Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (01:36)
Manuela Malasaña

Welcome to Make Games Drink Coffee. Thank you so much for joining me.

Manuela (01:41)
Thanks for having me.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:42)
So I want to mention that the reason that I know who you are is at least…

Partially because back when a lot of game developers were on Twitter before we all ran away, you had a pretty strong presence on Twitter doing a lot of both shit posting but also stuff about shaders. Maybe I could call that shader posting. And I like seeing cool shader tricks and I also like shit posting. I paid attention to what you were doing and I thought it was really cool that you were posting a lot of

Manuela (01:54)
haha

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:17)
your own shader experiments, but that you were also simultaneously doing freelance work and on projects that didn’t necessarily have anything to do visually with the type of stuff that you were doing on your own. So actually that segues me into one of the questions, which is that you have your own kind of visual style for your own personal projects. And I’m wondering what your connection to that style is. It’s very neon, there’s lots of bloom.

Manuela (02:38)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:46)
The shadows are very dark, which I appreciate being like a fan of movies that look like that. So like, where does that come from? What’s your connection to that?

Manuela (02:54)
well, basically it appeals to me, as you might imagine.

I think I’ve always just liked that sort of aesthetic, also sort of showed up when I first started teaching myself shaders, in part from an accident. I had a monitor that was poorly calibrated. It was kind of dark. So I kind of had to have that super contrasty look just to see what the hell I was doing. And then I would upload clips to Twitter. I got Twitter. Yeah, yes Twitter. I have to use, upload clips to Twitter and be like, oh my God, that’s a lot more vivid on my phone than it was on my.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:28)
Yeah

Manuela (03:28)
computer.

So first it was it was not quite as vivid as I intended it but then I kind of leaned into it like that as that does look pretty good actually.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:37)
So you’ve gone cyberpunk by accident or what is it?

Manuela (03:41)
I think there

was always a bit of a cyberpunk intention, but not as extreme at first as it looked, but people really reacted that. like, you know, originally I probably wouldn’t have gone that extreme, but let’s lean in. Let’s go extreme.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:57)
That’s great. My issue with movie cinematography is often that people are afraid to put too much stuff in shadow and just let it be black. This is like one of the reasons that I like David Fincher movies, because at least the early ones, because he’s like, no, half the screen is black or more. And that’s fine because that makes the positive space stand out in a really cool way. And I like that I see that in your work and I wish more people

would be okay with having that much negative space in their images.

Manuela (04:30)
I actually discovered something really interesting about shadows by accident that turns out coincidentally is something that cinematographers actually know. So if you look at the shadows in my work, they’re never black, sometimes they’re black, but they’re almost never black. They’re usually a deep, highly saturated blue. And people who have training in more formal fine arts will usually say like desaturate the shadows.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:46)
Mm.

Manuela (04:54)
Whereas I’m doing the opposite. I have this highly saturated dark blue, but it doesn’t parse to the eye as a highly saturated dark blue. It’s like your brain compensates and you’re like, okay, it’s a shadow. But because it’s so saturated and it’s not actually super dark, you can see stuff in it, but it feels super dark because of that shade of blue. And I later learned that a lot of professional cinematographers will use color grading to turn shadows in professional films slightly blue.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:21)
Hey, I just wanna jump in here as Aaron who is editing this. I cut out a section where we talked about the differences between different versions of the matrix and their color grading, but it becomes relevant anyway. So I just wanna mention that’s what we were talking about, so we can jump back into that part of the conversation afterwards.

Manuela (05:38)
I noticed that among a lot of people who are into certain kinds of media like film and games, not everybody, but a lot of people are very focused on what is the true version, what is the real version. And a lot of people know me know that I am very interested in stage theater and I have a strong background in stage theater and informs my philosophy towards game development. Now in stage theater, there is no definitive version of a play. You see a play and you don’t think, that’s how it’s supposed to be. You think,

Aaron Nemoyten (06:04)
Mm-hmm.

Manuela (06:08)
was really interesting version I wonder how I’ll see it done another time.

And so like these multiple versions are very fascinating because, you know, a lot of people probably hate the DVD grading. But somebody to somebody that’s like, I don’t know, it speaks to them. And the way I relate this to games is a lot of times in games, because it’s real time on whoever’s PC or, you know, device, there is no definitive version per se. It’s like a live performance.

Aaron Nemoyten (06:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it’s.

