Join host Lizzie Mintus as she sits down with Charles 'Chuck' Tolman, a seasoned CTO with a rich history in the video game industry. Chuck's career began at Atari in 1993, and he has since made significant contributions to over 30 games, including major franchises such as titles like Spider-Man, Call of Duty, and The Walking Dead.

In this episode, Chuck shares his journey beginning with his unexpected start in game development to becoming CTO at studios like The Workshop, acquired by Skydance. Discover Chuck's insights on how his leadership propelled Skydance's success in VR gaming, and explore valuable tips for VR game development, including navigating technical challenges, creating immersive experiences, and balancing gameplay mechanics.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Chuck's Career Journey From Atari, Treyarch, Activision, to CTO of Multiple Studios
• Founding The Workshop
• Surviving Setbacks and Partnering with Sony
• The Acquisition by Skydance Interactive
• Leading Skydance Interactive through VR Success
• The Impact of Play Testing on Game Mechanics
• Challenges and Innovations in VR Game Development
• Leveraging Previous VR Experience for New Titles
• Creating Effective Game Demos
• Advice for Aspiring CTOs in the Gaming Industry

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Chuck Tolman on LinkedIn
• Treyarch
• Archangel Hellfire and Walking Dead: Saint and Sinners by Skydance

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Tiffany Tolman for introducing us. I love the game industry marriages and relationships. I'm in one myself. 

Today we have Charles or Chuck Tolman with us. Chuck is a veteran in the video game industry, having started straight out of college in 1993 with a programmer job at Atari. Since that time, he has shipped more than 30 games, including high profile titles such as Spider Man, Call of Duty, and The Walking Dead. He has been a CTO in the industry for the past 16 years. Let's get started. Thank you for coming on. 

Chuck Tolman: Yes, thank you for having me, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, okay, I want to start by talking about your 1993 career at Atari. How did you find them, or how did they find you? 

Chuck Tolman: I got a call from a friend of mine. This is a friend of mine who I met in high school, and he had graduated, ahead of me from Berkeley with his computer science degree. And he had gotten a job there at Atari Tengen. This is the branch of Atari. Atari had split up, I think in the late eighties. This was the branch that was responsible for doing home console ports of point out games. Well, actually they did the coin out games as well. So they would make these coin out games and then they would also be permitted, legally permitted to make home console ports of those games.

This is not the branch that did the home computers. So he was working for them and he called me up and said, you should come apply. This is when I was graduating. So I was graduating from UCSB. So I did and they had me fly up there and interviewed with them and ended up getting the job.

So I ended up starting as a game programmer at Atari Tengen, working on things like RBI baseball and we did a port of Sega VR, racing, virtual racing. And then we did Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. That was also a port from the coin op side. Yeah. So that was my three years I spent there.

Lizzie Mintus: Were you intending to get into the game industry or was it sort of a chance? 

Chuck Tolman: It was not my intention, but I had sort of fantasized about being a game developer, but I was interviewing with places like Microsoft and defense contractors and other just sort of typical engineering jobs that you might go after in serious businesses. I didn't have games on my radar at all. But when he called me, I'm like, well, that could be interesting. So, I was definitely a gamer. No, it came by surprise, but I was very happy. 

Lizzie Mintus: The butterfly effect stuff is funny. When you start your career and one thing happens, it takes you in this whole direction. And then you went to Activision. How did you find that? 

Chuck Tolman: That started out as me being a senior programmer for Treyarch. So, Treyarch was founded by another high school buddy of mine. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh! You went to the right high school! 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, yeah. It was founded by three people. One was my old buddy. Actually, I've known him since junior high. His name is Peter Ackerman. And then with him was another partner, Don Likeness, who he met in college. So I knew Don as well. So these are two friends of mine. And then the third guy was like a business money partner. Somebody had funds to help them get started.

And they had managed to find a publisher for this first game, the idea that they were working on, that Peter had come up with in his spare time while he was getting his PhD in mathematics. And he had shown me this demo, and I had never really imagined that it would go anywhere, but it was a demo for a stick figure who was able to wield a sword and shield and you controlled it with a joystick or keyboard. You could control the arm swinging and the shield movement, sort of like puppetry. 

