The response from readers about the Nocturnal Initiative has been overwhelmingly positive. How has the development community responded?
Well, we've talked to other people in the industry, and whenever we bring this up, they get excited. Other people are excited about doing this kind of thing. One of the great things is Ted's openness. It surprised us that we really was like "do it." Not any kind of push back that you'd expect.
This isn't the first time Insomniac has reached out to the community at large. How was the response to the R&D page that Insomniac opened a few months ago?
We get a lot of feedback about the R&D page, saying "hey, we really appreciate this." I've gotten e-mails from Intel and the industry at large. People are interested in what we have to say.
Are there any specific examples of projects that may have benefited from your research?
I don't want to call anybody out, because I don't think that would be appropriate. I know that we get a lot of e-mails from developers all around the world that appreciate the information that we've made available.
What is Insomniac going to offer to the development community, and how much will it help?
The code is nice to have and is useful, but what's important are the coders. You can have all the source code in the world, but without an appropriate team, you're not going to get anything. You're certainly not going to get good results. At Insomniac, what we wanted to provide is just nice little useful pieces. Other teams that are good teams are going to take those any way they please. Maybe they save a little time, or maybe they find a bug and point it out to us, and we get it fixed in our stuff too. You can't make a bad team better through source code. But maybe we can save a good team some time.
It's hard to say. I know the outside world has this impression of programs and source code and you can just pop it in. For example, Polyphony Digital has a specific way of rendering cars. We can't just take it and use it in our own engine. Everyone has their own method and issues. If another developer came to us in private and wanted to know how we solved something, we'd totally want to share that.
And we're trying to start a broader initiative here. A lot of it this is to lead the industry by example. "It's worth sharing." A common question we get is "Won't other people make games that look just as good as Insomniac games." Well, no. But even if they did, that helps push us to make even better games.
Do you see this as a challenge to yourselves and the developers out there?
It's fundamentally about sharing. But yeah, like Andy was saying, sharing our tech means that we're going to have to up our game. If anyone is using it, we have to become that much better. We have to figure out new ways of doing things.
What's driving the Nocturnal Initiative?
The console industry is all about getting better. If not, we'd all be playing on our Atari systems. We can challenge ourselves internally. We hear anecdotal stories from friends, and there's a desire to access the solutions to the problems we've solved. Why not take a little time and share? We'd rather compete with them by making good games, not by the quality of our code. That's not good for the industry. Nobody likes writing code. Everyone wants to focus on making their games better, and the features that make them better. That's what we're focusing on.