Yeah, exactly. That is so interesting.

so you mentioned you have a theater background and also you went to school for economics and then you learned shaders for fun. But you also are doing stage play adaptations to Steam or PC or I don’t know what you would call it, but it is a non-interactive video game form version of a stage play and I don’t know of anyone else doing that. So.

Manuela (06:43)
Yes.

Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:07)
Can you explain how you sort of got from being, I assume like maybe a theater kid in high school to getting a degree in economics to learning shaders to going back to theater in video games?

Manuela (07:19)
So I was not a theater kid in high school. No, well in high school my focus was fine arts, but I gave up on that because I remember my dad said to me, once you fail as an artist, you can get a real job. Like, so I gave up on.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:37)
Thanks, Dad.

Manuela (07:40)
He was, I think he was, he was right in a way, right and wrong in a way. I don’t know. don’t even think, I can’t even resent it because my life turned out pretty well, regardless. So my best subject in school was Spanish. So I’m like, well, I’m just gonna go major in Spanish. And I was a teenager in a city called Georgetown, Texas. And at the time I lived there, was a population of 20,000, a small town, only one high school. And I hated it.

I just wanted to get as far away as possible. So I found out about a university in Madrid, Spain that was a satellite of an American university. So I’m like, yes, I’m going to do that. I’m going to study Spanish. So I go to college in 2007.

And then 2008, we have what was in Europe called the crisis. I believe in the United States called the great recession. And so I’m like maybe I shouldn’t major in Spanish anymore.

So I was like, what can I switch to that won’t set me back? Because I don’t want to afford to get more debt to finish my degree. That is a little more marketable than a degree in Spanish. So a Bachelor of Science was out of the question because I would have had to take too many different core classes and take another year or something. But they had a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. I’m like, that sounds marketable. I’ll do that.

I changed majors to economics. So the interesting thing about studying economics while living in Spain during the crisis is a little bit like studying a hurricane while being the eye of one. Because we’d be in class and our teachers would be like, so what we’re reading right now apparently doesn’t apply anymore, but we’ll learn it anyway. Classical theory. so in Europe they don’t call it studying economics, they call it studying political economy.

And I had a lot of teachers who were socialists.

And I had some teachers who were libertarians. So I got both sides of it. feel like an economics education in United States is going to be dominated by what they call the Chicago School or more of a libertarian kind of point of view or neoliberal at least. These are two different things, but they’re more related, I would say, than a socialist point of view. So I appreciated being able to learn perspectives in economics that weren’t the leading dogma of like, know, cut all the taxes and, know.

make houses out of orphan bones. But, because I think a lot of people get mad about, economists don’t understand how the world works. They think that we should give all the money to the rich people. No, economists don’t think that. It’s that neoliberal economists think that.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:21)
That is good to hear. mean, we actually, you know, when people talk to economic experts in the media in the United States, they’re always of more or less the same school of thought. And it is not helpful, especially because you have, you know, people that think they are experts online because they took econ 101 as a prerequisite for something in college going like, well, obviously it works like this.

Manuela (10:35)
Mm-hmm.

boy.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:50)
And yeah, now what a…

Manuela (10:51)
boy. People are

so Dunning-Krugered on economics, it’s crazy.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:55)
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Manuela (10:57)
You asked me how I got from there to games.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:01)
Yes, how? So anyway, how did

you get? How did you get from a degree in economics? And now I better understand that like you didn’t go to college with the intent of getting a degree in economics. You kind of up getting that because it worked for your circumstances. So you graduate with a degree in economics. Now what?

Manuela (11:23)
So in college, I got really into theater. And I think what really helped is that university didn’t have any four year programs in theater, so there were no theater kids per se. Exactly, get rid of all the, I love actors. I am a freelance director. And so I work with actors a lot, bless them, I love them. But being able to do theater without a bunch of actors around was how I discovered my love of theater.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:34)
That’s how we create more opportunities in theater is get the theater kids out of theater.

Manuela (11:51)
because I mentioned one thing I love about stage theater as opposed to film, even though, you know, I enjoy film as well, is that theater is not about making the right version. It’s about, taking, you know, a play and kind of injecting your own beliefs and ideas into it, using the play as a scaffolding for your own story.

Now I would say a good play doesn’t tell a completely different story than what, you know, the playwright intended, but it’s sort of a great launching point for, I think, more subtle ideas. For example, jumping forward to, you know, I did a, I would say, I call it a game because that’s what people understand, but I would call it entertainment software version of The Cherry Orchard.