You controlled the movements of the arms directly with your controls instead of Pushing a button to attack or defend, you were really just controlling the arms to make these things move kind of like VR actually except that it wasn't something you wore on your head you were still looking at a normal computer screen. And that turned into this game that they were then making for interplay, which was Die by the Sword.

So that was like Treyarch's almost first game. And he had called me in 96 to see if I was interested in coming down and joining with them. So I was like employee number eight or something like that of Treyarch and went on to make lots of games with them. And we got purchased by Activision in 2001.

 They had us working on their Spider Man franchise and that was the first movie game for Spider Man, and they decided they wanted to bring us in house. They decided that the franchise was valuable enough. They didn't really want to have it be in the hands of contractors.

So they're like, we're just going to acquire you. So we became part of Activision at that point. And that's what led to eventually us working on Call of Duty with them. 

So 

Lizzie Mintus: you stayed on through the acquisition? 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, I stayed on until 2007. So I worked on several Spider Man games, I worked on Call of Duty, a few different Call of Duty games. We did some sports games on contract. We did some sports games directly for Activision, but we also did some on contract with Sega and that was the NHL 2K series. We did that. I worked on those. By that point I was a lead programmer, the technical director. And then in 2007, Peter, the same Peter Ackman who had left Activision came to me and said, I want to start a new game studio. And so he got me and a couple other guys who were also ex Treyarch guys and we, the four of us, started up a new studio which we called The Workshop.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, so kind of a similar situation to what Treyarch had been. And it's initial days. 

Chuck Tolman: That's right. A contract developer house. Initially, we were going to do movie games. That was our sort of mandate. As a studio was to do movie games because that was our, that had now at that point become kind of one of our calling cards was that we did ports of, or not ports, but like developed movie games, games off of movie licenses.

We had done it successfully with Spider Man, a little bit less successfully with Minority Report, but it was a good game, just not as commercially successful. And we also did, I was kind of in the middle of helping with Casino Royale. We did a Casino Royale game, James Bond. So, with that pedigree, we had an inside track with this brand new publishing house that had been booted up in Hollywood by various Hollywood money folks.

They wanted to create their own interactive publishing company to specifically make movie games. So we started up with them. We were looking at a few different properties to possibly make a game off of it. We were looking at different licenses and we were starting to develop a demo for the publisher for them to see what we were thinking about making.

We were about two months in and we had gotten ourselves an office and we were all set up and we had about six people and we were starting to go full bore on this when we suddenly found out that they had collapsed. They lost all their funding. They had told us that they had around 400 million or so in funding, but turned out they had about half that. And the other half was contingent on performance. So the actual VCs who were backing them would give them the rest of the funding after they saw how well their first games did. 

Their first games didn't do very well at all. They lost all their money and they did not get their additional funding unlocked. And so they had to close the shop. So here we were. Two months old as a company, as a new company. And we had to decide whether we wanted to also fold up and walk away or try to make something out of it. We ended up self funding ourselves for several months to try to find a publisher of our own, you know, just somebody else to do to be a publisher for us to make a game. 

We made a tech demo, sort of like a game demo, tech demo using Unreal and we shopped it around. And we eventually got hooked up with Sony. So Sony decided they liked us as developers and they hired us to make a game for their, at the time, top secret Sony move controller. So this was the controller that was their answer to the, we sort of. And at the time that they had to start working on a game for the move, it was still an unknown product. It hadn't yet launched. And we were slated to make a launch product for them. 

Well, the product kept growing in scope as we went along working on it. And it eventually became a really cool game that we did publish. They did publish it. It's called The Sorcery. And it's a game where you cast magic spells using the move controller like a wand, and it was gesture based. This whole fantasy world that we created and the whole story that you went through, it was a single player, campaign driven story. But by the time it came out, the move had kind of come and gone. Like it had not been as successful as Sony was looking for it to be, so that kind of ended up going nowhere. 

