People of Note

I had originally intended this to be a post on the White Lotus blog, but it got a bit wordy and personal.

I’ve become quite accustomed to being unable to discus what I’ve been working on.

During XING’s development, we more or less started completely publicly. We had a successful Kickstarter, started going to trade shows, Steam Greenlight (rip), and a monthly devblog. For better or for worse, we had eyes on our project the whole way through.

I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to not have that public pressure the whole time?”

XING shipped - now what?

Right after shipping XING I was asked by my friend and White Lotus collaborator Jason if I would be willing to help him out on a project he was working on. After helping us get XING out the door in 2017, Jason was cutting his teeth on various Unreal Engine projects - some personal, some contract. I was asked to help with some tech art on one of these contract games - one that ultimately completely fell though and went unused.

Or did it? A few years later, Jason hit me up with a similar ask for tech art, this time as a pitch. I got a chuckle after opening the project and seeing the abandoned contract work revitalized and recycled. Jason and a small team had transformed the abandoned work into a lively demo for an old school turn-based RPG centered around a world of music - an incredibly easy to pitch concept. I did some work on a cutscene leading up to a battle: the player character approaches her adversary, a seemingly tortured young man who raps about his grievances on his position in the world. Clever! The demo certainly lacked polish (though I did my best to clean things up!) but totally had heart and clearly demonstrated the intent and capability of the studio. Let’s go.

I finished up my work on the pitch and headed back to my own project once more. For the next year or so I got regular updates on the pitching process from Jason. Stressful stuff, it seems. Jason was looking to really do this idea justice - he has walked multiple paths in the indie game industry already, with several self published titles, one smaller and one involving external funding (but no publisher!). He expressed his interest in a proper publisher, citing a desire to “just be a creative director” and letting a third party handle the publishing duties. Sounds nice!

Being a profoundly charismatic man with an absurd work ethic, Jason indeed found an interested publisher for his project, now titled People of Note, Annapurna Interactive.

It still feels weird being able to share these details publicly after being restricted for seven years. That being said, it is impossible to bring up Annapurna Interactive without referencing the controversy from late 2024. I had left the People of Note project well before that happened… but honestly I have no idea what was going on at AI before then either. Everyone seemed very, uh, Hollywood¹ - name dropping, fix it in post bullshit. I guess I’m not surprised there was a power play going on in the background. I was fairly quickly “banned” from going to publisher meetings after calling them out on several occasions.

In 2020, Jason once again asked me to help with some contract work for People of Note… we all knew where this was headed. Koriel and I agreed that pausing our preliminary work on our own next project was in the best interest of the company, and agreed to partner² up with Iridium Studios on the People of Note project.

Time to get to work

Koriel and my acceptance into Iridium Studios hit a bit of a “second wave” era for the People of Note project, with many of the people who worked on the pitch and early concepts of the project moving on to other jobs, as one does in this industry. I never really had a formal title but was brought onto the art team, which, well, was mostly empty at that point. Koriel and I ended up defacto leading the art side of this “second wave” team as we had the most experience, despite having little managerial experience ourselves. This meant making hires, which was a mostly unknown venture for me!

Like any game, a lot of things were still up in the air. People of Note had a pretty nice script put together that included like 17 plus discrete environments (Entire cities! Towns! Forests! Each with 4 - 10 “scenes”), dozens of unique characters, and, oh yeah, full on musical style cutscenes. Having not been part of the early pre-production there were some baseline strategies already laid out: the game was to be built on UE4, have a static or “on rails” overhead camera for “field” movement, and have a turn based battle system in the style of older Final Fantasy or Persona games. Dialog cutscenes were initially planned to be mocapped but were quickly turned into a scripted, canned anim affair. Musicals were to remain be mocaped and assembled in Unreal Sequencer, a still relatively newly available approach for smaller teams. The general consensus estimated a completion date of around two years. Fortunately, all I gotta worry about is environment, right?

Best laid plans

Early on I indeed got to work mostly in my wheelhouse - outdoor environments and foliage. A “painterly” style had been developed, quite liberally, in the sense that there were floating “paint strokes” that extended off surfaces, giving a rough but intentional look. We put together a wonderful forest environment and packed it full of plants. I put together some standardized lighting systems, and started to grasp the desired art direction. Kori and I hired an additional artist to help us out, and away we went.

