use it and I think it’s amazing if you’re a creator that’s trying to create pitch decks, right, or trying to communicate an idea, right? I mean, look, I have a Pinterest account for one reason only to find references in order to create pitches. And I go to a meeting, hey, it’s like this meets this meets that. Look at this environment there. It’s going to look like this, right? That’s what it’s for. And I think my journey is phenomenal. If you just type in these text prompts and you keep doing variations, it’s and it’s fun. It’s very quick, very cost effective. And it uses the same technique as I would have done if I was just taking images from the web for my pitch deck. Right? But the lines get muddy when you start to commercialize that piece of work. Like I would never sell. Yeah, yeah. I would never put those pitch decks online. I’m like, oh, my God, I’m violating everything. Even when I was cut like sizzle trailers, like you take other clips and film the create a fake trailer to kind of pitch it to the studio. Everyone does that, right? And I think some of the directors like in the past have put that out on the web to kind of show, hey, is what we’ve done. It’s phenomenal. But it’s different when you’re commercializing this and when you commercialize Mid-journey work or any kind of AI gen generative artwork, you’re selling other people bits of work in your work. And it becomes very muddy because the part of it is that, well, like, you know, it’s its own it’s a remix.
Haz:
Everything is a remix, right? We’ve all heard that term. But at the same time, a lot of the work, our digital artists work that are on station and so on that they spent so long trying to like the people that probably created Arcane, right? If you type in like, you know, text prompt, Arcane characters and you get this arcane looking thing and it’s like, Oh my God, it’s such a unique style. And you realize, well, the guys who did the Arcane show spent a decade.
Paul:
They worked. Yeah, hundreds of hours trying to get that done. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s….
Haz:
That’s a problem. Yeah.
Paul:
Yeah. And I know we had a previous conversation about it where it’s also not quite there yet. Like it’s, it’s, you know, we mentioned the secret invasion. Marvel’s opening credits are done with AI and you can tell it’s just it has that weird, warped kind of effect and it’s the…..
Haz:
Color it’s like yeah. Pinkish haze to it.
Paul:
Yeah, it’s just not right. Like you just look at it and say, Yep, that’s mid-journey. And so, yeah, but I can understand people getting upset thinking that jobs are being stolen and work is being stolen. And you know, man.
Haz:
The thing is that as much as we fear it as much as we can see the problems, and which is rightly so why there’s strikes in Hollywood at the moment for this stuff. It’s not going to go away. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not going to disappear. Right.
Paul:
So, we it has so many uses. It has so many benefits. It does.
Haz:
Of course, it does. Absolutely. Like, you know, I read somewhere about AI being used in hospitals to help read X-rays because at the moment, like doctors looking at X-rays based on their experience. But if you have an AI assistant, an AI and an experienced doctor, you’re most likely going to get it because most X-rays are usually 92 to 95% accurate in terms of what it’s diagnosing. But if you can get to like 98% because of AI, holy shit. Of course.
Paul:
Amazing. Yeah.
Haz:
Absolutely.
Paul:
And it’s never going to be tired. It’s never going to have a bad day. It’s, you know, it doesn’t need a cup of coffee like it doesn’t go and strike. Well, you’ll get, you’ll get people upset saying that but.
Haz:
That but that’s the thing right. You know, it’s designed to help us make our lives easier if.
Paul:
If it makes a person’s job easier. Yeah, it’s a good thing.
Haz:
It’s a good thing. But. But it’s human nature. The reason why we have cars and fast cars and technology, and everything is because we want to make our lives easier, right? And that’s human nature. But I think the big thing is like, you know, for us, for example, it has a nation. We’re very interested in AI because we want to create our own data set. We want to create our own data set, which is using all the work we have been creating over the years and feed that into our data set. And then I’m like, okay, I want to take the spaceship from the beyond. I want to take the character from Riff, put that together and give me something that feels sci fi, anime, and all of a sudden, I’m getting this really cool imagery, just like Mid-journey. The only difference is I’m not pulling from the web, I’m pulling from my data set.
Paul:
It’s all stuff you own and make. Yeah, it’s…
Haz:
On Amazon Servers.
