There's a version of this conversation with Lana Bachynski (Art Director, Riot Games) that's about animation — she's one of the best in the business at it, and we do talk shop, right down to the order she animates a character's body in. But the version I keep coming back to is the one about showing up.

Lana grew up in a house that banned video games, which somehow made her more obsessed with them, not less — rotating on footstools with her siblings, waiting a strict twenty minutes for a turn at the one family computer. She talks about the teacher who connected her secret animation habit to an actual career, about landing a Blizzard internship on a demo reel full of monsters instead of walk cycles, and about the strange pressure in animation school to want to work on films instead of games — a pressure she just never really felt.

But the part of this conversation that stuck with me longest comes after Blizzard. When Lana moved to Riot, she found the studio's animator community was basically three people in an empty room, trying to convince anyone to show up. She didn't shrug and move on. She built it into something dozens of people turn up for every week. This whole episode is really about that instinct — building the room, and then filling it.

"It basically looks like a mess until the moment it doesn't."
— On how she animates: root first, then hips, then spine, layering the body from the inside out until, all at once, it clicks.

"You want to work in video games? You're stupid for thinking that."
— The reaction Lana got in animation school for saying she wanted to work at Blizzard, at a time when games were seen as the lesser craft next to film.

"I'll play a thousand hours of a video game, and if I'm losing the game I feel differently, if I'm winning I feel differently."
— On why replayability, not prestige, is what actually pulled her toward games over a film career.

"It felt like somebody died when I left."
— On walking away from five years at Blizzard, even though staying was no longer really a choice.

Alex (00:00)
Thank you for taking the time. Right off the top — I'm going to have a hard time saying your name right, because I'm English.

Lana Bachynski (00:09)
Yeah. Which is legal — I always say, to the consternation of my friends and peers, that however you say the "a" in that yellow fruit you'd put in a smoothie is how you're allowed to say the "a" in my name. If you say "Lana" but you also say "banana," it's legal.

Alex (00:31)
Well, now I'm a hypocrite. Hey, Lana, thank you for taking the time.

Lana Bachynski (00:39)
Land — like land party. For the gamers.

Alex (00:46)
Excited for you to be part of the podcast. I always like to kick this off with my favourite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Lana Bachynski (00:56)
Great first question. Probably the thing that first inspired me was their illicitness in my household — the forbidden fruit that was only found elsewhere. We didn't have video games in the house for years and years. Computer games were eventually allowed, but not video games. Going to my friend's house in second grade, she's got a Super Nintendo, and pushing the button and seeing the guy on the screen jump — it was like magic. Like fireworks in my mind: I can't believe the buttons I'm pushing here are having an effect on that thing over there. That fun was immediate and amazing.

What first inspires me about video games as a developer — the first time I thought about a video game in a development way, in a direct line to my career — was much later. I always said I wanted to make video games, but I had no concept of what that meant, or what my role in that might be. But playing Jak and Daxter — I still think of it as the best double jump in a game that's ever existed. It had this juicy timing. You hit it and it was snappy, a really strong stretch pose into that really wide pose at the top, with little Daxter hanging off of Jak's shoulder. So satisfying, so cool. I remember just double jumping around all the time so I could see it.

Alex (02:34)
So interactivity, being able to make something move on the screen, caught you straight away. I'm fascinated by the illicitness of them — the forbidden fruit, the thing you couldn't freely play. Outside the obvious — that we're drawn to the thing we're not supposed to mess with — was there something about video games specifically being forbidden that attracted you even more?

Lana Bachynski (03:07)
I think it was just — I've always loved games. Despite not being a video game household, we were always a games household. Sports, my parents making up games for us on rainy days or long car rides, board games and cards, lots of euchre growing up. Competition was a big thing, and video games had this very satisfying loop of, I'm going to try and do this thing. Even if it's the hard platforming section, the wall coming up behind you in Mario — if you can do it fastest and not die, there's a competition that's both everybody rooting for you and rooting against you, because they want to try it too. That competitive feeling, self-contained and self-satisfying, was the part that really hit me and made me want to do it again and again.

Alex (04:07)
I love that — the competition element, and the fact that games were such a part of your life growing up. Did you have any siblings who were also gamers?

Lana Bachynski (04:18)
Yeah, all my siblings are. I've got a twin sister, so competition built in from the first breath, and two older brothers. When we eventually got a computer, it was for documents, but we convinced my parents to get some limited computer games — a disc called "101 — Only the Best Games," the kind of wallet fold-out of CDs you'd see in a cartoon. It had fifteen different Pac-Man ripoffs, Lemmings, random little things. We were allowed to play for limited chunks of time. Eventually we got Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith.

