Michel
Kripalani is the senior games industry manager for Autodesk, overseeing
aspects of Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Autodesk MotionBuilder
from the perspective of a game developer.
As a veteran of the videogame industry, founding Presto Studios in 1991 and developing titles as diverse as the Journeyman Project series, Myst 3: Exile and Whacked!.
Michel joined Autodesk in 2004 to help focus the product development
team on the needs of game developers, and works closely with game
developers and publishers from Nintendo to Epic.
Gamasutra
caught up with Michel (and PR Specialist Shannon McPhee) at the recent
Autodesk Backstage Pass press summit held in Montreal to discuss
Autodesk’s acquisition of Alias (Toronto-based developer of Maya), the
future of the games industry, and the future of Autodesk itself.
Gamasutra: Autodesk’s attitude to what they do seems to be that they “make stories real.” What’s your take on that?
Michel
Kripalani: Well, I think that at the core gameplay is king, but beyond
gameplay, all real good games have a story. There’s two ways of looking
at a story in games; there are the games that are more narrative driven
and have a story that you’re being told or, in a lot of cases, there
are games where players create their own story. The process of playing World of Warcraft, for example.
So
with the Autodesk tools we are enabling creators to make games, and
ultimately all of those games really are story based whether its
stories that are being told to you or stories that you’ll tell
afterwards.
GS: Both the 3ds Max and Motion Builder teams are based in Quebec. Are there particular benefits for being based there?
MK: I think there are definite benefits, I think that at this stage
you have to remember that there’s a huge history of 3D creation tools
that comes out of Montreal and Quebec, reaching out as far as Toronto.
There’s a wealth of intellectual knowledge, the talent pool, that’s
available in that particular region of the world. It’s second to none
for that type of work. There are things such as government incentives
that have created this atmosphere that go back many years and have
helped to create this atmosphere, but the fact that there are so many
people centrally located there that makes the location really powerful.
GS: There’s a huge games community in Quebec; do you find
yourself working particularly closely with the likes of Ubisoft
Montreal?
MK: Absolutely. There are actually a lot of companies that are
located nearby and we communicate with all of them quite regularly.
They assist us with our feature plans, we try to be very good about
speaking to customers to find out what it is that they need in our
future releases. We get a huge benefit for having such high quality
developers right in our back yard.
GS: Does this include the Alias location in Toronto?
MK: It does, there are many developers; not that there are any of the scale of Ubisoft…
Shannon McPhee: We do have Rockstar, and Silicon Knights...
MK: That’s true!
SM: And Koei…
MK: Of course, Koei from Japan. The message there is that there are
very high quality developers there that are doing excellent work, but
Ubisoft’s studio in Montreal is probably one of the largest in the
world.
GS: Speaking of Alias, how has the merger been working out?
MK: It’s been very strong; we’re very excited about it. If you look
at the games pipelines around the world, there’s been a mix of Maya and
Max games pipelines used, and there’s been a big battle backwards and
forwards about which one is better. Now that we have all the
information we can see that it’s essentially quite balanced.
The number of people using Max for development and the number of
people using Maya for development is actually quite balanced around the
world, and so rather than allowing the fighting and kicking and
screaming to go on back and forth between the two applications our
focus now is interoperability. And what we’re going to do is using FBX [Autodesk’s new universal file standard] and our other technologies we’re making it easier for developers to push data back and forth between programs.
The great thing about this now is that studios can choose between
one, the other or both integrated, whatever balance they like, and if
they have an artist that they want to hire now it almost doesn’t matter
what package they use; they can hire the artist on the strength of
their art and experience, and integrate them fully into their pipeline.
So, the merger has worked out as even better for developers than it
has for Autodesk! It’s going to give them a lot more options to just
focus on the creative work and not have to worry about which one is
going to be the perfect tool for them to use.
GS: So you don’t see the product lines merging, even in the longer term?
MK: No, it wouldn’t be technically reasonable to do that; the code
bases are substantially different at the core and that would be a
monumental task that just wouldn’t make sense. The Max business was
very healthy before the acquisition, as was the Maya business, and
there’s no reason to think that would we would need to have one
continue over the other or to merge them together.
They work very differently at the core; for the artist to work with
them as a tool the thought processes in either package is a little bit
different. So we’re going to keep them separate, but we’re definitely
going to push their integration.
GS: You consider them different enough to keep them both running?
MK: Oh absolutely. They both have their huge strong features based
on the way they’ve been created architecturally from the ground up.