Paul:
Speaking of, because we’re meant to be talking about a Game Moon Topia, which is out now. You were able to take one idea and turn it into a game which then became what we can see now through fortnight. So, do you want to tell us a bit about the origins of Moon Topia and how it kind of evolved into a game?
Haz:
Sure. I mean, as with most production companies, we have a treasure trove of IP, right? And sometimes they’re scripts, sometimes they outline one page, sometimes they’re full pitch deck. Or in the case of Moon Topia, we went as far as creating a big, animated trailer because it was basically going to be an animated series about a bunch of astronauts that in the future you can travel around the moon as space tourism. It gets hit by a meteorite crash, lands on the moon, and you find out that there’s monsters on the moon and they have to make their way back home. The only way to make their way back home is to find them in Topia base, get the only spaceship that’s available and head back home. But that journey, there’s a shit ton of monsters. So, we pitch Gravity meets A Quiet Place, set on the moon and we’re like, Cool, let’s do a sizzle trailer we showed at Annecy. But then we got really busy with Riff. We got really busy with our other games and other projects and I’m currently directing the cinematics for Dune, the video game for Funcom. That’s all I can say about it, by the way. I can’t say.
Paul:
Yeah, I was like, I can’t ask about Dune.
Haz:
No. They released an early trailer in January at the Games award. It’s called Dune Awakening. So you can see that and there’s like there’s a sequence of this guy with the hood walking through the say, That’s my secret. So.
Paul:
Well, I’m old and I played Dune One, which was kind of like an adventure game. Was that on the Amiga? It was on the Amiga. Yeah, it was on the Atari ST as well. I had it and so had Dune One. That was again like just a kind of story adventure game clicking text going to different places. Then Dune two was like a real time strategy game, right? I’d love to know what the new Dune is, what type of game it’s going to be. Can you even tell us that?
Haz:
I can only tell you that it’s going to be awesome. All I can say is there’s a trailer on YouTube called: Dune awakening that came out in January. Games Awards. Check that out. That’ll give you an idea of what the game is. Okay. That’s what I can say. And I’m responsible. I’m just responsible. The cinematic. So, my team has a motion plug into Funcom and we handle all the cinematic side and then the brilliant, wonderful team at Funcom that are doing the amazing work on the game, which is phenomenal.
Paul:
Excellent. Yeah, but nowhere near as good as me. And, you know, obviously nowhere near absolute amateurs.
Haz:
They’ve only got like a couple of more zeroes on there, but that’s okay. Yeah. No, So, so yeah, so going back to that, we got really busy, so we shelved the project, right? And that’s a natural thing to do in production. You work on a project, you shelve it and you come back, just like with Rift was based on the script called Brother, which we shelved, and we bought it back when the right opportunity came. So, I was at GDC at a Game Developers conference in San Francisco in March, and I sat in the big epic, the big epic presentation, and the room erupted when they announced UFN, which is Unreal Editor for Fortnight. And I’m like, wow, what is this thing? And this is fortnight, What’s the excitement? And then when I saw the demo that they’re done, I’m like, this doesn’t look like fortnight, but it feels like fortnight. What is this? And go Oh you as an unreal engine creator, you can bring your stuff into fortnight and create your own experiences. I’m like, wow, okay. But then it got even better. You can monetize from your content and the split is like 8020. I think it’s more favorable. So, the creator, I’m like, okay, that’s a big win. But lastly, the user base is 500 million plus. So as a company whose sole purpose is creating original IP and tapping into the user base, what better way to test your IP than the existing 500 million plus user base?
Paul:
Got all those eyes on it straight away? Yeah. No.
Haz:
Yeah. So, I came back, I said to the team, oh, we got to do something. And they’re like, oh I don’t know, like maybe. So, I spent all my weekends making something and I made a level. And then one day I said, hey, everyone, jump on. We’re going to do a fortnight game and we’re going to play a game fortnight. Okay. It’s weird that the boss wants to play Fortnight with us, so we end up playing fortnight and they’re like, this is a cool level. We’ve never seen this before. This fortnight. I’m like, no, I made that. This is very, very rough. And then Sam was like, I’m going to come on and help you lighten the level. And then Miles, I’ll come on to help you with animation and Ryan’s like, everyone’s in, everyone’s in all of a sudden. And that’s a good example. You could choose to prototype something very quickly and pitch it to whether it’s your team, to your financiers, to people. It’s a great prototyping tool. So, we decided we’re going to do something, but what we decided to do was we had to create something that felt original. We weren’t. We didn’t want to make it like an island demo or something that was very quick. Like you have existing fortnight games. And that’s the thing about you’ve got to remember fortnight games back in, back in the day like last year was only can be done using creator mode which is the existing fortnight assets so all of the fortnight islands last year look the same whereas now in the opportunity to create something that looks fresh and there’s some amazing work coming out from other unreal engine artists using, which is phenomenal. So, we decided let’s just take Moontopia, which we had made a trailer and show that A.S.
