Origins: Tanya Jessen, Lead Producer on Bulletstorm

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So that’s part of the corporate ethic as much as anything? Right?

Yeah. Once you get that credibility, people recognize that you know what you’re doing, and give you that trust. And then you get to be naturally kind of involved. With Bulletstorm, I got to be very, very involved with the whole story creation process, developing the characters, script reviews and all of that stuff. Normally, Cliff would be very heavily involved in that. But, on Bulletstorm, he was like, “Tanya, I understand you know what this game is all about. You know what we’re going for with the flavor. You and Adrian, I trust you guys are going to figure that out, right?” That can be kind of unusual for a studio but, again, the trust is there. Let it be said, though, that Cliff reviews everything, like every single day.

He doesn’t seem like the sort to just sit back…

(More on The Techland Interview: Cliff Bleszinski, Part 1)

Not at all. He knows what’s going on. But, when it came to the script stuff, he was sending in some of our reviews, saying “Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t have to review the scripts to these because these are awesome.” People who are playing it at Epic are just laughing because they’re experiencing it as gamers. As opposed to, “Oh yeah, I remember that Excel document.” They get to come to it fresh, and not as something they’re building.

Yeah. So when they come upon an event or something in the game, their response is more organic. So, Bulletstorm is a hardcore FPS game with some interactive elements in the environment. How would you sell, say, a girlfriend of yours on it or someone else who’s not a gamer? Like how would you try to draw them in? “This is what I do, and I’d really love it if you’d played it.”

For me, there’s something naturally visceral about the game. The way I would probably sell them on it is just to try to get them to play it. Just pick the most hilarious part of the game, sit them down and give a little tutorial, and just let them play. The feedback you get from the game is so obvious. You don’t have to know a whole lot of gaming rules to play the game. You walk up to something, and it gets a little shimmer on it. Little buttons pops up so you know, “Oh, I can do something with this.”

You don’t have to have been a gamer for 10 years to know that you get something special for shooting the guy in the head. It is pretty obvious. And it’s very colorful. The feedback, the color and the design part of the whole experience lends itself not to women specifically but just to people who maybe wouldn’t want to play a shooter. Other games  leave them feeling like, “I don’t know, it’s too hard.” Or, “I hate running into an area and dying.”

Bulletstorm is not about that. It’s about maximizing your opportunity. Running into an area and seeing ten different ways you could take out all these dudes gets you thinking. You might think, “I’ve been getting a lot of head shots lately or I’ve been exploding a lot of shit lately, so I’m probably not going to get as much points for that. “Maybe I should look at my skillshot list or maybe I should try unlocking a new weapon depending on what kind of skillshots I get.” It’s not about getting punished over and over again. It’s about, “Hey, I didn’t get prevented from completing an area. Not only that, but I want to play it over again.”

So this is your first game as a lead producer. Correct?

Correct. Well, I was like the quasi-lead on Gears PC and I was also the lead for all of our DLC for Gears 2.

And that’s where the relationship with People Could Fly came from?

From Gears PC.

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