That, however, did allow us to survive as a company. So we shipped that. And then meanwhile, we started to get other contracts going. So we ended up doing a lot of different products. We helped ship various games. We helped port games to other platforms. Probably the biggest project we did was the Evil Within. We worked on that with Bethesda. porting it from prior generation consoles kind of to the next generation consoles. So, the Xbox one and the PS4 and PC. So we had to up port that game from sort of older graphics to newer graphics and stuff like that. Let's see, we worked on World of Tanks. We worked on Gears of War with Microsoft. We worked on, yeah, we did a lot of things.

But then we were approached in 2015, I think it was, we were approached by Skyance, Skydance Media. So another Hollywood company, and they wanted to start up their own interactive division. And their vision, the vision of their president for this interactive division was actually to make VR games specifically. He felt that they become kind of a big player in this relatively narrow market and it wouldn't cost the kind of money that it would to try to be a big player in the AAA games market, which is of course super competitive and expensive. So that was his strategy. So they ended up acquiring us and we became Skydance Interactive. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. And at that point, were you shopping around at all? Was that a desire of yours to be sold? How did it even come about? 

Chuck Tolman: It was, it came about because we had an agent who had helped us land quite a few different contracts. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing. That makes sense. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, and he came to us and said, I've just been talking to this company that does television and movies. They're called Skydance Media, or Skydance, and they want to create a game studio. They want their own game studio. They want to create a Skydance Interactive. They had a couple different companies that they had looked at. We ended up on their radar because of him, because of our agent, and we ended up convincing them that we were the best option. So yeah, that's how that happened. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. I have other questions. In terms of convincing them, you were the best option. I feel like lots of people talk about their company being sold or bought rather. Someone just told me the other day, no company is sold. it's always bought. But what do you think made you win in that case?

Chuck Tolman: Well, we definitely had a lot, we had a very deep resume as a company and as who we were, even as individuals in the game industry. We were very seasoned. We had worked on all these different AAA games. And that goes back also to the days of Treyarch and Activision, because so many of the members of the company were ex Treyarch people.

So it was not hard to convince them that we knew what we were doing as far as game development was concerned and as far as being able to handle technology. We also could point back to our history of doing fairly cutting edge work, in terms of working with cutting edge technology because even back to the early days of Treyarch and doing this kind of interesting game that we did Die by The Sword that was almost a VR like experience in itself and then working on the move controller and working doing Sorcery for Sony. That helped I think convince them that we were a good choice when it came to a new sort of cutting edge technological with VR and we had played around with it.

We hadn't published anything, but we had done a couple of demos of things using VR, just because we felt that it was a good idea for us to gain some experience and be ready to work on something in that area, just because it was a new thing. 

Lizzie Mintus: So that was proactive. It wasn't needed. You just thought that we should get this because it's a new emerging technology and we should have a demo ready.

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, exactly. It wasn't much. It was just kind of proving that you could get into the headset and we had a little virtual like, living room. And you could interact with some of the things in the space, including a television. So it was kind of an interesting little demo, but it just proved that we knew how to use the technology.

We knew how to create an experience. Oh, and we had worked on it, it wasn't VR, but we had worked on another odd sort of, unusual thing. We had a small scale interactive play experience with a company that does things like shopping mall, interactive hardware. It was this thing where you would be able to step up in front of a projected screen and just use your arms to interact and it was looking at you with a camera and it was sort of like the Connect, right? It was based on that kind of technology. I don't think it was literally the Connect device, but it was something similar. And it was a brief play experience where you were supposed to be Iron Man and you were shooting things down with your hand repulsors.

 So that was something that I think also contributed because it was sort of VR like again, gesture based and other of those kinds of experiences. And then the thing that they had us do when they were interviewing us as a company, you know, when we were pitching them on why we would be a good choice, they said, all right, come up with a game pitch for a VR game. Not based off of any license.