The cherry orchard, I’m gonna spell it because it’s not about the ending is a foregone conclusion. It’s Russian play about a old woman who is in a lot of debt and she owns a cherry orchard and in the end she has to sell her cherry orchard to pay her debts. I spelled the whole thing, but it’s not about the ending, it’s about the journey to get there. I mean, it’s Russian play. Of course she’s gonna lose her orchard. Like, how could it end any other way? But…

There are a lot of ways to interpret this without changing any of the words. So like, is she a stupid person? Is she a smart person with bad luck? Is she a foolish person who’s nice? Is she a foolish person who like, deserved to lose it? Without changing any of the words of the play, you can tell a somewhat different story that’s still THE story.

and so that’s fascinating. So, you know, if you ever see the cheerio chart in your local theater, you should go see it because it’s a great play and it’s a great play. You can see a million times and each time is going to tell a slightly different story. so that’s, that’s what draws me and video games are very similar. so I was not, I had, I could not program, at the time.

but that ended up being very instrumental in my love of game development. So I didn’t major in drama, but that’s kind of what I got more out of my college years than economics because I just kind of get the degree, you know. But I graduated.

So I went back to the United States in 2012. So like, 2009 to 2010, they’re like, the recession is over! But you know, it wasn’t really. So the job market was still pretty bad.

So I was working lousy jobs and I had a boyfriend who was an aspiring game developer

but he didn’t do anything to become a game developer. He just kind of talked about how he wanted to be a game developer. He was a enterprise programmer. And so he wanted to do a game jam at some point and I did art like for fun. And so he wanted me to do art and he’d do programming in a game jam.

So we did the game jam And I just loved it. I was like in my element. felt, was the first time since I had done stage theater in college that like I had that feeling of engaging all parts of my brain. It was like a peak human experience.

Aaron Nemoyten (14:59)
Mm.

Manuela (15:00)
If you’re working on a play, because I did not just acting in college, but I actually ended up training and directing then at that time as well. And also stage management and stuff. We didn’t win. so my partner at the time was very disappointed and didn’t want to think about anymore. But I asked him for the source of the game because I wanted to keep working on it, even though I couldn’t program. Because I wanted to bring it to completion. So he’s like, yeah, sure. So.

me the source code so I learned how to program basically by by going off of his code and then looking up stuff online and tinkering and stuff. So at around the same time I started trying to learn shaders because he had put some shaders into that game.

so while I was learning C sharp, I was also learning HLSL at the same time. So I kind of learned them concurrently and I didn’t actually know at the time that shaders were supposed to be hard because to me, that was all hard. and, I’m the kind of person where if I get, so I have ADHD as I mentioned, and there’s hyper focus.

So sometimes when there’s a tough nut to crack, it pisses me off and my hyper focus is completely on it. So I was pissed off that I just couldn’t figure out this stupid shader stuff. I’m like, surely this can’t be too hard. So I just kind of like obsessed over it for a long time.

So I started getting active in the local community while also being like, what’s wrong with me? How come I can’t learn this? This surely can’t be that hard. So I started talking to people in the local community and somehow I ended up becoming really good at shaders better than a normal person by obsessing over it out of frustration.

But it turns out, so you have to have a different kind of thinking to do shader programming than CPU programming. Just do the way, you know, CPUs for one instruction at a time really fast and GPUs for executing instructions in parallel. So, I don’t know, I just agreed with the way my brain works and I didn’t realize it was supposed to be hard because it was just all hard to me. So I think because I learned CPU programming and GPU programming at the same time, I got over a hump that a lot of normal programmers have where they get

mad that GPU programming isn’t the same as CPU programming they just kind of give up so that’s that’s how i made my splash into hobbyist game dev

Aaron Nemoyten (17:19)
Mm.

Manuela (17:26)
I eventually started posting my experiments online and that turned into offers of freelance work and eventually I got enough that I could quit my day job.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:26)
So we mentioned the idea of adapting plays to a sort of computer game format. Why? How did you get into this? Why do you do it? And especially because you’re doing this as a labor of love, as far as I know, you’re not really making any money off of it. And yet you’re setting off to do all this graphics work, animate characters, hire and direct a voice cast. Like, this is a lot of work. So why?

