9 Questions With Craig Wells

Describe what you currently do, and tell us the best thing about it.

I'm currently VP of Operations at Super Evil Megacorp, a fully remote studio with people in 14 countries. The role covers everything that isn't making the game itself. On a team our size, that's a wide net. In a single week, I might roll out a new IT initiative like mobile device management (MDM) or zero-trust networking, set a title up with a platform partner like Nintendo or PlayStation, review and sign contracts, answer customer support tickets, and contribute to upcoming pitches. Over the years that has meant overseeing shipping titles like “Vainglory,” “Catalyst Black,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate,” and “Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game.”

The best thing about it is how short the distance is between a decision and its effect. When I fix something structural — a schedule quietly crushing people, an approval process eating weeks, a piece of infrastructure that's been a daily tax on everyone — I get to see the work get better within the same month. Running a distributed team across that many time zones makes the operational work matter more, not less. Every process either helps someone in another country do their job or gets in their way. Getting that right is the whole job, and it's what keeps it from feeling like an abstraction.

What led you to the ETC?

I was working in Los Angeles as an associate at an architecture firm, moonlighting as a PA on film projects, and getting a bit fed up with both. I wanted to move into animation, so I started applying to graduate programs in that space. The ETC was easily the most unique and interesting one I found and I honestly assumed I wouldn't get in, especially given it was CMU. Getting accepted was a genuine shock. It changed the trajectory of my life in ways I still can't fully articulate.

What projects did you work on at the ETC?

• ImininTech Project: A double-sized, two-story booth built for CMU's Spring Carnival. Nine of us worked on it, and it was by far the most ambitious of all the projects I worked on. I handled the structural and architectural drawings for the building.
• Heavy Metal: Sponsored by Caterpillar, who wanted to explore remotely operating a large bulldozer in environments that were unsafe or had low visibility. We built a real-time 3D deformation prototype that took sensor input from the machine and deformed a world in Panda3D as it worked. It never went beyond prototype, but we fed a recorded data stream from an actual bulldozer into the model and watched the terrain deform in real time.
• Empyrean 2D: A project at ETC Silicon Valley on the Electronic Arts (EA) campus, working directly with EA on a companion game for an upcoming “Dragon Age” title. The idea was a loop between the two: the mobile game would pull data from the main game, and its outputs would feed back into it. It was prototype-only and never released, but we had a working build running against their QA game that demonstrated the round trip.

What’s your favorite ETC memory?

My favorite memory is one of those random non sequitur moments during Building Virtual Worlds (BVW). I was heads-down on my own project when I overheard a conversation from another team: "But there's a thermal detonator in there." The response? "Yes, I put that in there to clear the room." And then, with total sincerity: "Oh, okay, that makes sense." Completely reasonable in context. Deeply strange out of it. That's the ETC in a sentence.

How did ETC prepare you for your career, and what impact has it had on your life?

The real impact of the ETC was personal. I came out of my first semester and sat down with Ruth Comley to ask about my prospects for a summer animation internship. She was honest with me and told me that while there was good work in my reel, it probably wasn't going to land me an internship and that getting an animation job after graduation would mean working myself into the ground.

Then she said something I hadn't considered: my organizational skills during BVW had been obvious, and that was worth capitalizing on. I pushed back, because I didn't want a role where I couldn't contribute creatively. She told me to go talk to Jesse Schell. Jesse's answer was that I was describing a false choice — become a creative producer and you still shape the work, you just do it from the position of the thing you're actually good at.

I spent the rest of my time at the ETC becoming that. I organized the library and built a checkout system for it. I produced the BVW show my second year. I took the producer role on my last two projects and loaded up on production electives. That work is what got me hired at Disney as an Associate Product Manager, an offer that came through while I was on my way back to Pittsburgh for graduation.

None of it happens without two faculty members being willing to tell me something true I hadn't asked to hear. That's what I'm still most grateful for, and it's what I try to pass on when I'm doing the same for someone on my own team.

What is the most interesting or enjoyable thing that you’ve gotten to do in your career so far?

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate!” I grew up with the Turtles, so getting to work on them at all was a bit surreal. But the part I didn't expect was how long it kept going. Most licensed games ship and then that's it. Everyone moves on. But we've been adding to this game for years now — new characters, new levels, all of it — because people kept playing and kept asking for more. Every so often I'll come across someone online saying it's one of the best TMNT games they've played, and I have no idea what to do with that. I just know it's not the normal outcome, and I got to be part of it.

What advice would you give current students?

Pay attention to what you're actually good at, not just what you came here to do. I arrived wanting to be an animator and left as a producer, and that only happened because two faculty members were willing to tell me something I hadn't asked to hear. So talk to them. Really talk to them, not just about your project deadlines. They've watched a lot of students and they notice things about you that you can't see from the inside. Two years is a short time to change direction, but it's the cheapest window you'll ever get to do it. After this point, changing course costs a lot more.

Describe the ETC in one word.

Clarifying.

What are you working on now that excites you?

Outside of work, I'm building a Dungeons & Dragons campaign from scratch, and I've ended up running it exactly like a game project. There's a design doc, a tracker, a dozen work streams in dependency order, deferred scope… even a review pass. I'm two tracks in right now. The premise is an Eberron game about a villain who's built a legitimate corporation to do something monstrous, and the party has to take the company apart to stop her.

I did not expect the most creatively satisfying thing I've done in years to look this much like my day job. Ruth and Jesse told me sixteen years ago that organization was the thing I was actually good at, and I worried at the time that it meant giving up creative work. It turns out those were never separate skills. I just needed a better example.