If you can make a VR game, what do you think would be the best, most awesome VR game we could make? And so we created a game design, and a pitch deck for a game in which you were piloting a mech, so like Pacific Rim kind of right. Like you're not really a giant robot yourself. You're piloting a large giant robot machine and battling enemies with it. We had this whole idea that you were part of a larger military unit that consisted of you piloting this mech supporting infantry, sort of like a Tank division would be supported by infantry, right? And so part of what you're responsible for as the pilot was protecting the infantry from threats, but also they're supporting you in what the targets are you're supposed to be taking on. So we pitched them this idea, this mech piloting game, sort of like mech warrior style game in VR. And they liked it so much that they said, okay. We'll buy you, and we want you to make that game, and that's what we're gonna do. 

So we made a game. We called it Archangel. That was the name we came up with for the mechs. The art that, that you were piloting. It was called an Archangel and we made that game and shipped it and did okay. It didn't do great, but it did okay. It was a good game. It was fun. Sort of a on rails shooter, kind of an experience. You didn't literally steer the mech. You didn't pilot the Mac, you controlled the arms and you would shoot things and you would have a shield and you would protect yourself using the shield. And it was a very story driven, very narrative driven experience as well. 

And then we made a semi sequel or expansion to it, which was called Archangel Hellfire. And that was full piloting more. You actually controlled the mech. You were actually driving it around with the joysticks, basically, while you would control the arms and do all of that other stuff. And it was multiplayer, so that was our follow on for that. And that was also a really cool, fun game. 

That led to us getting in contact, we got a contact from Skybound, skybound Entertainment, I think that's what they're called. And their main thing, really, is that they have the license for all sort of publishing and core interactive rights for The Walking Dead. That's the graphic novel by Robert Kirkman. Although AMC had its television thing. And, Ironically, it turned out they had the interactive rights for their television show. These were interactive rights for the comic books. And we made Walking Dead Saints and Sinners with them. And that really took off.

That became our actual success story as a VR studio and kind of allowed us to achieve the goal that Skydance had set out for us to achieve, which was to become a premier VR game studio. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow, what a story. Congratulations. So in The Walking Dead game that you made, was there a certain point in the process, what stories do you have? Like, was there a certain point where you knew that it was really going to take off? And were there any hard calls or near death moments in the journey to get there? 

Chuck Tolman: I would say that it took a while for the game to coalesce. We knew we had something sort of a core for it that was good, in terms of the gameplay of just being able to interact with the walkers, and the melee action, the melee combat that you would engage in with them and stuff. It was a good experience. It was fun, but it took a while to kind of figure out what the game experience around that was really going to be like and went through a few different iterations.

Early on we were kind of focused more on just the narrative side of things, like telling these stories about difficult decisions you had to make and the sort of, moral tension that is typical in the comic books, where you have to make these very difficult decisions about who's going to survive. You know, someone get infected, you have to kill them, these kinds of things. Right. But we ended up kind of realizing that what we really wanted or what was really the most fun was having this sort of core game loop where you would focus on just the need to survive. 

Yes, we had a story and there were some dilemmas you had to face in that story, but, rather than the bulk of the game being about that, we realized it really was about the action and the tension of managing resources in a dangerous world that you're constantly under threat. So we drilled in on the limited resources and the experience of going out into this. world that's infested with walkers but having the level of difficulty ramping up gradually as you were out there and especially having this time limit where you try to achieve your objectives when you would go out, but after a certain amount of time, you'd hear these bells going off like a church bell style bells going off. And that was the signal that the walkers were coming and like you would suddenly start to see more and more of them. And they would kind of inundate you if you didn't get out quickly enough. So these kinds of mechanics. We drilled in on really survival horror, but almost like more survival strain and less, not horror in the sense of jump scares, but just horror because it's walkers, right? Because it's kind of scary. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: How did you know that you should drill down on that? Did you do a lot of play testing? Was it, yeah, we discovered it. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah. We discovered it through play testing it and realizing that limiting your resources and having it be a constant struggle to accomplish these goals, you know, the missions that you had and being able to scavenge the world for additional resources, but having it always be kind of this fight to get enough to bring back to your base, to be able to craft more ammo or to be able to, you know, repair your weapons, which can break or to make new ones, to make food. Because if you didn't have food items with you, it would be difficult because your stamina would start running out. You would be needing to consume all these resources in order to be able to battle against the environment and you have to go out into that environment to get the resources. So it's this constant loop.