Haz:
last year, take that move the Unreal Engine project into like the monsters and the astronauts and everything Moon based, move that into and make a game out of that. And the plot would be exactly like it would be in a movie. You crash land, you have X amount of time to find the nearest spaceship in Utopia. You run out of oxygen; you die. Oh, and there’s a bunch of aliens that are going to rip you to pieces.
Paul:
No pressure. No pressure, No pressure.
Haz:
So, we realized, oh my God, this will make a great Fortnite game. Because not only is it great as a solo game, but it’s also great to play as teams, but also very competitive. Who’s going to get to the ship first? Who’s going to get the biggest pickups, all the keys and so on. It became so fun. So, we spent a month learning. And just for those who are not familiar, UFN is basically unreal. Engine 5.1 lite, so it’s unreal. Engine five ripped out a lot of stuff and just kept the stuff that you need to do stuff to make something, which is still quite a lot. Um, and so obviously a lot of stuff we had done in Unreal Engine five broke like some of our animation tools, broke some of our particles. But that’s okay because we don’t have to design a game engine or game mechanics. We just utilize fortnight game mechanics. We just need to focus on getting our stuff in. The thing I do have to say though is making a game a fortnight game really reminded me of making games on the PS2 days when I mean that not look wise more the more the memory management you only have 400MB for your entire game. Includes audio, CG assets.
Paul:
Everything that’s crazy to me. Like that is tiny.
Haz:
It’s tiny. But you know, you know why I spent some of that epic that and they said, well, the reason we have that limit is to make sure that every game has the same amount of memory so that no one’s hogging someone else’s band. Bandwidth, space or memory space. Everyone’s on the same playing field, which I thought was a very, very cool idea. It reminded me really like; how do you take something small to make it feel big? You know, back in the day on the PS2 days, I had like a texture map, like one square texture map, like 128 pixels by 128, all of like the wheels and the door all on one map. And then you tile, you kind of map that onto your geometry to make it look good. And my geometry was only like a couple of polygons. Right now, we have like, you know, we have Unreal Engine five, but our maps can only be two K, which is big, but like a lot of other developers like, you know, like, like I remember Sam was like, dude two K man that’s low dude. My dude, try 1 to 8 by 1 to 8 back in the day. So, it really allowed us to optimize. It allowed us to be very smart with how we make something look amazing or cool with very low memory management and resources. And also, it’s got to hit the frame rate. You have to make sure you hit 60 frames per second. Anything lower? The Fortnite players, you know, and we spent a lot of time watching Fortnite players play on the videos and the replays playing against other people. They’re flying everywhere, man. They’re flying away, shooting all sorts of stuff.
Haz:
Any lag, they’re going to be pretty pissed off. So, you have to understand that.
Paul:
You don’t want a load of stuff, kind of loading in all at once, just making the game choke.
Haz:
Yeah, totally. So, we ended up spending about three months making this game. And I think the thing that took the longest was testing. So, here’s the thing. We’re making a console game at the moment. Like I said earlier, like Max beyond for, you know, on the Xbox consoles and so on. And when you do that, when you do your code, you do your scene, and you press play, and you play it locally to test it right on a Fortnite game. It’s not like that. If you want to play, test it like you put a new monster in. Okay, I want to test this, see if this works. You have to upload it to a private server and in between loading into a private server, you have to run past all these validation checks by epic validation check, memory management, validation check. And it’s like a red meter. If you go past a yellow meter, if you go past a yellow meter will not upload. That’s a whole different mindset, dude. A whole different mindset to make it a game. Oh yeah.