We'd set up at the one computer chair, a wooden chair, with footstools all around it. You'd set it so that after twenty minutes, or after so many kills, it would advance to the next level — rotating, group competitive play, but not leaderboards. Every time the level switched, we'd set it to a timer, twenty or fifteen minutes, and switch seats: one sibling playing, the other three on footstools waiting their turn, heckling — "there's somebody around that corner." It was one of the most formative times in my mind — sitting around that computer with my siblings, rotating on those footstools, waiting for your turn.

Alex (06:06)
Your own version of Lord of the Flies. And where did you grow up?

Lana Bachynski (06:11)
Three main cities — we moved around a bunch because of my dad's work, his industry going through consolidation. Mostly Calgary from when I was born to about twelve, with a stint in Fort McMurray, quite far north in Alberta. Then Edmonton, where I lived most of my conscious childhood — twelve to eighteen — where I went to art school and had a great time.

Alex (06:55)
Growing up in a relatively cold part of Canada, presumably.

Lana Bachynski (07:00)
Yes — even though Fort McMurray is much further north and more consistently cold and dark, the sun rising at eleven a.m. and setting at two p.m., Edmonton will consistently spike into being the coldest place on earth for a few days.

Alex (07:33)
And that motivated more indoor activities — more gaming, more malls.

Lana Bachynski (07:38)
Lot of malls. West Edmonton Mall — formerly the World's Largest Mall — had what I still say is one of the greatest arcades that has ever existed. It's gone now: Palladium. Those who know, know — there are websites dedicated to remembering it. Getting the time cards where you're there for five hours beating Jurassic Park, not because you're good, but because you can swipe an unlimited number of times. Now that's an afternoon, baby.

Alex (08:11)
So arcades were a big thing, and plenty of competition there too.

Lana Bachynski (08:17)
Yeah. There's a local LAN called Fragapalooza I used to go to — a pretty rough time being one of fifteen women at a three-hundred-person LAN — but going and just demolishing people at Unreal Tournament 2004. Few things are more satisfying. I showed up wearing my little skirt and tank top, and then I won. How rough was that for you, man?

Alex (08:55)
The person who initially looked over at you, thoroughly embarrassed. Love it.

Lana Bachynski (09:01)
Yeah, competition — definitely my early life, and I definitely still feel very competitive every day. Problematic.

Alex (09:15)
You mentioned being drawn to interactivity and competition, but at some point Jak and Daxter inspired you to make games. Did you understand how games were made, or did you just have this inspiration of, I want to make them? How did that come to you?

Lana Bachynski (09:33)
I wish I'd connected the pieces sooner — it's like reading a young adult book where the protagonist says "here's what could be possible about the future," and you think, that's the most obvious foreshadowing of your life. So I'm playing Jak and Daxter, registering that these animations are great — and I'd started going to art school in seventh grade. At the time you had to submit a portfolio and prove you wanted to make art, even at eleven years old. The school — Victoria School of the Arts, the composite school for the performing and visual arts — sounds fancy, but it's a run-down inner-city school for the weird kids.

Once you got in, they had a huge variety of options alongside the normal subjects: drawing, drama, welding, cheerleading, jazz and every dance variety, video, radio, photography with a full darkroom, web design, new media, and an animation class — the first time I ever took one. As soon as I saw that, I thought: animation, this is the thing I really liked.

I started animating all the time, but thought of it as a weird hobby. I'd show up early, before the teachers most days, and be on the steps asking, can I play on the computers? "Sure, weirdo, come on in." I'd animate in the lab before class, at lunch, and after school I'd babysit my teacher's kids and animate from three to five-thirty — the whole time thinking, what a fun thing I'm doing, I wish I could figure out how to work in video games — without ever sticking those two ideas together.

But my teacher — shout out, Mr. D, always the best — at some point heard me saying those two thoughts out loud, back to back. In his classroom he had posters from Warcraft III, from A Bug's Life, cardboard standees from The Incredibles. He said, "Lana, come here a second. See these things around you? People get paid to animate those." I said, that's what my job could be in video games. He said, "Yeah, I thought you knew that." I didn't — I'm dumb. It was a light switch, him pointing out that this weird hobby was my way in to the career I wanted. He helped me put my demo reel together, find good animation schools, apply for scholarships, which I won, which offset the cost of school in the States. He was massive support through what felt like a crazy push in the last six months of high school to get myself out the door and ready to go to art school. And so I did.