I don't even know when exactly we stumbled across that. I think it was because somebody was playing some game like Far Cry or something and kind of realized, Oh, we should have these kinds of mechanics. Like the world is dangerous, and we don't want you to ever feel really safe. We want you to always feel that tension of, it's not easy being out there. But you have to go out there just in order to keep surviving and progressing through the story. But the longer you stay out there, the more dangerous it is. So, yeah. Yeah. So we realized that was a good loop and that became the key. 

Lizzie Mintus: And so you would say that playing other games kind of in the genre is very helpful when you're creating a game. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, yeah, very helpful. I think it's critical as game makers that we are familiar with existing games, legacy games, you know, just being as familiar as possible with the universe of games that are out there because there's so many options or ways that you could conceivably go for your product.

You've got to develop some kind of a vision for what you think is going to be the most fun. I think without that awareness of the ideas that others have come up with before you, it's just really hard. I think that just as it's hard to come up with a unique idea because so many things have been done before, it's also hard in the sense of that, the odds are pretty good that your idea is not that great if you're trying to invent in a vacuum. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's true. That's good advice. Can you talk about the technical challenges that you experience when you are creating this VR title? 

Chuck Tolman: VR is very challenging to begin with. Let's talk about the tension of in game development inventions. We're working with something where, you know, normally when you're developing games, especially the AAA games that we were used to making, you're leaning on this by now very well established legacy of what's the best way to control, what kinds of genres do you already have to show you what's been successful and what works well for people and delivers a good experience.

And we're all so used to having mouse and keyboard or gamepad controllers and the language of interactivity is this well established thing at this point. It wasn't years ago when we first started making these kinds of games. But by now, consumers will pick up a first person shooter and they know right away what they need to do to control it. It's totally obvious. And so when you're making it, you don't have as much of a challenge in the design of that aspect of things, because you don't want to depart from the existing language too much, because there's no reason to. You want to lean into the thing that everybody expects and that has become intuitive basically for people, but when we're starting out relatively early on in VR, the control paradigm is new and extremely different. And there wasn't as much to lean on in terms of, established history of the best ways to interact and the best ways to control.

So we did a lot of experimentation. We would implement different control schemes. We have to try different things. You don't have quite the same options, for what you can do because you're also dealing with the potential pitfalls of motion sickness. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, when you were describing, yes, controlling a robot, I was going to tell you that would make me very sick.

Chuck Tolman: Yes, exactly. So, we had already gained some experience with the mech piloting game Archangel. We had played it fairly conservative when we made that game by making it a on rails shooter, because you didn't have to worry about steering and we could control the path and we could control the rate at which it would turn or move. We could keep it relatively safe. We occasionally would push it a little bit, but we did a lot of testing with people to see people with different levels of sensitivity to motion sickness or different reactions to VR to see what was going to work, and be the most comfortable experience for people.

 Then we started pushing the envelope hard with Hellfire, where we made the full piloting experience and the multiplayer experience. So we gained a lot of knowledge from that as well on what people could tolerate and what they couldn't tolerate. But we also pushed it and said, look, this may not be for everybody.

But there are people, by that time, VR had been, the headsets had been out there for longer and, people had the avid core audience had started to acclimate themselves to more experiences and being less sensitive. It is something that not everyone can acclimate to it very well, but it seemed on average that most people after playing enough would start to be less sensitive.

Based on that, we started to get a little more bold and allow you to do a little more. And then with Walking Dead, we pushed it again a bit. We understood by that time, the options you needed to have to enhanced comfort, like to narrow down your scope of vision, the basically tunnel vision effect for turning, the snap turn option, you know, smooth versus snap turning, things like that. We played around with teleporting versus smooth motion. We didn't like the gameplay experience that you got from it, for a game like ours, action combat game, like what we were doing. So we didn't choose to go down that road, though we played around with it. So it was a bit of a tightrope, balancing action and control versus comfort.