Manuela (18:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, as I mentioned, I love stage theater. People, by people I mean like our peers. Don’t go to see plays which is a shame because I think…

It’s a wonderful medium that does things that film cannot do. Now film can do a lot of things that plays can’t do. That doesn’t mean, you know, plays are better, film are better, but there, you should go do both because both give you different experiences. And video games can do things that neither of those can do. And those can do things that video games can’t do. And so one thing I love about stage, as I mentioned, is, know, there’s the meta element of it’s, it’s a little different every And the way you, you approach a stage play,

is with, okay, this is happening. I’m going to assume everything that I see is happening for a reason. So I’m going to work backwards. What is the reason it’s happening? And you see like this mentality that people take to film where it’s like, if I don’t understand why something happened, it’s a plot hole. It’s a flaw. And it’s a culture thing, I think, because it’s like normal people aren’t stupid, but they just have been.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:53)
Hate that.

Manuela (20:00)
I’d say trained quote unquote to approach media in this way, which is a shame. But if I see a play where, don’t know, you go see Hamlet and Hamlet is wearing a biker jacket the whole time. I’m gonna say, okay, they did that on purpose. Why did they decide to do that? There’s something that the director is trying to tell us in this story, not about Hamlet canon, but this Hamlet. Why have they done that?

Um, so there’s, I think too, you, when you see plays, you approach it with that sort of generosity of spirit. Now I’ve seen plays that are real stinkers, but it’s, it’s a different mindset. And I feel like taking that mindset to games, uh, is something that people often do automatically.

and so, the reason why I put so much time and effort into adapting plays to, interactive entertainment software or games for short, is to bring the idea of stage theater to people who otherwise wouldn’t experience it. And I know I succeeded because, afterwards, after I,

launched the Cherry Orchard. I had so many people telling me. I saw this, I saw my local theater was going to do it. So I went to go see it and I enjoyed it. Or Jeopardy had a question based on the Cherry Orchard and I knew the answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I infected your brains with theater. I think people approach plays expecting a film and they’re disappointed because it’s not a film. So think it’s boring, I’m not gonna go again. So.

by like showing people plays in a video game forum where people approached it with that mindset that you approach a video game, they were able to enjoy the play as a play. So it’s like training wheels for going to go see like meat humans on a stage do it instead of, you know, polygons.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:49)
So you’ve worked on a wide variety of games and they all look very different. They’re in different genres. I mean, from Darkest Dungeon to VR games at Owlchemy, which are very bright and colorful. And I’m wondering how much of your work has been about helping to develop a look

versus executing on a look that is already established and it’s just about like, hey, can you help us make this exactly the way we want and, or how much is just like, can you make this performant? Because we already got it how we like it, but it doesn’t run on the devices we want it to run on.

Manuela (22:27)
So in freelance work, nearly all the time, if I’m brought on as a freelancer, it’s pretty late in the project and it’s by an indie team that can’t afford to hire a dedicated graphics engineer. And so for most of the game’s development, one of their engineers has just been muddling through and I’m usually brought on when there’s just something they don’t know how to fix and they’re stuck. And so I come in and I fix their problem. So in that sense, I don’t have a chance to…

dictate anything artistically, but there’s a lot of pride in being the person who comes and fixes everything, especially because, how do I say this without sounding too arrogant, I’m very good at what I do, I usually can do it pretty quickly.

So there’s some pride of, that’s a lot per hour. And then I do it in like two hours and I’m like, okay, that was actually cheaper than like getting a cheaper freelancer. Like, yeah, I could solve your problem right now, man. You could be on your feet tomorrow.

something like, know, darkest dungeon two, was always going to look, you know, like that because that’s the look. but it was fun to, to solve the engineering problem of how can we create that beautiful comic book style in 3d. really fun. I, I don’t think I’ve ever for any project outside of my own been able to dictate what the game looks like.

but that doesn’t bother me because there’s a lot of fun in solving the problem of how do I make this concept illustration exist in 3D?

Aaron Nemoyten (23:56)
Do you have any advice for game developers that want their games to stand out visually? Is there a trick that we don’t see enough of, especially now that there are like a million games released every year, what do you think people can do to get noticed and do something that no one else is doing?

Manuela (24:13)
Well, the easiest thing would be to not use the default shader. Now this sounds stupid, but no, seriously, the vast majority of like lower or cheaper games or like mobile games or games that are cranked up quickly, just use the default shader. And I think people kind of have a misconception that there’s such a thing as like a neutral.

shader, but no, there isn’t because some artist at some point in the past made a decision about the default shader, whatever the engine is, know, Unity, Godot, Unreal. Someone made an artistic decision about what the default would look like. And that is not, you the law of the world of how things ought to look. So just doing anything but that will make you stand out.