Paul:
So, you don’t have the luxury of just kind of throwing it in there and messing with it and playing with it. You have to kind of make sure it’s stable and running well before you’re even allowed to test it. Yeah, it has.
Haz:
It has to run on the server. It has to run within a bandwidth, which I think is a very, very cool thing when I think about it. Now at the time I’m like, Oh my God. But now I’m like, I’m glad it’s like that because now I know that if you play or someone else plays it, it’s going to be as expected. Whereas if you make something locally, you’re not sure. Is that going to run online very well? Like what’s the bandwidth for, you know, someone could be playing on their phone, for example, you know.
Paul:
Yeah. Mean and there’s so many different devices now. I mean, you know, there’s a huge difference between even a Nintendo switch and an Xbox, you know, like it’s. Yeah. So yeah, it makes sense that they restrict so that everything is kind of more playable and uniform no matter where in the world you are, no matter what you’re playing it on, it makes sense. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And so going from again, we keep kind of going full circle, so….Moontopia!
Paul:
I know I’ve seen other stuff where you did some work for other companies, and it was kind of VR based and so it was excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent and excellent. Excellent. Sorry.
Haz:
And man is the company. Yes. Owns. Excellent is like they like X.
Paul:
You know, to make up words but yeah. And again, I saw some trailers that looked very much like a metaverse thing and VR involvement. Are you interested in maybe branching out, getting some VR stuff? I mean, I.
Haz:
Can say the same because I can see the VR headsets buying. You mean VR? I haven’t. I have an Oculus Rift. And, you know, I, um, Oculus Quest and I and I play pistol Whip like I’m freaking John Wick. Yes. Yes. That game. It’s amazing. So, yeah, and, you know, true story. We actually have a VR, a very rough VR demo of Moontopia. So last year we were going to take it from an animated show to a VR game because we were looking at ways of having multiple verticals. And that’s the other thing, dude, like transmedia, the whole everything we do is transmedia because we build it once and we end up, you know, like we made an animated film called Riff. We made a video game, we could do a comic book, but we could do that in Moontopia. Moontopia was an animated TV show, tested it in VR, and we were like, Oh, that’s a whole different mind field. Doing VR games. Like a whole different thing. It’s so different and fun, but different. We didn’t have the skill set to really do a good VR game justice. And now we’re making a game. Um, but yeah, I’m excellent. This is an interesting one because there’s a company called X Manor, which is like an esports company that reached out to us saying, hey look man, we saw some of the Unreal Engine cinematics you’re doing. We love that. You know, we’re a web3 company. We’re doing NFTs and stuff. And those words at the time, I’m like, Oh God, no, no, I don’t do NFTs. I don’t do crypto. I don’t even have a bitcoin dude. Like no blockchain. What? And no, no, no, no. You have to worry about any of that stuff.
Haz:
We just want your creative magic. We want what you guys do well, which is to tell stories. And we’ve got this story about we have a pitch deck, we don’t have a product, and we need to show people stuff because we raise money. So, we’re like, okay, great. So, we end up doing like a 2.5 minute trailer video showing what the future of the metaverse could be very much like. Ready Player One-esque, right? Because at the time the only reference was ready. Player one So we were essentially creating the next reference for people to look at, which is pretty cool. And we did it and it came back. Everyone’s like, oh my God, we loved it. We loved it. We do like a couple more videos. I’m like, Sure. I mean, this is great business for us. We know our cinematics team will be super happy, but question why are we pitching Web3 If I if I’m correct, Web3 is immersive interaction, you know, in immersive experience of, of the Internet while we’re pitching it in video and image, which is web2, they’re like, oh, what other way would you do it? I’m like, well, you know that trailer you really like? We actually did that entire trailer in Unreal Engine. They’re like, really? We thought you did it like in Maya Houdini, you know, like proper traditional animation. That’s why it looks so slick. I’m like, no, no, no. That’s, obviously it’s rendered, but it was all rendered from a game engine. So technically we could just plug a controller in, spend a few months moving it into a game, into a game environment.
Paul:
Go in and play it.