But we, I think we managed overall a pretty good experience that most people seem to be able to acclimate to and do okay with. It's not for everyone, but it works out for enough people. I think we benefited too from our many years of experience doing triple A console games that we brought something that not a lot of VR developers at the time were doing, which was a full game experience. As much as possible, like playing an FPS or an action, an action shooter, it just happens to be in VR. And we had a very feature rich game, a full game loop, appeal, something that we would want to play, something that would appeal to hardcore gamers, but it just happens to be in VR.

And then we leaned into what can we get out of the VR experience? What are we bringing this extra that you can't do in conventional games, right? And that's the immersiveness of it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Do you think that the other two VR titles that you developed before were critical to this Final one's success.

Do you think you? 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, for sure. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's interesting. 

Chuck Tolman: Again, we played it pretty safe with Archangel, but we knew that we wanted to make games where you were in more control. And we always had the goal of making it immersive, as immersive as possible, feel like you were really in some other world, experiencing something firsthand in a way that you can't fully do in a conventional game.

You can get a lot of immersion from first person game experiences. I do all the time when I play conventional first person games, but in VR, it's just different. You're there in a way that, that no conventional game can mirror. And so we wanted, we always wanted to really lean into that.

And that's why for us, we ended up kind of trying to preserve smooth movement through the world. Not defaulting to snap turning, not defaulting to not doing teleporting, not doing any of those other things, but just try to make it feel as much like you're there as possible. We even did support room scale to it to a degree. You can't have the game all be room scale when you're able to wander through a large world because nobody's got a room big enough for that, but we did technically support room scale VR in the sense that you could move around in your environment and you'd move that, that same amount in the game. It's just that if you wanted to really travel, you'd have to push the joystick and start, you're walking yourself. 

But Peter, one day put on a quest, and went outside in his neighborhood. He started walking. He had his daughter's kind of help warn him if he was walking where he shouldn't, or if he was going to hit something and he just started playing the game outside, wandering around doing it quote room scale the whole time and it worked. He was able to do it. 

Lizzie Mintus: I hope there's a video. I feel like that would go viral. 

Chuck Tolman: He didn't record a video of it, but it's pretty hilarious. He was like, I was walking around inside the game. I was like wandering the streets of St. Louis. And it was kind of mind boggling because instead of driving around with a joystick like we all were doing when we played, he was just walking around in this other world and playing the game out in the outdoors. But yeah, interesting experience. 

Lizzie Mintus: That sounds like an experience I need to have. My neighbor across the street works in games too, so if he sees me wandering, he'll just say, Bet she's playing a VR game. 

Chuck Tolman: I don't recommend it. It's very dangerous if you don't have somebody holding your hand the whole time.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, no, VR is alarming in that way. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Chuck Tolman: It's fine if you're doing AR passthrough stuff, but yeah, if you're doing full on VR and you're wandering around outside, yeah, it's not very safe. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, you'd have to be with someone that you trust. Maybe that's like the new trust exercises that companies do. That'd be awesome. 

Okay. So you said that when you were starting the workshop that you made some technical demos and they got you conversations and essentially contracts. If any of our listeners want to make a technical demo for their company, what advice do you have? 

Chuck Tolman: Well, it's best to use existing game engineering technology, I think, when doing prototype work. This is that kind of work. From the beginning of The workshop, when we created that company, we knew that we were going to use existing tools. We weren't going to try to reinvent the wheel. We weren't going to try to create a proprietary engine. Because we wanted to get into the development work as fast as possible.

We wanted to get to the game making as fast as possible. So we, at the time, debated different engines, different options that were out there. And we ended up choosing Unreal. So, We've leaned on Unreal for the most part for like almost, at least 80 percent of our projects, since that time and having an engine like that, having a licensed engine with a really good tool chain with really good tools is, I think critical if you want to do game prototyping work, there are other ones. It doesn't have to be Unreal. Obviously there's Unity and there are even others. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's probably Unreal. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah.. Unreal is nowadays, I think the main choice. But the key is having these tools to save yourself a lot of time. That's, I think, critical. You want to have a good sort of cross disciplinary team. It doesn't have to be very many people, but you want kind of a little strike team that covers game design, tech, at a minimum. Obviously you need a certain amount of art, support, things like that. You can do a fair bit though with canned assets. Like you can go on Unreal Marketplace. If you need something that doesn't just come by default with it, like you're not just going to use the default assets for everything, then you can go on Unreal Marketplace and other places and get.