Alex (13:16)
I want to draw the line — was it literally the motion of Jak and Daxter that inspired you to be an animator, or was there something in human motion that drew you to animate, or was it just the video games?

Lana Bachynski (13:39)
They felt like distinct ideas to me. Animating was a fun thing that was a way to express little stories, more than the animation itself. In animation school it became more about that tactile expressiveness — how economical you could be with an idea, and how your frames expressed emotion in a punchy way.

But video games was always for the fun of video games, and when I stuck the two together, video games was always the career goal. I run into animators a lot who ask what inspires me about that heart, and I like that merging of being on the computer and doing acting — I did a bunch of acting growing up, and my parents met on stage, so theatre was a huge part of my life. But I enjoy the acting part of animation less than just making something look cute and move in a cute way. Animation was always just my way to work on video games. Now that I do art direction, people ask if I miss animation, and I don't, because I'm still doing the thing I wanted to do, which is make games. They're related, but not a full Venn diagram of my complete interests — what's great about games, and what's still my favourite hobby, which happened to be my career: animation.

Alex (15:10)
You just happened to find a way to smash the two together and make a career out of it.

Lana Bachynski (15:13)
Yeah — as I grew into animation, the joy of it was making the game feel responsive and fun. The animation was the puzzle piece to the game being great, not the game being the train that animation rides into being the showpiece.

Alex (15:33)
You're talking my language as a game feel designer. At that time Pixar was a thing, there were great digital animation houses around — was it the interactivity of games that still pulled you? You didn't feel the draw to animate a movie, you wanted to animate a video game.

Lana Bachynski (15:59)
In university there was a strange phenomenon, going to school for animation, especially the school I went to. I went to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco because it was an animation hub — ILM was in the Bay Area, Pixar, Tippett Studio, Blizzard North, EA, tons of video game studios, Ubisoft among them. I thought, even if this school turns out to be no good, I bet I can still find somebody who'll teach me what I need to know. But because of the proximity to Pixar, showing up at school saying "I want to work for Blizzard" — which was the dream — everybody was like, you want to work in video games? You're stupid for thinking that. There was this idea that games are lesser than, because objectively, at the time, animation quality in games was worse — performance reasons, a million other reasons, the complex puzzle of putting the pieces together. And if you didn't want to make films, you didn't know what you wanted from being an animator, you were a fool for thinking otherwise. So there was a lot of pressure to want to make movies. I did feel a halfway pull toward thinking maybe I was wrong — I would have taken a job at Pixar, don't get me wrong. But I wanted to work at creature houses, animating monsters, robots punching each other — Tippett was my other dream studio, alongside Blizzard, and ILM, if working on a Star Wars film would have been fantastic.

But the interactivity of games, and really the replayability, is what stuck it to me. When I got my internship at Blizzard — a cool first job after all the dreaming — it was animating something, and every time you see it... if you love a movie, you'll watch it fifty times, that's crazy. I'll play a thousand hours of a video game and see that same animation, and if I'm losing the game I feel differently, if I'm winning I feel differently, if I see somebody else using it I feel differently. You feel steeped in your work, and it changes context and always feels interesting and satisfying to see.

Alex (18:29)
I really empathise with that — having the thing you made get played, replayed, enjoyed by people, in a more organic way than something that's always the same every time. What drew you to Blizzard specifically — were you a big fan of their games, was it a particular game, or just the company?

Lana Bachynski (18:56)
I love StarCraft. There's really only three games we ever owned, other than "101 — Only the Best Games": StarCraft, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and Mysteries of the Sith, and Unreal Tournament. We never got a computer capable of running anything more contemporary; we tried Warcraft III, thinking it's 3D, so exciting, and got one frame a minute, way below minimum spec. StarCraft, though — you could burn a copy of it, and get a LAN party going that fast: five friends, someone's PC brought in for the weekend, a borrowed parent's laptop, and how quickly we could get a local LAN party going, before Battle.net had even spun up, was incredible. Kids in the basement, my brother upstairs on a laptop, a friend upstairs, a four- or five-person free-for-all within the household. StarCraft being one of my fondest memories was why Blizzard was the target — the joy, the gameplay, the competitive scene. The little characters would dance, the campaign was so satisfying — everything about it spoke to what I liked in video games.

Alex (20:38)
Sounds like all the pieces you love in one perfect experience. So you land an animation internship at Blizzard — how did that happen, and what was it like?