Haz:
Yeah, play it. They’re like, Oh my God. They’re like. They’re like, so, so happy, so supportive. And we ended up prototyping it using the trailer assets and we prototyped it. You can walk around, and some really cool stuff interact. And I was showing this all on Zoom like, oh my God, how do we play it? I’m like, okay, well what do you have? Do you have an Nvidia RTX card? They’re like, no, no, we just have phones and iPads because they’re tech. They’re tech guys, right? Yeah. You know, they’re executives. They’re like, we don’t have gaming workstations. Like, my son might have one maybe. Oh, man. Okay. So, we have to find a way to get you guys to play this. And when we looked at the world of the metaverse, we realized the metaverse is designed for everyday people, not just gamers. Like my mom should be able to get her phone and just go to the web link and play it right, just like and this is why when I’m on the tube and I see most people on their phone playing a game on a mobile, it’s why mobile gaming is phenomenally massive. It’s a massive industry because everyone can do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. The barrier to access is low. So, we end up learning about pixel streaming where you have an instance of unreal Engine running on an Amazon web server and then you send the link to the person and they can play it on their phone. And they were like, mind blowing. You’re like, Oh my God. And we’re like this. We’re like, this is actually pretty cool. Did we just make an MMO? And we’re like, Yeah, we just made an MMO and that just grew us as a company to start really exploring the world of game dev.
Haz:
And now we just can’t get enough of it.
Paul:
Yeah. And again, so you’re talking about big open worlds and things like that. Is that something you would hope you might scale up to in the future?
Haz:
Yeah. I mean, the original plan was to go full scale. On it. But as with everything in the world of Web3, it’s a roller coaster that goes up and it goes down. We were in a section when it was up. It’s now very down. So, there’s been a massive pause on the productions like X. Mana are rethinking their strategy because the whole market is very volatile. It changes constantly. I mean, I’m not just talking about the world of crypto, I’m just talking about web3 itself. You know, like remember last year everyone was talking about Web3. This year not very much. People were talking about Web3, right.
Paul:
It’s not a buzzword anymore. Yeah.
Haz:
Yeah, exactly. So, we put a pause in it. But the good thing is, like, you know, most people that invested in the world of web3, you know, they’ve got tangible assets and money in there and it’s really hard for them to, like, see that. And I really feel for them because they’re like, Oh my God. And I really hope Web3 takes off the way it should do because it could really change the way we, we, we exploit experiences and information. I think it’s going to be great, but you don’t need crypto to have Web3. I’m trying to tell people web3 is web3, It’s not crypto.
Paul:
It’s almost like they’re married. I mean, it’s so remembered Decentraland was a big deal, but not so much anymore. But yeah, everything was like, well, if you want to be, if you want to sign up to it, you have to have a wallet and you have to have crypto. And it’s like, what? What? And then, you know, as you said, people want ease of access. They want something on their phone that they can press a button. If you’re telling me I have to sign up to crypto and sign up to a wallet and just to go into a lobby, basically, no, that’s the answer. I mean.
Haz:
Dude, that is why Fortnite works. This is why Fortnite, you download it for free.
Paul:
You, your six-year-old niece, can play it. That kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely.
Haz:
And if you want to go buy stuff, there’s v-bucks. But you don’t have to spend any money. I mean, I haven’t spent any money since playing. Why should I? Right. So, I mean, but that’s the point. So do we put a pause on that. But it really allowed us as a team to really get our heads into the world of game development in that way. So, in a way, Web3 for us was an entry into going back into game development because and that’s why we ended up making Utopia in Fortnite because like we had to build everything from scratch, like all our NPCs had to be designed in a certain way. All our AI systems had to be built in a way. We had to build pixel streaming solutions, all of that stuff. And then you go look at it’s like, oh, I’d have to think of that stuff like it’s all their game design. Exactly.
Paul:
Well, speaking of, I did watch a video from Winbush who was playing your game and it doesn’t look like Fortnite. I mean that as a compliment. It’s very you know, it’s got better lighting, better shading. You’ve got your own assets in there. You can see it’s this, you know, it’s completely different. It’s not this cartoony, you know, green and blue. It’s and seeing those assets, seeing this kind of octopus kind of monster kind of crawling up the rocks and you have to use the turret guns to shoot them down and climb up these base towers and things like that. I mean, it’s just it’s a thing of its own. It’s, you know, but I don’t know more than that. So, I watched him play. He was playing solo. And are there other ways to play? Yeah.