A lot of things and they're not necessarily expensive. So yeah, I think you can create a demo for almost anything you want fairly quickly if you lean on those kinds of resources. 

Lizzie Mintus: But what about a good demo? 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah. You have to have good people. 

Lizzie Mintus: Hey, that's the good secret. Yeah. That's the truth.

Chuck Tolman: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: But don't always think about that enough. 

Chuck Tolman: It's always very, very good to see people who are younger and are coming into the industry and are motivated to do things themselves and learn the tools on their own time and just have that enthusiasm and make their own things. But to make a good game demo,

you either have to be a genius or you have to have experience, because there's a lot of learning there, right? There's a lot that you have to either get lucky or you have to learn what's going to work and what's not going to work. Or just do a lot of experimentation. Like if you spend a lot of time trying different things, you can hone in on something that works. So either experience or spending a lot of time iterating, hopefully both to get the best possible result. 

Lizzie Mintus: Or you can just do Pokemon with guns. 

Chuck Tolman: You can do that. You can just borrow, borrow ideas from other places. 

Lizzie Mintus: Just joking. I mean, lots of games are inspirations from one another, as you said, right? It just depends on how close the inspiration might be. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, you don't want to just be completely uncreative and just copy something that somebody else did. On the other hand trying to make I mean, if it's not for commercial purposes, and you're just for learning purposes, trying to recreate something that you already have played, just to see if you can make your own version of it. That's a lot of learning experience right there. You can gain. 

When I was a high schooler, I would try to make my own versions of things, copying some game I had seen or played. And you learn a lot just by trying to make something that emulates what somebody else has already made, and trying to build that yourself from scratch. It's of course a lot more work than you ever realize when you're not, if you haven't done it before. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Absolutely. So a lot of people dream about being a CTO in games and you've been a CTO in games for quite some time. What advice do you have for somebody that is aspiring or working hard In order to get there.

Chuck Tolman: Well, you need to have, I think, to do a good job being a CTO, you need to have gained quite a bit of experience, ideally both as a programmer, as an engineer, doing lots of different things, but also as a programming manager, as an engineering manager. Typically, especially in a smaller company, as a CTO, you really, ideally are wearing a lot of hats because you're likely doing a lot of coding. You're likely guiding the engineering side of things, pretty intimately. Even the things you're not coding yourself, you're probably spending a lot of time kind of overseeing and giving advice to others. You're mentoring. You also have to be the engineering manager, especially if it's a small company. In my case, I did a lot of it as well. It wasn't all on my shoulders, but a lot of the infrastructure for the company, I had to be the one to set up or at least help decide what we were going to do, what we're going to use, what tools.

So yeah, being comfortable doing a lot of different things and not all of it is programming. In fact, ultimately a lot of it isn't just programming, really. I think the industry sometimes, especially historically, Promotes people into managerial positions based off of them being good at their jobs as developers And then they don't have training or experience at being a manager or having other people report to them and being a good caretaker of people. And that can be very detrimental. So I think that even just for somebody who's becoming a senior or lead programmer and has other people who they're sort of responsible for really ought to have management training. And that I think doesn't happen often enough. And that doesn't just apply to engineers that applies to really all disciplines. 

So if you're interested in going up that ladder, then make sure that you're learning the right things and reading the right sorts of materials and taking classes or getting training. And ultimately it's better if you really are a people person, and really enjoy doing that. If you don't enjoy managing people, and not all people who get into game development actually can, or want to, or should be managing others, then don't do that. Talk to your company about an alternate track.