Lana Bachynski (20:51)
It was surreal, honestly. When I was at school in San Francisco, GDC — the Game Developers Conference — is also in San Francisco, and I volunteered there every year, which, as a destitute college student, getting the all-access badge felt like the most glamorous free thing that could come to my town. I had a place to stay, the badge, and food as an RA at school — one of the biggest events in games every year. I met a really good group of friends there who I still keep up with, literally daily. I wasn't tracking the job pages, but a friend from GDC said, I've never seen this before, Blizzard has an animation intern role open, you should apply. Of course I should apply. I applied immediately, and what I put in my demo reel — because my focus had been on the pressure to work in film and on monster stuff — was a variety of different characters, not just bipeds. A lot of people applying to games assume you'll do a bunch of walk cycles, but I only had one, and it was a crazy monster walk cycle, not a guy walking down a street. I had all this body-mechanics, physicality stuff — ogres punching the crap out of each other, terrible animation, but all this physical, monster stuff. I applied with that reel, staring at the phone for days, weeks, thinking I didn't get it. Three months later I got an email — sitting with a friend and a teacher when it rolled in. "This says Blizzard Entertainment, that's weird — StarCraft intern." Everything else in the room disappeared. I went over, shaking, opened the email, and it said they'd love me to do an animation test. Everybody, shut up! Freaking out in the lab.

The test, in retrospect, was crazy — rig and animate a character, seven days, five animations, full rig. I'm one of the worst riggers of all time, but: good luck. I immediately conspired with people around me — we ended up taking the mesh and skin-wrapping it onto Norman, one of the oldest character rigs that exists. Essentially Thrall skin-wrapped onto Norman. Five animations — a run, a death, an idle, an attack, and an optional animation of your choice. Mine was an ogre drinking out of a stein, choosing, drinking, slamming it on the table. When I submitted the work, they said it was really cool I'd put the stein animation in — I didn't know Steins were a big Blizzard cultural thing; they give one away at your two-year anniversary. So they got Steins galore out of it.

It came down to me and one other guy, a thirty-minute phone call, basically "are you normal?" Later they told me I got the job because the hiring manager made an embarrassing joke to the other guy, who had more experience and a slightly better reel, and he was too ashamed of the joke he'd made — so they hired me instead. Keep you humble. Every job you get is such a lesson — you never know why you get the thing, and you never know why you don't. Knowing that at the time was a bit of a bummer, but it's such a good lesson to carry. That's how it kicked off — I made a good impression, hungry and quick, animating speedily was a specialty of mine, and it stuck around.

Alex (25:59)
That was you moving from San Francisco on-site to Irvine, Orange County. Internships are hard — four months, low or no pay, on-site too. How was that? Did you feel the pressure?

Lana Bachynski (26:25)
Once I got there, I had the confidence of not having ego — knowing I was there to learn, and to soak in whatever I could, since maybe this was the only three months I'd get. I kicked the ego to the curb on the way there. But it was really, really hard. The work itself came pretty naturally — they started me on the lowest-level work nobody else wanted. I did all the flail animations for the Phoenix unit in Heart of the Swarm, units that could pick other units up and flail because they were floating in the air. I did every single one, but there were enough different units that it took a couple of weeks, just enough time to learn 3D Studio Max, which I hadn't used — I was on Maya — learn the editor, meet everybody. By the time I got through all the lowest-level work, things sped up, and they gave me more fun work while other people had the critical-path gameplay work to do — I got to make everything dance, all the critters. Incredibly enjoyable.

But the hardest parts were getting paid basically nothing while paying rent in San Francisco and Irvine. There'd been drama with the previous year's interns — Facebook groups were newish then, and the "Blizzard Interns" group from the year before had posted photos of themselves drinking together, and Blizzard freaked out: we did not make you do that, don't put our name on it. Because of that, they didn't provide housing for my intern year. So I was paying rent in both places, with two roommates who were also interns, none of us had a bed — we all slept on the ground in little nests we made. Irvine is also in the desert, so there are ants everywhere, and we didn't know that was just a fact of life there — after a barbecue, everything was clean, but donuts on the counter weren't sealed enough, and the apartment filled with ants. We thought we'd get in trouble if we told the landlord, so every day was brushing the ants off, getting ready, and riding my bike — no seat, because it was free — twenty or thirty minutes to work, standing up the whole way so I didn't impale myself.

It's weird, because that living situation was genuinely one of the hardest times, but the internship itself — being at work, meeting everybody, feeling like I could unabashedly be myself and felt celebrated — the people there were excited there was this new young person ready to be down to clown, play games, make games, and have a really good time. So at their earliest convenience, they brought me back in.

Alex (30:15)
So you found your people, you found your space.

Lana Bachynski (30:16)
I did, yeah.

Alex (30:17)
And it was a couple of years after that before you actually got a full-time role.