That would be the easiest thing. And I know that probably doesn’t sound super helpful, but it’ll help somebody,

Aaron Nemoyten (25:11)
So even though you are sort of known by many as the shader person, your TikTok is mostly you singing opera. How did you get there and why, what’s going on

Manuela (25:20)
Yes.

In 2023, mid 2023, I had a vocal fold hemorrhage. So vocal folds, the vocal cords, but the technical term is vocal folds, because they’re not cords, they’re folds.

that it means like a blood vessel burst in one of my vocal cords and made it swell up with blood, which made it not work right. it made me, it killed my voice, made me hoarse, cause I couldn’t, like fully close my vocal cords, which is what causes us to be able to like make a sound like a woodwind instrument. So air was just passing through, no, voice. and that sucked.

I didn’t sing at the time, you know, like to talk, you know, we like to our voices for things. So I couldn’t talk for like half a year. And normally when you have a vocal fold hemorrhage, they give you oral steroids and that reduces swelling and it goes away on its own within like two weeks.

In my case, it was so severe. It did not go away. so like six months in the ENT I was working with was like, maybe we should do surgery. So I had surgery in December of 2023. And then at the end of January 2024, my voice started to come back. So it’s still got creaky and bad, but it started to come back. Oh God, what a relief. Like you all, I mean, I wouldn’t say people take their voices for everybody’s happy to have a voice, but like to not have it and then, you know, for it to come back.

such relief because there’s that what if I’m like this forever what what if I can never talk again so it’s like I’m this is my new lease on life I’m gonna use my voice so I wanted to learn how to sing

Aaron Nemoyten (26:54)
so because you’ve picked up singing now as a sort of serious hobby, relatively late in life for someone to do that, do you have any advice for other people who want to pick up singing after, you know, 20s or 30s?

Manuela (27:08)
I would say you should do it. I think what was most helpful for me. So, I am 36 years old. and, I had, like tried choir as a teenager and didn’t like it because my voice sucked. And I thought, I just have a crappy voice. Well, it turns out it’s cause, I, my voice does not sound good if you ask me to sing soprano parts.

So a lot of people, so the interesting thing about vocal range is that, For a large part of like the total possible notes that any human could make, most people can produce those notes. And so the difference in vocal type is not your absolute range, it’s where your voice is most comfortable.

And so a lot of people don’t realize that where their voice is most comfortable may not be where they expect it to be.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:05)
Okay, my last question. I don’t know if this is going to be a real soapboxy type question, so get ready.

Manuela (28:10)
boy, I love soapboxy questions.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:12)
So, you went to school for economics, you are now a game developer. Are there any lessons from formal economics that can be useful for indie game developers?

Manuela (28:14)
I

It goes back to, well, so many people have seen the meme about there’s like the fancy cake and then like the more like modest cake and the person who made the more modest cake is like, no, my cake’s not as good as the fancy cake, but the normal person is like, holy shit, two cakes. In economics,

Aaron Nemoyten (28:44)
Yeah.

Manuela (28:48)
there’s this idea of comparative advantage. So you could have an economic entity like a country or a person who sells things that is the best at making both widgets and doodads. And you have someone who’s worse at making widgets and doodads.

but the person who’s better is better at making widgets than do dads even though they’re the best at both. So that means it’s best for them to just focus on making widgets and the person who’s worse at both still can…

participate in an economy or society by making doodads. People, I’ve seen this so many times, both like friends in real life and people on the internet, oh, oh, I had an idea for a game, but somebody else made that idea, just do it. Like, we were talking about people like more of the same in a way.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:39)
Mm-hmm.

Manuela (29:40)
Like maybe your idea is not as fancy, but if people just like that idea in general, they’re gonna be like, you holy shit, two cakes. The more of this thing I like. Cause just like, you know, we’re talking about with plays, there doesn’t have to be the one thing and you don’t look at anything else. It’s, I’m gonna keep seeing variations of the same thing that I like. Just do it. Just do it.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:03)
Sounds good.

Manuela Malasanya, thank you so much for being on MakeGamesDrinkCoffee. It’s been a great time talking to you.

Manuela (30:11)
Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.