Invoke Studios On the Studio's Relaunch & Building Its Own Specific Working Culture

In October 2022, nearly three years after its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, Tuque Games announced that it was relaunching as Invoke Studios. The revamped studio revealed that it would operate with autonomy from Wizards of the Coast developing its own culture and specific work methods and shared that it is working on a new game that will be based on Dungeons & Dragons and built using Unreal Engine 5.

We spoke to Invoke's general manager, Dominic Guay, to discuss the studio's approach to organizing working processes and its hiring practices as well as talk about Invoke's new project.

Introduction

My name is Dominic Guay, I'm Vice President and General Manager at Invoke Studios. The team at Invoke includes talents that have worked on some of the biggest franchises developed in Montreal over the last two decades. It’s a healthy mix of younger talents that bring fresh perspectives and ideas.

The Invoke launch highlights the significant evolution of the studio over the last year. We have a new mission – to build high quality AAA HD games. We welcomed many new talents and evolved our ways of working in line with our new mission. It was a major shift and now are exciting times at Invoke!

Invoke Studios

Our studio culture starts with the empowerment of developers. We think that the best games are made when talented developers can take initiative and when they can define the best solutions and be creative to achieve the goals of the team.

This said, games are made by a diverse team, so we value a respectful environment where everyone feels safe and can enjoy their work. Finally, while we have a lot of developers that shipped great games in the past, you are never entitled to success, you need to work for it, and you need to listen and learn. That is why we also value humility.

As for how we work, we organize ourselves into multi-disciplinary teams and our process empowers them to have ownership in their work. Of course, you need to have a direction for a game, but communication should go in all directions and good ideas come from anyone on the team.

We are organized to ensure that within a craft you feel connected to your colleagues, but ultimately most of our processes are there to break silos and enable artists, programmers, and designers to work together and be creative.

Hiring a New Specialist

Obviously, from a hard skill perspective, it starts with people who are strong in one or multiple areas. We value generalists but modern games are complex and you also need specialists to achieve great results.

Considering soft skills specifically, we look for compatibility and complementarity with our culture and with our values mentioned earlier.  While we are growing, we want to protect and foster our culture to ensure a fun working environment because we feel our culture is an essential part of our future success.

Invoke's Approach to Education

We have two angles on learning. On one hand, we want our developers to work closely together and learn from each other. Our multidisciplinary cells open up so many opportunities to learn from experts in every craft. On the other hand, we have a solid learning and development budget for the studio.

We work with every director and lead to make sure we can provide the right training at the right time to support everyone in their career development. Moreover, every developer can raise their hand if they feel a learning opportunity would be beneficial for them. We want to make sure everyone keeps learning and growing with us.

Invoke's New Project

We started working on our new game about a year ago. The team was excited about the opportunity to make a D&D game, we felt it gave us a lot of creative freedom while giving us access to great lore and reference material. It is still the early days of the project, however, so I cannot share more at this time.

Making a Commercially Successful Game

In my opinion, to make a commercially successful game, you need two things – to create something unique that players are interested in and deliver it with quality. If you have these fundamental elements then you will find your audience. That is what we are focused on.

Adapting to Post-COVID Conditions

Initially, when the pandemic hit, everyone improvised and it was a big challenge for teams shipping games in the following year. At this point, however, we are getting significantly better at adapting our work methods. Invoke proposes a flexible hybrid model, some people come to the office every day, some a few days every week, and others very rarely.

There are benefits to this new model but also challenges. We do not pretend to have all the answers. The team is learning together and we will be tweaking our model over the next months and years.

Invoke's Roadmap

Now, we are still in the early days of our current project – we are building up our concept, the technology, and the R&D; we need to support it and move from creating early prototypes to building the game itself. It will be a while still before we can talk about our game!

Dominic Guay, Vice President and General Manager at Invoke Studios

Interview conducted by Ana Kessler