Hazelight Studios: Working Culture and Approach to Creating Collaborative Gameplay

Hazelight Studios

Oliver Granlund: My story with Hazelight actually started in school. I'd always been interested in story-driven games and Hazelight was high on my list, and they happened to be looking for interns. I did the work test with a couple of classmates. Curveball, I didn’t get it. They were looking for a more technical skillset than I had and instead took my classmate.

I ended up at DICE as a level/game designer, another place high on my list. DICE was an invaluable experience and I stayed for a couple of years, before deciding I wanted to try something new. As it happens, my old classmate contacted me and said Hazelight was looking for a designer with a skillset closer to design rather than tech. Things went quickly from there, and that’s how I ended up at Hazelight.

I honestly barely remember the first day, it was a blur. I remember the shock when I saw the earliest, broken, and not arted prototypes. My first task on the other hand, besides a general introduction to systems and the engine, was together with another new designer, Robert Johansson. The task was to create a level that eventually would become "Tree" in It Takes Two. This is no small task, as we owned everything from the design of abilities, level design, combat design, and just generally what the level was. But it was also the type of ownership I'd craved over the years and it was fantastic to own a part of the game, in that sense.

Daniel Issa: I also started my game development career at DICE as QA and stayed there for about two years. Funny enough, it was actually Oliver here whom I ran into on my way home one day and he simply asked if I was interested in joining Hazelight. Intrigued and excited by the thought as I had just finished playing A Way Out which was a great game – I sent the application and got hired! Getting the job was such a blast for me and I was so excited to join this team who focus so much on combining narrative and gameplay which was different from what I did previously.

I actually remember my first day quite clearly. I had no idea what type of game Hazelight was developing so I started to creatively envision a game in my head that I thought they were working on. As I sat down at my desk, glancing over at the person sitting next to me – I just saw two frogs jumping around like crazy and I thought to myself "What the f*** is happening here? This place is actually crazy! I love it!"

Once It Takes Two was released I got the offer to join the production team as a Producer working together with Aimar Bergan and here we are!

Working with Beginners

Daniel Issa: Excluding the regular onboarding process for new hires, which is vastly different from studio to studio, I believe if you truly want to welcome a person to be a part of the team, you need to have an inclusive collaborative mindset in the culture of the studio. This is not something one can force by rules or processes. I see it as a direct reflection of the people you are working with. 

With the above in mind, for us, this goes hand in hand with building that understanding between departments – understanding that you may be a person who represents Animation in the studio, but you are working very closely with all other departments and you are as important and included in shaping the studio culture as anyone else. Designer or Code, QA or Artist, Junior or Director – it doesn't matter.

What I personally find inspiring with our team is that we understand that nothing is a one-person job and working together we create and develop games that we would want to play ourselves. The understanding that a clear vision, crazy gameplay, and team collaboration are the beating heart of this studio.

Maintaining Creative Freedom

Oliver Granlund: I think in an industry that is obsessed with authors' and directors' singular vision down to the pixel. Josef Fares, the director of all Hazelights games has a different take than most. Don’t get me wrong, Josef owns the ultimate vision of the game but leaves a lot of work blank for the team to fill in. In a way, he serves more as a compass for the teams working, rather than telling us exactly what to make. This empowers the team, in all disciplines. 

One of our goals at Hazelight is to create a wide variety of gameplay, blending different genres and tastes. Josef acting as a compass results in the team owning a lot of the creative aspects, allowing a variety that would be harder coming from one singular vision. As a compass he is mostly pointing us in the direction of doing something more innovative, pointing out what isn't working or what needs to become cooler. 

Everyone, from artists to programmers, gets to influence and be creative. Each level is almost like its own small indie studio, presenting to Josef regularly for feedback. I don’t think the level of variety, taste, and creativity would have been nearly as wide had it come from one person. Almost everyone in game development is creative, and letting them be creative is to our benefit. 

Hiring a New Specialist

Oliver Granlund: To have this creative responsibility, and not to bloat the teams too much, we always try to hire people with wider skill sets, as we're emulating a small studio setup. Of course, we often want specific skills and specializations, but always on top of a wide base of knowledge. 

Generally, when we work we work in small teams, pods, consisting of two designers, two programmers, two artists, and two animators. Outside the pods, there are smaller specialized teams that jump in and help out such as audio, tech art, etc. Together the pod owns a few levels, with fairly little outside help. A team of eight is still small enough that everyone can have a lot of freedom and their voice heard, and the consequence is that you have to be able to execute what you want to achieve within the pod.