I did not stay in environment long. Through a series of twists and turns, my responsibilities grew and grew. A few examples of things I did for the project:

• Initially I was the sole technical artist, leading me to make most of the rendering decisions in the game. This eventually grew into “technical director”, as our engineer left and I took over entire technical rendering pipeline - I essentially felt responsible for getting the game to run on Switch (1), at least the gpu side.
  • Lighting / Sky rendering / Post processing, material work
  • I inherited a custom “toon” shader model - yep, engine edits on an indie game
  • Dozens of art tools, including spline based, brush card, gradient mapping, water etc.
  • Tech art for all the field puzzle mechanics, usually specific vfx
• At one point I took over the field camera system, rewriting most of it to better support a dynamically interpolated camera (that can rigidly follow the character at will)
  • I’m not actually sure if any of my changes to the camera made it into the shipped game? I guess we’ll see!
  • I also made detailed notes on how to update the battle camera, but I don’t remember if I actually implemented any of these.
• I spend a lot of time working with cinematics, IE the musicals.
  • For this “Second Wave” part of the project, PoN had only one dedicated person on musicals. I ended up assisting a lot - mostly putting together scenes, lighting, and VFX.
  • During this wave we focused on getting a singular musical put together, which took a long time. We went through several iterations of ideas, mine consisting mostly of the radical reduction nature, but the dream remained and we pushed forward with a full CG, sequencer driven motion captured deal, including facial (!) mocap.
    • I made the decision early on to pre-render the cutscenes, as there was no way we were gonna support all the fancy camera FX in realtime on Switch (1)
    • Lighting detailed cel shaded faces is a NIGHTMARE and I respect anyone trying this.
  • Nearing the end I was spending nearly my entire workweek on supporting cinematics. It was becoming increasingly clear the we needed to make an impression with this, and to a certain extent it became a hail mary play.
• Characters. Despite my previous title having exactly zero characters, I found myself working closely with our character modelers with regards to rendering.
  • At one point there was a complete shift in direction for characters, which demanded a shift in rendering tech. This fell on me to develop.
  • I went through dozens of techniques and did tons of research, having never really worked with this stuff before. At one point I had a test map with probably 100+ different variations of models, searching for the look.
  • A the time of my departure this was somewhat up in the air. I’m not actually sure what the team decided on shipping with, or if they completely developed something new. When I play the shipped game I’ll pixel peep of course - from the trailers it looks like they more or less stuck with what I left (or at least were inspired by it!) and mostly focused on updating the underlying assets. There were a good number of issues that I’m not sure were actually solved… but that’s game dev.
• And of course, art director stuff, like managing people, developing an artstyle, reviews, etc. I shared these responsibilities with Koriel, but ultimately it was a bit weird - We never officially got an “art director” title³, more like a defacto role, which was undoubtedly confusing for everyone, perhaps mostly to myself.
• I even ended up composing one of the musical numbers!

Time to say goodbye

I worked at Iridium for two and a half years.

Working with a larger (like 12 people at the time?) team had some awesome moments. I developed a camaraderie with my fellow artists, got to work on a project much larger than myself, and witness immense talent and dedication in a variety of fields. I learned a ton about stylized art as well - something I might be taking with me going forward. Characters no longer felt out of reach!

I also learned I may not be cut out for working with a publisher, at least maybe not a typical one.

I think one of my biggest misunderstandings was the idea I understood everything that was going on. I had taken on a lot of responsibility based on information I thought was set in stone - things like target platform, budget, and release date. The lack of knowledge on these things might be second nature to many developers, but to me it was a completely foreign concept that I was absolutely blindsided by.

Something I’ve learned about working with a publisher like Annapurna Interactive: they own the project, the buck stops with them, but we gotta make the game. In this sense, People of Note was not an independent project, and I was not an independent developer, and that frustrated the hell out of me.

I let Jason know, and when it was time for the “second wave” to end in November of 2022, we agreed it was time for me to go.

Public reveal and release

That was nearly three and a half years ago. People of Note finally went public late last year, and is coming out in just a few days from the time of me writing this. (edit: out now!)

I’m looking forward to experiencing an unusual phenomenon - seeing a project that I was profoundly familiar with years ago that has undergone a three year metamorphosis. Will the caterpillar I helped raise still be in there? Weird metaphor aside, I do hope things have come out alright on the other end, but already I am deeply proud of my friend Jason for following through on an immensely challenging project, and sticking to his guns throughout.

People of Note launched today, April 7th, 2026, on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox series whatever, and Switch 2.