Lana Bachynski (30:26)
Yes — that's why I said "at their earliest convenience." I went back and finished my degree, because as a Canadian it's mandatory for me to have it to get the visa to work in the States. When I was about to graduate I wrote to Blizzard saying I was ready for work. They said they didn't have availability, because the project that would eventually become Overwatch had just had a hard reset, and rather than firing everybody, they'd absorbed those people onto other teams. They asked if I could wait another year, and I said, I will get deported, so no, I cannot. I started applying for three jobs a day, every day, for about six months, trying to find any other way in. I was working at a little studio called Visual Ink Creative doing internal marketing for companies — Pepsi wants to talk to its people about the future, that kind of thing — and I learned every corporation says the same thing to its people, wants the same picture: here's where we currently are, drawn like an old coal town, brown buildings, smog, and a big yellow arrow, also a bridge, leading to the future, which looks like the Jetsons — bubbles, glass, spaceships. I drew that same picture about fifty times, for Pepsi, for HP, for random tech companies.

Eventually all the people who'd go on to make Overwatch went back to it, and my former boss texted me at nine at night: what's up, you want to move back to Orange County? I said, I sure do — for a job, to be clear. He said, offer's in the mail. I don't think I even had to do a second-round interview — my whole path in was a thirty-minute conversation for the internship, and then they just shipped me the offer when it was available. I've never heard of anybody else having that happen — it was crazy.

Alex (33:01)
You clearly made such an impression in those four months, even with the time that had passed. You mentioned a lot of illustrating and drawing — was that ever an angle you wanted to take, or was animation always the priority?

Lana Bachynski (33:15)
Animation was always the priority, because that was the path to games — drawing in games is drawing stuff for other people to put into the game, one step removed. But I really liked the arts education I had, because it gave me well-rounded knowledge that lets me do my current job better than if I'd been solely animation-focused. I have some drawing chops — better long-form rendering chops than concept ability — but I can get by, and then colour theory, foundations, sculpting. If I'd wanted fine art I could have gone into oil painting, but instead I went digital and kept on that way.

Alex (34:09)
The course gave you a really good broad understanding of art with a capital A, and set you up for success.

Lana Bachynski (34:17)
The closest thing I ever did to deviating from it was stop-motion animation. I still have my little stop-motion doll, a guy somewhere on the shelf. Being able to make things with your hands, super tactile, feels so great to have a physical thing when you're done. Stop motion helped me understand animation better than trying to do it on the computer first. There was a flow state — moving something, seeing the onion skinning on screen, pulling a couple of frames back, doing a quick playback, thinking, it needs a couple more frames — it helped it click, understanding timing, why more frames slowed something down. All the different principles came into sharp focus in stop motion, in a way that made it easier to translate into the computer. I was taking animation courses at the same time, and they were so rough — why do I understand it over here, but not over here? Eventually I was able to merge that knowledge into the side of my brain that could parse how to do the job.

Alex (35:39)
I'd never thought of it that way — stop motion is about the journey to a pose, whereas digital animation tends to be about pose to pose.

Lana Bachynski (35:52)
With stop motion you had to think of everything at the same time — where things are in the background, the dialogue happening — because it's straight ahead, there's no other way to do it, you just crank through it, and it feels like you're sculpting it as you go, because you can play it back and check when the timing feels a little off. With digital, you're fighting the computer for control — ironically, animating in a stepped mode was extremely hard for me. Stepped mode forces no other poses between the ones you put in, so it just pops between them — some people use that to see timing, but every time I'd put poses in and get it into a spline, where the computer starts adding in-betweens, it would either be extremely slow or extremely fast, and I couldn't see it. The way I animate on the computer is layered — a couple of big poses in, then just the hips, or the root, the centre of gravity, animated so it feels right, even while the upper body is just popping between stuff. If I can get the core of the body, the biggest motion, feeling like the timing is correct, I can match everything else up to that — root, then hips, then feet, then spine, then arms. It looks like a mess, until the moment it doesn't.

Alex (37:41)
Until you put that last piece in and it all comes together.

Lana Bachynski (37:46)
So then you get your degree, join Blizzard, move back down to Orange County, and you're at Blizzard for five years — working your way from associate to senior, on some big competitive games, on Heroes. I also love the graphic design for the team-bonding merch.