I want to still have room for growth. I want to still be able to become more senior and still be able to be promoted and earn more for my experience, and becoming better and better as a game developer, whether it be an artist or a designer or programmer or whatever it is, without being forced to go down the management track, which is, again, another mistake I think game companies have made historically, which is not to have the proper track for advancement for those who aren't going to manage other people.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think it's getting better. 

There's distinguished engineers and yeah, different titles that you can strive to. 

Chuck Tolman: Yeah, especially the bigger companies which have a little more leeway to do that kind of thing, are doing it. It's more challenging for smaller companies because they don't have as, they don't have as much depth to them to be able to do that.

And so that's something to be aware of. At a smaller company, there may not be that ability. But I think if the company is aware of it and they're really paying attention that you can do a lot, you can do a lot to acknowledge and provide room for growth for those people to be, to feel like they are as much valued by the company and rewarded for their knowledge and experience and achievements, even though they're not managers, even though they aren't being held responsible for managing other people. And the truth is that a manager has to spend a lot of their time managing and can't be as good of a game developer because they don't have the time. They're having, at best, they're dividing their attention and, At worst, they're really spending all their time either just doing the managing and can't be relied upon to do the tasks, or they're spending way too much time trying to do things and not paying attention to the management side of things.

And that ends up being really the worst result because you put somebody in charge of other people and those people, in essence, don't have a manager. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So are you a proponent in a small company of having somebody just manage or just program, do the task?

Chuck Tolman: I think that it's, yeah, I think that in a small company, you don't have as much leeway to necessarily devote all of their time to managing, but you should try. And try to get people into a position where they're not being expected to divide their attention so much. It'll be a better result. If you're really small, well, you probably can't do that. And you probably just have to have everybody just doing the work more. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. You have bigger fish to fry.

Chuck Tolman: Yeah. Right. If you're really small, you need to make your game. You need to do whatever you are doing to get it done. And you're probably just all kind of at the same level, just being a team and just making stuff and it's garage band time. And that's just how it is.

Lizzie Mintus: Garage band time. I like it. I have one last question. Who have some of your biggest mentors been throughout the years? And what particular advice do you have that you still think about or has resonated with you the most? 

Chuck Tolman: Well, I think I gained a lot, early on in my career from people who had a lot more experience.

One of my early mentors was a man named Bill Hindorf and he was a senior manager, type person at Atari and had been there for a long time. And he just was a really good guy and he was very patient and willing to teach. And I guess I would say that what I learned from people like him is being patient and keeping a level head and not panicking when things get difficult, is important.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Thanks. 

Chuck Tolman: Even though he's like very much an engineer and treats things fairly clinically, still, he was somehow able to be a people person, he was able to somehow be a good manager. So yeah, I think, understanding, being patient with people, understanding that everybody has their own, perspective on things, everybody has their own needs, and the best thing you can really do is listen, and try to understand where they're coming from and what You know, worries are what their concerns are so that you can talk to them from a place of kind of understanding, and sympathizing with whatever their concerns are, whatever their needs are. As managers, that's critical.

So I guess, yeah, I would say that from people like Bill, I learned those values of how to treat others, how to be respectful of your coworkers and especially the people under you, if you're a manager, they aren't like your servants. They're just your coworkers that you're responsible for assisting in getting things done and listening to their needs and trying to fulfill their needs as part of the job rather than being some sort of dictator coming down from on high telling them what to do. 

Lizzie Mintus: What a good lesson to learn early on. We've been talking to Chuck Tolman, who has been a CTO in the games industry for many years. Chuck, where can people go to contact you or learn more about you?

Chuck Tolman: Well, I am on LinkedIn. You can look me up there and ping me. I'm happy to chat with people. That's probably the easiest place to get a hold  of me. So yeah, just look for me. I think I'm listed as Charles Tolman. I go by Chuck, informally. Feel free to reach out. 

Lizzie Mintus: And maybe send a very specific message.

Always my advice when you reach out to anybody on LinkedIn. I heard you on this podcast and I wanted to talk about Yeah. Thank you so much. 

Chuck Tolman: Great. Thanks for having me, Lizzie. It was fun. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Thank you. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.