Haz:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the first things we when we decided to make Moontopia was we wanted this to really embrace Fortnite’s mechanics, not the way it looks, but the mechanics and mechanics is you have so much more fun when you’re playing with your friends, whether it’s co-op mode, whether it’s team-based mode or whether it’s competitive. And believe me, everyone at the company is competitive. So, we’re in competitive mode and it’s so much fun. So, we’re like we want to have that we want to have that so you can play solo and have a great experience fighting the aliens, you know, seeing the story and everything. Or you can play, you can play with a team of up to six people, you know, set up your own party, match on a private server or a public server and play and just have fun. And it’s still the same experience except it’s much more it’s much more elevated when you’ve got more people. Um, and it’s not, it’s not a big map, you know, we made it very, it’s a very linear. So, when you see the wind Bush video and yeah and again, I have to say like props to Jonathan Winbush man. Like just a fact. I actually, when I was starting to learn Unreal, I watched Jonathan Winbush’s videos. That’s how I learned Unreal. So, so when he reached out to me and go, Dude, like huge fan of your work, like I’d love to like, you know, showcase me. And I’m like, It’s great. I was like, oh, sounds super cool in the text. I’m like, Yeah, sure, yeah, absolutely.
Paul:
I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it.
Haz:
He’s super cool. Met me in person at Siggraph last year. Super cool. But, you know, I have to I have to say this, though, like if it wasn’t for people like Jonathan Winbush, Matt Workman, William Fulcher, and there’s a bunch of other people out there that just dedicate their time in between their day jobs to provide tutorials and share their knowledge to the world. We wouldn’t have creators like me and a bunch of other people that are doing amazing work in Unreal if it wasn’t for those people contributing. So, like massive props out to those guys.
Paul:
Man Yeah, fair play, fair play and the game itself. So again, we mentioned like, it’s not just solo. You can play with your friends, and I know it opens kind of like a cinematic kind of and I think it closes as well with a cinematic. So, I mean, is it story driven? You know, does it kind of guide you along the way? Will you always know what you’re supposed to be doing?
Haz:
Yeah, it’s a really, really good question. And when we started, when we started doing the original plan was to migrate the entire animated series into you because we could tell a really good story, have a really good quest, and then the more you start to play Fortnite, the more you start to see other people play it. Then you got time to sit through Game of Thrones level story lore. I don’t want to get on and play the game and collect as much ammo and just like to get to the end and get the highest points right and get to claim their rewards. So, but we as a company that solely is driven by story, we create some cinematics. So, we had an opening cinematic and again we originally had some text, and we removed that text. We’re like, it has to be visual narrative because this is Fortnite is the world everyone plays that We don’t want to have a language barrier. So as a storyteller, it forced us to be very visual narrative and to really tell that storytelling. And we kept it very short. And you can see the ship crashing. You get it right to the point, oh, okay, we’re in a ship, we have to make it out. But also, we didn’t also want to have so many like waypoints that you have in games saying go over here and go over there because.
Paul:
Arrows and checkpoints and all that kind of stuff.
Haz:
So, Sam Rebello, our level designer, who came on, he really took what I’d done and just made it way better. And he kind of created it in a way that it just felt natural that you just feel like you have to go here. There’s a big monster there. You feel like you must go there. And that’s a good level design as a kudos to Sam. And then we had, um, Ryan Fleming, who’s our dev coder and Arnesto. They came in and really did stuff that I didn’t think was possible to do in Fortnite, like optimization, making something that look very cinematic and crushing down the polygons to make it fit in a world of 400 Meg and your memory and doing things like, you know, you may see it in the video like one of the things you have to do is there’s this floating astronauts and they’re your crew members. And the monsters got them on like this, sort of like energy tendrils and you got to Freedom Tower. Yeah. And you got freedom but that’s a mechanic that isn’t in Fortnite. We design that. So, we had to like to use verse coding, which is a programming language inside of Fortnite to create that. And so all of a sudden, you’re bringing the best on your team that are art, you’re bringing the best of your code. And my job is to direct the game. Directors like to, to kind of like remind them of the shitty version I did and that we have to elevate that the North Star has always been, how do we get out of Dodge, zip down the zip line, fight the monsters, collect all the keys and jump in the ship to go home.