A designer for example will do prototyping, level design, game design, UX, technical implementation, planning, communication, etc. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses so we try to make a complementary team, but the reality is that in a small team you need to wear many hats. 

As for soft skills, especially for design, it’s quite important to be a good listener and communicator. You need to sell other departments on your vision, or listen to theirs, while also making sure everyone is comfortable with the workload. In general, we are quite light on middle management. We have two producers for a team of 70, but each pod has a designer acting as a "mini producer" that is always communicating with the producers. For us, this has worked really well, with fewer steps in communication and giving the teams more agency over what they want and need. 

Hazelight's Approach to Education

Daniel Issa: Something that has been mentioned by Josef in other interviews but is important to mention again is that about 70% of the team who developed A Way Out were fresh out of school. We are keen on keeping that collaboration going with schools and keeping our doors open for internships and more junior-level positions which we feel is very important for our studio culture. It is a part of Hazelights history that we value highly.

With that said and looking at this from a broader perspective, it is unfortunately widely known that in game development the expectations set on a lot of entry-level positions are either way too high or there are simply too few of them. I believe our industry overall can get better in creating even more opportunities for people, especially younger ones, who want to work with game development.

Challenges Behind the Co-Op Mechanics

Oliver Granlund: The extra hoops you need to jump through for co-op, not to mention online co-op, are countless. We insist on asymmetrical mechanics between the players, meaning essentially making two unique mechanics and making sure they play well together. Finding two mechanics is quite easy, but making them feel equally fun can be a larger struggle.

For example, in "Tree", we had the sap and match gun. One is essentially shooting explosive goo, the other has matches that detonate the goo. What we noticed was that the sap player had more to do, while the other player was a bit unengaged. This was something that was hard to get away from, so instead, we made the enemies more aggressive towards the matchplay. This made for a more balanced experience between the players. 

Another aspect when it comes to coop you’d think that the saying "two heads are better than one" was true, but generally, we’ve seen the opposite. People are quite bad at communicating. They may each have one piece of a puzzle on their respective screen, but not say anything. In a way, so much information gets lost that it’s harder to convey information than it would in a single-player game. We really have to put in effort for players to communicate and read the environment. It’s one of those things that you might not think of before setting up a puzzle, how much gets lost in translation. 

One big pain is syncing the players. In other words, making sure that one player doesn’t run off doing something else and leave the other player behind. Often if a player gets the opportunity to leave the other behind, they will, without not realizing it. We’re so focused on what happens on our screen that we often don’t notice what happens on the other. So we always have to make sure to sync them with puzzles that require both of them and prevent backtracking. 

If you’re somewhat familiar with action-adventure games such as uncharted, you may know that they fake a lot of things. Such as teleporting to another location without you noticing, mid-gameplay. This is either done to switch levels or to make you see something specific. But with two cameras this is way harder to do. It’s really hard to fake anything. There’s still smoke and mirrors, but it’s way harder when you can see it from two perspectives. 

Now that’s not even mentioning optimization, having to render everything twice, which is a battle on its own. 

Testing the Titles

Daniel Issa: From a development point of view, there really are no tricks. We, as many others, simply understand that the most valuable feedback one can get on a level is to test it on a pair of fresh eyes. In our case, we split our tests into two: Internal and External. 

Internal tests for us mostly refer to friends coming over to our studio and playing a specific section of a level. We mostly observe and look for anything that sticks out of the design intent. As It Takes Two is a pure co-op game, we need to observe their gameplay from a different perspective compared to what someone might be used to in a single-player game.

While observing the way they play, we ask ourselves – are they subconsciously solving puzzles without knowing what they did for one another? Do they understand the co-op design? Did they manage to play an entire section, solving challenges and all, without communicating with each other once? The outcome of these tests is extremely valuable information for us and it would give a clear indication that we need to look closer at what they've tested from a co-op perspective.

External tests take place when we feel ready to test the game outside of friends and family with players all around the globe. For us, it's very important to make sure that we ask the right type of questions at the right time. Depending on where we are in production would reflect that. To clarify, even if we really would want to know what feedback a player has on the story early, we won't ask that question because we know the story isn't "there" yet, and potentially get skewed feedback. This is true for all aspects of the game. Design, Environment, UI, and UX.

Conducting tests takes time from everyone in the team as we have a set of goals to achieve. We carefully plan and set the scope together, separately within each pod. We also get a lot of help from the EA-QA team with feedback and reports on anything that might disrupt the critical path for the player in the game. 

Daniel Issa, Producer at Hazelight Studios

Oliver Granlund, Design Lead at Hazelight Studios

Interview conducted by Ana Kessler