Lana Bachynski (38:13)
I did do that. I loved making shirts — I always wanted something to commemorate what I'd worked on. It started with team events, social on-site, with little competitions people made for each other to play at each other's desks. One time I designed a shirt for the animation team, went to one of those iron-on kiosks at the mall, asked if they could do custom designs, and worked with the guy at the mall to get custom iron-ons made. Everybody was like, wow, you guys made shirts, this is crazy. So every team event after that I'd make the animators a different custom shirt, and then more people wanted in, so it branched out into commemorating the heroes I'd worked on — because you're there together for about nine months. Blizzard didn't sponsor it, but everybody would opt in, and I had a relationship with a local screen printer, making sure the colours were right, and then I'd take payments — a little internal-only merch store. For some reason Blizzard never stopped me putting their name on the clothes. A little logo for every hero I worked on, stamped it on a t-shirt, and anybody who wanted one could buy it from me. Ten or fifteen different shirts for the heroes I worked on, three or four more for team events. A lot of merch design in between everything, a lot of weird things, because the team really let me flex into what I thought was interesting. I think because I was a fast animator — I could get to shippable quality really quickly — I'd be looking for what else I could do, and they'd say, everything else is kind of waiting, so I'll make a shirt, work on a GDC talk, help with a cinematic thing for BlizzCon, anything that came up, I'd say I can help with that. It let me feel like I could fire on a lot of cylinders, from in-game prototypes to using the knowledge I had of the engine — a proprietary little beast — to anything else in between. Tons of public speaking — they tapped me as a spokesperson for the company for many of the years I was there. I really felt like I was embracing myself as a developer, not just an artist, which is what I'd always wanted to be. I felt really empowered to do that there.

Alex (41:37)
By "developer," it sounds like you also mean a key team member — someone for whom it matters that the team connects, that you're a community, especially on something with live service, patch dates, big things to ship. It sounds like that was a big part of the experience, not just the work, the community as well.

Lana Bachynski (42:13)
Absolutely. It's a sentence you hear devs say all the time, but unless you're really in it, on one side or the other, it doesn't quite sink in. People want to work with people they get along with, because if we're having fun, we're going to make something that's fun for other people. If we're comfortable together, we're going to give better feedback, be more honest — we're in a space of psychological safety that's empowering for making tough choices. Those are the teams that can make the hard calls and the hard cuts, because they're going to be there to support each other. On the other end, if you don't feel safe around somebody, you're not going to give them tough feedback, because you don't know if they're going to freak out. When I first started on the team — and this was a big team effort, not just me — people would say, ugh, I don't want to ask the designers, and I'd say, I'll go ask the designers, why are we scared of this? It became my own personal mission not to feel that fear, and over time, especially competing with a much bigger, much more successful game like League of Legends — you have to bring it, baby, you have to move — the whole team physically knocked out some of the walls keeping the designers in their own little pen, like a little castle, and punched them out: you're actually hanging with the rest of us. Over time everything levelled out, and any of the more toxic personalities either got removed from the team or moved to a more glamorous team at the company. By being the least successful game at the company, and one of the more demanding dev cycles — shipping something every three weeks — it pared down to people who really wanted to be there and were willing to be there with each other.

Alex (44:26)
I'm sure this is true of other creative fields, but certainly video games — I don't think all of us have that in us, to be that catalyst. I didn't for the longest time — it took years of failure and a little success, and realising, why am I not talking to people, we should just be talking to people. I think there's a lot of us who don't have that gene, and having people who can bring others together and get them excited to work together is really important — especially when not all teams get to work together for long periods, projects can be big, people come and go, things get cancelled, teams fall apart because the project fails.

Alex (45:29)
So it's even more important to have people who can motivate others to build that community. You spent five years at Blizzard on what sounded like a dream game for you, and then you moved on — why did that happen, and how did it feel?

Lana Bachynski (45:29)
Honestly, it felt like somebody died when I left. Working at Blizzard, for better or worse, is extremely all-consuming, and I learned so much. You can't talk about working at Blizzard without talking about that era — you can go read Jason Schreier's reporting on it, and I was there during exactly that time frame, so there's a lot I experienced. The games industry is definitely full of — I don't know the delicate way to put it — bad actors, but from my experience it wasn't any worse than the same type of guy I'd meet at a coffee shop; it was existing there the same way as existing in the world as a woman anywhere. So overall I had a very positive experience. But because I'm hungry and want more, working on Heroes was fantastic and a dream in a lot of ways — I felt supported, I felt safe — but I wanted to keep learning, and I felt like I was starting to reach diminishing returns in what I could learn there. I was hungry to be put in another deep end and try to build a team and a community again, because I do think that's a skill set I have, and I can't test that until I leave a team and go try to do it somewhere else.