Haz:
But one of the biggest inspirations, and I’ve used this on all of the promotional material Moontopia you always see Earth. That’s the thing that the minute you start the game, you’re on the inside the ship and the doors are busted and you’re looking out and you see Earth in the distance and that is subconsciously. So, I’ve got to go home. And that was something I got inspired from Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, you know, when he took that photograph on the moon of Earth. And it just reminds you like, oh my God, you’re on the moon. You’re looking at Earth like, that’s home.
Paul:
That’s where I’m supposed to be.
Haz:
Yeah, that’s where I should be. What am I doing on the back of that? Just this zero-gravity stuff I’m vibing. So, that was the North Star for this whole film. Like, we gotta get home and what do we do? We’re on uncharted territory. There’s the gravity and that’s the other thing, you know, that we end up playing with the gravity setting in Fortnite, and there’s all kinds of bloopers we could show you, like people firing rockets and shooting straight up into space and never coming back down. Yeah. So, we had to balance the gravity to make it that people like to jump around. And believe me, most of the Fortnite gamers like to jump around. Of course, do it in a way that doesn’t go too high, but enough to give it that sense of floatiness. So, there’s a lot of R&D that is required to do that. You can imagine the number of times we uploaded on the server back and forth to do that.
Paul:
Very good. I’ve got maybe two questions left. I was going to say one and I was going to lie to you and then I was going to sneak an extra one in. I’ll just say just before we ask those questions, just for the listeners and viewers at home, if you like this sort of content, if you like OutsiderGaming and you want to see more stuff like this, please hit like and subscribe. But more importantly, leave us some comments. Tell us what we’re doing well, tell us what we’re not doing well, tell us what you want to see. And we’ll try and do it for you. And yeah, two questions. So, I have to ask a non-Moontopia question. So, Katie Sackhoff, I am a total nerd. I love Star Wars, I love The Mandalorian. I think she’s pretty much taken over that show in a good way, you know? Bye-bye Pedro. It’s okay. She is absolutely killing it. And I hope it continues with her as the main role, it seems to be going that route. And also like, I mean, outside of that, she’s been in Battlestar Galactica. She’s a massive star. What was it like having her as your star in your movie and do you have any horror stories or any, you know, anecdotes or anything nice to say?
Haz:
She’s a diva? No, absolutely. She’s like, you couldn’t be further from that. She’s like, absolutely not a diva. She’s actually a really good friend of mine. Actually. We’ve come like brilliant over the years and stuff. What’s interesting, I mean, I can definitely share the story on how what it was like speaking to her for the first time. I remember like, my producers are like saying, you know, we’re going to get Katie Sackhoff to speak to you. You know, we think she’d be great for the film. What do you think? I’m like, Yeah, was amazing. Oh, my God. Like, I mean, let me prep some time to talk to her. Oh, no, you’re speaking to her tomorrow. Here’s the Skype invite. I’m like, okay. And obviously, like, you love Battlestar Galactica, loved, you know, pitch black. You know, she’s like, you know, badass, right? Um, so she jumps on a call within five minutes. She’s like, the whole star fame thing just goes out the window. She’s like, just like me and you having a conversation, man, she’s. You know, she loves sci fi. She loves talking about this stuff in general. And it was really great. She really liked the script. But I remember like after the Long Jam, which was supposed to be 20 minutes, they end up being like an hour of just chatting on Skype. She was like, look, man, I’m just gonna ask a question. Like, you know, why? Why do you think I should do this movie? And I’m like, oh my God, this is the ultimate question, man. Like, if I ‘F’ this up, there’s no movie and my producers are going to be pissed and I could do the usual thing like, well, this is going to be great for your career. It’s going to put you on the map.
