Gordon Midwood of Anything World On The Future of Gaming
“Feel” —?There is an indefinable quality to games that is so difficult to get right, and this is sometimes defined as the “feel” of a game. This is that last 10% of development that takes 90% of the time as the saying goes. The mechanics, feedback, audio, effects and joy inherent in the main gameplay loops all contribute towards this.
As a part of our series about what’s around the corner for the gaming industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gordon Midwood.
Gordon Midwood is the CEO & technical co-Founder of Anything World — a startup which uses Machine Learning to bring endless 3D worlds to life!
He is an experienced Technical Director & Technologist with particular expertise in gaming, augmented / virtual / mixed reality, voice computing and gaming.
Gordon has almost 20 years development experience in technology & games and possesses excellent creative programming skills.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to create Anything World?
Myself and my co-founder Seb met around 15 years ago at a creative tech agency in London, and we quickly became friends and appreciated each other’s creative talent. I am a programmer and game designer by trade and love creating games and other 3D apps, and Seb is a super talented artist. We made a number of video games together on Playstation, Nintendo, Steam and Mobile — including Derrick the Deathfin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWFiK66a2VM ) and Drive!Drive!Drive! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXdf6rqhdhg ). It was always a time sink and barrier to our creativity to model, rig, animate and code behaviors for 3D models. Moreover, we were restricted to a limited subset of 3D assets which we would outsource for our games.
When we saw the rise of open source community collections of 3D models such as Google Poly and in particular Sketchfab, we thought what if we could bring all these static assets to life and allow everyone to create unlimited living 3D worlds? What if we could use A.I. to make everyone a 3D content creator?
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
There have been so many interesting stories so that’s a tricky question. Back when we used to make video games, my Anything World co-founder Seb and I made the world’s very first underwater papercraft shark game called Derrick the Deathfin. We traveled around the world (well, to Cologne and San Francisco) promoting it in as guerilla a fashion as possible — including sending a flat pack cardboard shark in airline special luggage and then assembling it live at game conventions, as well as plastering events with our colorful stickers. Our extensive research on sticker effectiveness concluded that carefully placing stickers above men’s urinals provided the most captive audience! ??
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are so many that have supported and uplifted us on our Anything World journey, but if I had to single out one person it would likely be Eamonn Carey, who ran the London Techstars programme and presumably bribed the other judges to let us on it in 2019. Eamonn and Techstars were completely transformative on our startup journey, they provided us with the startup skills and connections to be successful — without them we wouldn’t be here today.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
We do try to influence the world in a small but positive way here at Anything World. Firstly we are a fun company to work with, and we are aiming to bring 3D content creation to everyone so spreading creativity too. We are also actively trying to redress biases in the tech sector, we are committed to a 50:50 male to non-male ratio for employees and we actively prioritize diverse candidates. We believe a more diverse workplace is a more productive and fun workplace, and we want to make Anything World a place where everyone is welcomed and championed.
Let’s now move to the main focus of our discussion. Can you tell us about the technological innovations in gaming that you are working on?
Here at Anything World we are using A.I. to bring 3D worlds to life at a massive scale! We are using Machine Learning to lower the barrier to creativity in 3D, and we want to make everyone a 3D content creator. We have 7 proprietary ML steps that can bring any 3D model to life, and have access to over 600,000 creative commons remixable 3D assets.
In practical terms what this means is that anyone can create living 3D worlds using code, text or even their voice.
How do you think this might disrupt the status quo?
Currently 3D creators typically go through the following steps to make an living 3D object:
Modeling
Rigging
Animation
Programming Behaviors
Anything World eliminates all these steps and allows creators (and players) to request any model at any time and have it appear with behaviors applied. This is extremely disruptive for gaming, metaverse and many other applications in terms of time saved: our customers estimate that we save at least 40% of the production time of 3D apps. It also opens the door to realtime experiences that would otherwise not be possible — such as endless living procedural worlds or voice powered emergent gaming experiences.
You, of course, know that games and toys are not simply entertainment, but they can be used for important purposes. What is the “purpose” or mission behind your company? How do you think you are helping people or society?