I first tried to move around internally at Blizzard, but it coincided directly with when they started downsizing Heroes — they cancelled the HGC, the competitive scene, and immediately started moving people off my team onto other teams. It was a frustrating moment: they knew I was looking to move to another team, specifically Diablo, and instead they kept me on the team, moved other people into the roles that opened up, and told me it was a concession they had to make, because I was so involved with the community — outside and on the team — that they needed me to soften the blow for the community and the team still there. They held me there, saying, even if this only means three more months, it's a choice we have to make for everybody else's short-term health. I said, that's giving me only one choice, which is to leave the company — and they said, yeah, we know that's true.

That ended up being a really good thing, because working at Riot has also been a fantastic experience, and in a lot of ways I've been able to grow more than I ever would have at Blizzard, just because of how they're structured. Riot has some unique opportunities — namely the community of practice, which I'm sure we'll talk about — but I just wasn't allowed to do anything else at Blizzard, so I had to scoot out of there. It felt really bad to be forced out, but I'm very happy for the choices I made, and therefore happy for the choices they made for me. So, no regrets, baby.

Alex (49:06)
It's a big thing, though — when you work on something you dream about and then that dream changes. It made me question whether I wanted to keep doing this — if I don't do it here, do I want to do it anywhere else? It sounds like finding Riot gave you that freedom. Did you at any point question it — think about leaving the industry — or were you determined that nothing was going to stop you making games?

Lana Bachynski (50:00)
There's no world where leaving the industry was an option — I'd try to start my own thing before I'd leave the industry. I can't imagine doing something else with myself, given how the industry is. Riot, being this big, successful studio, seemed like a very natural fit — they had a big R&D department, which I found most appealing, and I knew I'd be able to sell a lot of my skills, because they have a game in the same genre, so I'm an easy onboard — I have to learn their engine, but I've got the community chops, and I know how to animate for a MOBA, period. I know the camera angle, the weirdnesses you have to do to make something look and feel great for it, and I had good ideas. This was right at the end of 2018, so they were going through their own transition too — I was thinking, hey, I can maybe help with whatever's going on over there too. One of the things they brought up during the offer call was, we have these communities of practice, and there's an expectation that you, as a leader, would be part of that. I said, I would have done it without the threat, but I'll come do that.

It's one of the things extremely unique about Riot, coming from some of its weirder choices in the past — once a week they have a reserved hour for disciplines to get together and talk about whatever their discipline wants to, across the company. If you're on R&D, on Valorant, on whatever, you come together for that reserved hour, five to six p.m. on Tuesdays, and do discipline things, with a small budget attached — guest speakers to talk to animators, a class together off-site, dinner, any kind of team-bonding event. Through that you meet people from all over the company, and even in the pandemic world it was such a reliable space to come together, chat, play games, get a little spike of connection.

When I came over, I was told this was how it worked at the company, every discipline has one — but when I showed up, I said, okay, where's this community of practice, I'm ready to do my job, and it was three people in a room going, how do we get more people to come to this thing? I was like, what? So I helped build the animation community, which we call the Riot Animation Team, or "the Rat" — from a few people in that room, me and two colleagues, Nick Matthews and Adam Turnbull, into anywhere between fifteen and forty animators coming together regularly, doing livestreams together. We have a big external community presence — some of our Rats, Brendan Russert and Alex Ferreira Simoes, will go do lots of lectures, guest speaking, Light Box, CTN. It's a very bustling community, and Riot really appreciates a go-getter — they love somebody willing to go the extra mile and do something cool and compelling that really speaks to players, because they really do care about the players. It made a big impression.

Alex (53:58)
That's tailor-made for you, based on what you were doing at Blizzard — you just stepped right into those shoes and ran with it. Great that Riot lets you do that, and that you've embraced it so much.

Lana Bachynski (54:12)
Yeah — it was really fun, a little scary, being the new person saying "you should hang out with me," but it worked out.

Alex (54:24)
It sounds like your personality type is to engage with people, be open, be excitable and motivating, and that's not everyone who makes video games. I'm curious if finding an ability to do that in your job has made it blossom more, or was it always there and you just get to freely do it now?

