Dan Hay: Games Lecture 2017

Over his career, Dan Hay has worked across film, television and games. He has been an animator, texture artist, creative director and producer. Now, as Ubisoft Montreal’s executive producer and creative director, he works on the BAFTA-winning Far Cry series.

In his lecture, ‘Rooted in Reality: How the Real World Can Make Your Creativity Soar’, Hay explores how to draw on lived experience to make an idea with characters and setting that feel authentic. As well as delving into the importance of collaboration and listening to feedback to turn that idea to life.

• Read a full transcript of Dan Hay’s Lecture

Opening his lecture with a question he is asked a lot: ‘Where do you get the inspiration for a game?’, Hay said that inspiration is “everywhere”. Calling inspiration ‘vision fuel’, Hay reflected that it is: “everywhere. It’s everybody that you meet, it’s every moment that you have.”

Explaining it is important to draw inspiration from your own life experiences he also shared how this played out in real life when creating Far Cry. He said: “When we were first thinking about the idea for Far Cry, specifically Far Cry 5, I wanted to leverage what I already knew and what I felt.”

Hay also encouraged his audience to watch television and films, and play games, to pay attention to the news, and to push themselves out of their comfort zone in the pursuit of inspiration. He said: “Have a legitimately different emotion as often as you can. You’re not going to be able to write and or build or plumb the depths of an emotion if you haven’t experienced it and if you don’t risk.”

One way he suggests visualising your idea is by creating a collage. “It creates a swatch, and this stuff is gold. This allows you to see everything you’re thinking, and it allows you to cut the fat off it and be able to pull it down so it’s that bare bones elixir,” he says.

Hay also believes that when it comes to building on an idea, research is crucial. “I think you have this idea, or you even have a construct of an idea, and you look to ‘How do I furnish it? How do I grow it?’. And the answer is study, do the work, put the hours in.”

One way he encourages people to do this is to travel to a place that has inspired their idea: “invest in taking a look around your world, even if you can’t get on a plane or a boat to go do it. Eat the food. Live it. Wear the clothes. And if you don’t know what your idea is, take a look at television. There are some amazing things going on with documentaries about these places that show you what these places are – if it’s a place or it’s a thing or it’s a culture you want to look into. Go on social media. A lot of these places, a lot of these people have pages and you can learn about it.”

Once you’ve got the idea, Hay stressed that it’s important to mould characters who are relatable, no matter how outlandish their role. He used the example of his favourite show, The Sopranos, to illustrate this. Even though its main character is a gangster, Hay identified with him: “This was a guy who had problems: he had problems at work, he had problems in his marriage, he had problems with his family. It was a guy I could relate to, it was very approachable, who also happened to be a gangster.”

To build and humanise characters, Hay himself draws inspiration from family structures: “I like to do a little exercise. I like to actually think of our villains and our characters sitting around a holiday dinner. Because when you’re sitting around a holiday dinner, pass the salt never means pass the salt. It’s ‘Why don’t you love me?’ ‘Why do you like Jeremy more?’ ‘How come you won’t buy me a car?’ ‘Don’t you understand me?’ ‘I hate you.’ So we put that into our characters and we try to make them feel real.”

But, once you’ve got a creative idea, how can it become a fully-fledged story? Hay explains that working with a team who have different backgrounds and experiences is key. “If you want to inspire, if you want to surprise, if you want to evoke and amaze and innovate, you have to be prepared to hire unique people who think differently, who challenge you, who provoke you, who are relentless and who make you better. This is the band that I get to work with.”

Working with a team is crucial to peer review and receive feedback in a safe and constructive space. Reflecting on how nervous he was when he first had a peer review meeting at Ubisoft, Hay says he quickly realised it was an opportunity. He shared: “it turned into a new opportunity to get ideas and iterate, and I fell in love with that meeting.”

Another top tip that Hay has for game developers is to listen to players and welcome their feedback: “Don’t forget about the player. Our industry is changing very, very quickly. And each of these are an opportunity to talk to the player… What’s amazing about the time we live in is that unlike any other time you have the ability to go on Twitch, you have the ability to go online and take a look at somebody playing your game in real time. The feedback is instantaneous. You see the emotion, you see the enjoyment, you see the hate and you can use all that, you can leverage all that.”

“In years past what we’ve thought of is that we as developers are in the band and players are the audience. It’s not true anymore. Players are in the band. Make sure they’re part of the music.”

For more inspiring lectures from the worlds of film, games and TV, check out our resource section.