Our mission is to make everyone a 3D content creator. We want everyone to be able to easily make games and other 3D experiences, and empower a new generation of makers.
Games are an important form of joy, escapism and relaxation for billions of people around the world and if we can inspire and empower millions of new creators with our service then we can help to increase global joy levels!
I’m very interested in the interface between games and education. How do you think more people (parents, teachers etc.) or institutions (work, school etc.) can leverage games and gamification to enhance education?
We also love this intersection of gaming and education! I think using games and game engines to teach programming to kids is an obvious crossover point, and the visual immediacy of results is something that kids love. In other words results of their coding are immediately visible within 3D worlds, giving kids brilliant visual reinforcement for their efforts. One of the best examples of this I’ve seen is Minecraft PI on the Raspberry PI, which allows kids to add objects to minecraft with a couple of lines of code with immediate results.
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We have many people using Anything World to teach coding to kids too, which we are super proud of. Similarly in Anything World you can create a living 3D object and assign it a behavior all in one line of code — it really sparks imaginations and kids love it!You, of course, know that games and toys are not simply entertainment, but they can be used for important purposes. What is the “purpose” or mission behind your company? How do you think you are helping people or society?
Our mission is to make everyone a 3D content creator. We want everyone to be able to easily make games and other 3D experiences, and empower a new generation of makers.
Games are an important form of joy, escapism and relaxation for billions of people around the world and if we can inspire and empower millions of new creators with our service then we can help to increase global joy levels!
I’m very interested in the interface between games and education. How do you think more people (parents, teachers etc.) or institutions (work, school etc.) can leverage games and gamification to enhance education?
We also love this intersection of gaming and education! I think using games and game engines to teach programming to kids is an obvious crossover point, and the visual immediacy of results is something that kids love. In other words results of their coding are immediately visible within 3D worlds, giving kids brilliant visual reinforcement for their efforts. One of the best examples of this I’ve seen is Minecraft PI on the Raspberry PI, which allows kids to add objects to minecraft with a couple of lines of code with immediate results.
We have many people using Anything World to teach coding to kids too, which we are super proud of. Similarly in Anything World you can create a living 3D object and assign it a behavior all in one line of code — it really sparks imaginations and kids love it!
How would you define a “successful” game? Can you share an example of a game or toy that you hold up as an aspiration?
I guess success is whatever you attribute it to be. Personally I would define success for a game not in terms of player numbers or revenue but in influence on the medium and joy that it has brought to those that play it. Personally I am a deep lover of music games and my favorite game is Rez, that game changed the way that music could be experienced in my opinion and has influenced generations of music game creators.
What are the “5 Things You Need to Know To Create a Successful Game” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
Excellent question! I don’t think anyone has a simple recipe for success in game making (or indeed in any creative pursuit) but I think a strong focus on the following will certainly help in making a successful game.
Gameplay
Obviously compelling gameplay is the core of any game of any kind, without this you can forget about a successful game experience of course.
Controls
Clearly core to a successful game experience is the controls of the game, without tight and intuitive controls a game is nothing.
Audio
Audio is a key part of any successful gaming experience, and unfortunately it is typically not given as much attention as other key aspects of gameplay — often audio is bought in to experiences too late in the development cycle.
Visuals
Clearly one way to differentiate your game is through a distinct aesthetic, we have a history of taking such approaches and it always helps to make a game stand out.
“Feel”
There is an indefinable quality to games that is so difficult to get right, and this is sometimes defined as the “feel” of a game. This is that last 10% of development that takes 90% of the time as the saying goes. The mechanics, feedback, audio, effects and joy inherent in the main gameplay loops all contribute towards this.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Probably a light swivel and lift of the left hip.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“If you’re flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit” — Mitch Hedberg
This is relevant to my life because I have never been caught in a fire and I have never blocked a fire exit!
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Twitter:?https://twitter.com/_anythingworld
Instagram:?https://www.instagram.com/_anythingworld/
This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
(he/him) Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer @Anything World ?? Animations with AI - Let's create!
1 年Awesome ??