Lana Bachynski (55:05)
I think it was there, but not in the same way — the desire to do it. Despite doing a lot of theatre and speaking, I had pretty extreme stage fright — I'd call it stage adrenaline. Before giving a presentation in front of a class, I'd get so much adrenaline I'd be physically shaking, to the point I couldn't hold a piece of paper without it shaking. Very intense. There was the desire to do it, but I felt out of control while doing it. Through university I started a student club with my friend Brandon Nason, who's now also the animation lead on Valorant — pretty sweet — and I got a lot of that public-speaking fear wrung out through repetition. I feel like it could have come back at Blizzard if I'd sat back and zipped it, but I was really empowered to do more of that stuff, and because I was above average at talking in front of people, it became, can you present in this meeting, talk on behalf of the art team, present to the whole company, make a game show at BlizzCon and present it on stage — all these absurd things they let me do, and the more I embraced it, the less it became something I was afraid of, and the more it became something I was excited about. I saw the way it got people excited about what we were doing, and that feedback loop — I'm helping by being a weirdo, my most natural self puts other people at ease — felt like a very symbiotic loop for my personality.

Alex (57:18)
I've felt this too — there's some psychological safety in doing it in front of people you know are your people, versus people you can't read at all, in a completely different field. Something that lets you let go a little and think, I'm going to get accepted here, which helps.

Lana Bachynski (57:45)
Yeah. And then it'll delude you into thinking everybody's like that, and you stop caring, and you become a shameless, reckless weirdo.

Alex (57:55)
Then you'll say anything in front of people because it's fun and it gets a reaction.

Lana Bachynski (58:02)
Exactly.

Alex (58:02)
As we wind this down — as a designer, I often see things in the real world and my brain goes, that gives me an idea for a design, or I apply the systemic understanding I have to the real world. Do you do that as an animator? Do you pull inspiration from, say, a ballet, in terms of motion or emotion, and apply that back to yourself physically in the real world? Any bleed there?

Lana Bachynski (58:47)
Absolutely — from the way I talk about things, I don't even mean to, but if I see somebody with a unique way of walking, my brain says, that's a funny walk cycle — which is not what people are doing, they're just existing. The language I use to describe things is very animation-based. I'll see certain motion I find so interesting, or weird, or beautiful, that I want to put it in my eyeballs over and over — weird sports clips, pitchers in baseball, where their body bends in impossible ways. I love the slow-mo, thinking, look what this guy's doing to throw that ball so fast. I follow a lot of dancers — I'm not one, I don't even animate dances anymore, but I can't get enough of delicious, beautiful motion. But the thing I found it applies to most is being at the computer for a long time — I had a knee injury in 2016 or 2017 that I've only recently rehabbed, and being able to understand the physics of things, combined with all the anatomy I had to take at university, plus animation, trying to figure out why things move the way they do — it helps me understand my own body, at the gym, applications for the knowledge of motion, physics, anatomy, trickling into how I move, how I try to keep myself safe.

And the only other thing — it's forever broken my brain on left and right, because when you're giving animation notes, sometimes you say screen-left, sometimes character's-left, and those frequently get flipped, so it's a fifty-fifty shot whether I say the correct direction now. I'll be pointing one way and saying "right," because my brain's saying right hand, even though it's the left side of the place we're going. That's probably the biggest effect it's had on my life — sounding a lot like an idiot.

Alex (1:01:28)
I've definitely done a few of those. Mine is always frame rate — I get thirty and sixty mixed up, and then I'm obsessed with it, so whenever I see something running badly I'm like, my god, that's twenty frames, I can't handle it. My kid was streaming something once, and all I could say was, but the frame rate, what's up with the frame rate. So your mind becomes fixed in these ways.

Alex (1:01:59)
If you weren't making games, Lana, what would you do?

Lana Bachynski (1:02:03)
Perish. No — what would I do? I might be making music. I'd probably still be making art to some degree, probably be a graphic designer — that's one of the other things I do a lot of, actually, for the Rat, a ton of design work for livestreams across different platforms. If anybody's seen one of my GDC talks, I take a lot of pride in the design work on the slides, always something custom — I love graphic design, I'd love to be better at it, kind of a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. I follow a designer, CJ Cawley, and another person whose name I'm blanking on — I follow lots of dancers and graphic designers, thinking, maybe those would be my two career paths, based on how much content I look at from those fields. But definitely something still in art, something still creative — the joy of bringing something into the world is a special feeling I think everybody has, even if they're an accountant with a little hobby doodling on a notepad, or knitting. Creation is such a huge part of what we're doing, and it's so satisfying as a human to do it — I can't see myself doing anything other than what I want to do.

Alex (1:03:41)
I love that — a brilliant journey you've had, some great stories, and I love that thread of being obsessed with animation and with making stuff function in games, and that keeping you happy every day. Very similar to my own mentality, from a design perspective. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for being on the pod.

Lana Bachynski (1:04:10)
Thank you so much for the invite. You're such a delightful host. Thanks for walking me through a trip down memory lane, baby.

Alex (1:04:18)
Very kind. Thank you.