Haz:
But do I really want to say that? No. So I just spoke from my heart. I’m like, look, man, like I’m going to be really honest with you. Huge fan of, you know, Battlestar Galactica. You played a badass in Starbuck. Starbuck, you played in Chronicles of Riddick. You know, you played a badass. In fact, in your new sheriff show, she’s going to Kill Me for saying the new sheriff show. So, it’s more than a sheriff show. But, you know, she plays a cop and she’s a badass. Um, yeah. In this movie, you’re not a badass. You are a weak, vulnerable human being that’s dealing with her inner demons to try and solve the mystery of the future of our planet. Oh, and the entire movie rests on your shoulder. Just like Sam Rockwell in Moon. She’s, like, taking a moment to process it. She’s like. And I’m thinking, maybe my Skype has lagged, I hope, because my bolsters up and she’s like, I’ve never done any of these things. I’m like, and that’s why you should do it. And I’m thinking, okay, I’ll ballsed it up, right? I think like the next day or a few days later, you know, I get a call from her manager and yeah, she knows what you said but she’s in and yeah. And from there it was like we were prepping for the movie. Like every week we’d jump on Skype. She’ll go through script notes. Sure. I mean, it’s essentially her movie, you know, it’s her carrying the show. So, I really wanted to work with and work with an actor that was very collaborative, and I just couldn’t have asked for a better actor. Like I was not expecting it to be this level of collaboration because like, you know, before that, I’d made an independent movie, very Guerrilla.
Haz:
So, this was like my first proper movie with a proper star. So, I’m like, I don’t know what the cadence was like, you know, how I should be and stuff. And it just turned out it didn’t feel like, you know, on the day of the shoot, we’re sitting on the floor, like going through the script and stuff, and I didn’t feel like it wasn’t like a director actor relationship. It was like just two creators getting together to make something really cool. And I think that’s the fondest memory I can get from working with Katie.
Paul:
Yeah, it shows a passion, like it shows she’s obviously believed in the project, so much so that she wanted to influence and kind of, you know, make any improvements. Yeah. Amazing, amazing, brilliant. And she wasn’t horrible. That’s good to know. Yeah. The last thing I want to say, obviously the game has been out since the 28th, so I know we’re going to leave links in the description as to how people can log on, but it’s basically put in a code if I’m right. Yeah.
Haz:
So, whether you’re on a PlayStation, Xbox switch, PC or Android, not the iPhone, obvious reasons why. Um yeah you just go you just go to discover and then you just type in the code and boom, you’re off. And in a few weeks’ time or maybe sooner, you may see Moontopia pop up on the front page because they’re going through the motions at the moment. So that may be a fun way for you to find it, but definitely enter the code. It’s, you know, there’s tons of trailers out for it and just have fun playing it, man. Just play it, break it. I would love to see bloopers. I’ve seen a lot of TikTok videos of some bloopers. Yeah, I love bloopers. So, if you find a blooper, please record it, post it. Love that.
Paul:
So aside from that. What’s next? What’s next for Moon Topia in particular? Are you going to do more?
Haz:
Yeah, I mean, we had such a blast. I mean, yes, given how, you know, it is a very beta software. So, there’s lots of bugs, there’s lots of things being ironed out. It’s not perfect software. Things are going to break. But on top of all that, though, we just had so much fun because like, you know, we didn’t have to worry about mechanics or Odin mechanics. We just made a game. So, we want to expand that further. And we have a bunch of ideas, but we want to see within two months what the metrics are like. So, like, you know, if there’s a lot of player retention, it’s kind of like YouTube videos. The more viewers you get, the more inspired you to make stuff right. And so, the more player retention we get. So, all you players out there play the game, um, the more player retention inspires us to like, okay, let’s spend a bit more time to expand the map. And obviously you can’t make multiple levels. It has to be one big island. So, what we’re going to do is we’re calling it an island because we’re on the moon. But what we want to do is we want to take the players underneath the lunar landscape and see what the alien caves are. A whole new interior design for that. We want to do a space elevator moment. We want to have more puzzle-based stuff. So, the idea is the map will still be the same. So, for those who want to play the normal map, they go this way. For those who have played it already, you can go this way and you get hold of everything. Or for those who really, really want to see a whole different world jump down into this crater, that is a whole new world.
Paul:
Brilliant. Amazing. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, and I look forward to everything you do because it seems that you evolve and pivot all the time. So, it could be something entirely different the next time we talk, which is phenomenal.
Haz:
It could be. It could be VR.
Paul:
It could be VR. Hopefully. Hopefully. For me. Absolutely. Yes. Or we could be talking about the next movie you’re doing with Sam Rockwell because you know, you’ve plugged them here. He’s bound to be watching. It’s guaranteed. Amazing. We’ll leave it there. Thank you so much.
Haz:
Thank you.
Paul:
Thank you. Thank you.