Making Contact: Building an Ops Room Game

The podcast behind Contact: Wait Out, an ops room command game.

Our first guest episode. Chris Wood spent sixteen years as a programmer before founding Tanglewood Games, which has grown from one person at a desk to around 60 staff fixing the hard engineering problems inside Unreal Engine for other studios, on games including Hogwarts Legacy. We ask him the question every studio now faces: how far to lean into AI.

Ryan starts with what Epic has announced for Unreal Engine 6. Chris explains why he sees AI as an unprecedented tool rather than another industrial revolution, why his studio cannot sit it out, how his clients' contracts have changed in eighteen months, and what it means for juniors and graduates. Ryan gives the artist's view, and we ask what it all means for a two-person team building a game about commanding on information you cannot fully trust. We finish with Chris's hopes for the next five years, and our own thoughts on making a game with soul.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

00:37 Picture this

01:12 Now swap the radio for a chat window

01:41 Episode two, and our first guest

03:22 Unreal Engine 6 and Epic's pivot to AI

05:15 Welcome, Chris Wood

06:04 From programmer to studio founder

07:36 No investors, no big break

08:36 Tiny steps, not great leaps

10:42 Why build it at home

12:33 What an external development partner does

15:02 Small strike teams

16:27 How far to lean into AI

17:08 A spiky topic

19:40 A tool like nothing before

20:49 Ten times slower

23:00 Is AI inevitable?

24:11 What if it gets switched off?

25:09 The commodity end of the market

26:34 Who owns AI-written code?

28:36 Can you trust what it tells you?

29:27 Juniors, and an apprentice's journey

32:42 What universities should teach

34:39 Advice for two developers with an idea

37:20 AI-enabled, but with soul

38:40 Shiny, or substance?

39:47 Ryan on AI and the art

41:34 Scrappy indies and big budgets

43:13 The next five to ten years

45:15 Tanglewood is hiring

46:42 Tom and Ryan reflect

50:15 Get involved

Our guest

Chris Wood, founder and CEO of Tanglewood Games. Tanglewood is hiring engineers, technical artists and technical animators with Unreal Engine experience: tanglewoodgames.com

Get involved

Watch the playtests and read the devlog: contactwaitout.com/devlog

Sign up for news: contactwaitout.com

Join the Discord: discord.gg/gVXbshznpb

Did one of these jobs and willing to talk to us? [email protected]

New episodes every fortnight.

Contact: Wait Out is a work of fiction. The theatre, places, units, people and operations in the game are invented. Features discussed are in development and may change.

Contact: Wait Out is an ops room command game. It is not made to glorify war. It is made to represent, with respect, the real challenges that everyday soldiers and officers faced.

The podcast behind Contact: Wait Out, an ops room command game.

In episode 1 we go inside the game. Tom explains what an operations officer actually does, with a story from his own time running aviation operations, when the call was whether to hold a helicopter on the ground for thirty seconds. Then we walk through the first scenario as the ops officer: one section out on patrol, a sand table that is always out of date, a drone feed, helmet cameras, two radio nets and a chat log. Ryan talks about building a room he has only ever seen in photographs, and why the fidelity goes into the ops room rather than the battlefield. We get into the room as a character, pattern of life, combat effectiveness and keeping it fun, and finish with what worries us and where we'd take it with a magic wand.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

00:38 Picture this

01:43 Welcome back

02:50 Who we are, and why this game

04:49 A small team, a game with real depth

06:10 What an ops officer actually does

08:01 Your seat in the game

08:54 Tom's job: aviation operations

10:37 Hours of nothing, then everything

11:17 Hold the aircraft

14:02 Making pressure fun

14:35 The first scenario, as the ops officer

17:14 Devlogs and building in the open

18:07 The art: building a room from photographs

20:26 One step removed: where the fidelity goes

21:27 Replayability and what comes next

24:27 Co-op, and soldiers who carry on

26:41 The room is a character

28:26 Pattern of life and consequences

30:03 Combat effectiveness and duty of care

31:54 Never the same twice, and the after action review

33:29 The challenges

36:45 The magic wand

39:57 Get involved

Get involved

Watch the playtests and read the devlog: contactwaitout.com/devlog

Sign up for news: contactwaitout.com

Join the Discord: discord.gg/gVXbshznpb

Did one of these jobs and willing to talk to us? [email protected]

New episodes every fortnight.

Contact: Wait Out is a work of fiction. The theatre, places, units, people and operations in the game are invented. Features discussed are in development and may change.

Contact: Wait Out is an ops room command game. It is not made to glorify war. It is made to represent, with respect, the real challenges that everyday soldiers and officers faced.

The podcast behind Contact: Wait Out, an ops room command game.

In our first episode, Tom and Ryan introduce themselves and the game they're building together. You're the ops officer in a small patrol base. Your platoon is out on the ground and you're not. Everything you know arrives through a radio, a drone feed, a helmet camera and a map you keep up to date by hand, and you make your calls on that. We talk about why nobody has built this game before, what the room has to feel and sound like, what the first grey-box playtest felt like, and the kind of community we want to build around it.

Coming up: a deep dive into the vision for the game, then our first guest.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open

00:24 Contact. Wait out.

00:59 Welcome to Making Contact

01:33 Who we are: Ryan

02:22 Who we are: Tom

02:52 Why this game

03:32 The game in a nutshell

04:29 Why not another milsim

05:19 What the player sees

07:42 Building the room: immersion and sound

10:21 The first playtest

11:24 Why this game, and who it's for

14:00 The community we want

16:08 Why a podcast, and building in the open

17:46 How to get involved

18:47 Next time, and a future gem

19:32 Outtakes

Get involved

Sign up for news: contactwaitout.com

Join the Discord: discord.gg/gVXbshznpb

Did one of these jobs and willing to talk to us? [email protected]

New episodes every fortnight.

Contact: Wait Out is a work of fiction. The theatre, places, units, people and operations in the game are invented.

Contact: Wait Out is an ops room command game. It is not made to glorify war. It is made to represent, with respect, the real challenges that everyday soldiers and officers faced.