Building Up a Indie Company with Karla Zimonja | GduX.me

[Music] okay so yeah I have spent a lot of time triple-a no I mean Indy interval a I worked on bunch different games including Bioshock 2 and its DLC Minerva's Den which I'm really proud of it's good and then we co-founded or I am co-founded me and Steve Gaynor founded full right 7 years ago and they've gone home and to come up and now we're making something else but I'm not so the basics are you can really learn a lot in triple-a if you're gonna go indie and it's really cool to have a paying job and be able to learn things that will benefit you later very good so I came up as an animator this is why I may just look like they look like what's-his-face

I totally camera was its word Kimble that's who it is anyway he's a goof that's that's wasn't me I will never be that good and that's life instead I am NOT an animator anymore I co rental break and my path here was weird like I didn't do I think a lot of people think that you're like they're like you're an entrepreneur you started a company you must have been trained for this ha ha ha no so like normally when you start out in an art discipline especially if your career path is like really well-defined and really narrow nobody I kept in stunning nobody really expects you to do a lot of broad things and especially in art and so I started

out in art and then began to branch out but I was only really able to do that when I was at 2k Marin which was people who made those like to and if it hadn't been for that job where I got to like do more things in the industry I probably would have burnt out entirely unless the game industry um part of that is because animation is a lot and I was never really a good enough animator to achieve like the best skills I spent a long time just kind of being like I'll try harder but I think what I really needed was some really targeted mentorship and I didn't work out that way so in the absence of that I determined that what I needed was more variety in my idea today activities because when you're an animator at a big studio you can seriously you can honest-to-god end up just being like animating you know transitions between

animation States all day every day I actually I worked on Zoo Tycoon 2 and when they came time for layoffs one of the people apart from me who got laid off was the guy who modeled all the animal poop the guy he did that and like it wasn't his entire job I think he also did rocks and some other stuff but like man you can get specialized like crazy in triple-a and it's for me it's bad some people they really want to be good at the poop modeling bless their hearts so anyway so because I left the standard animator career path I learned so much at to Cameron that it basically formed the basis for everything I use daily at fulbright so let's see I didn't do a lot

of cool slides for this one sorry it would have been would have been a really abstract triple-a companies that employ you aren't always incentivized to help you grow that is sort of a central problem they hire you they want you to already be able to do a job with hardly any wrap-up time because that's you know what they need for their scheduling you can conceivably get hired as an intern for example and move into a full-time role but it's pretty uncommon to be hired as a junior dev with the company you're really having your future path in mind like they sell them or like we're gonna hire you and you're gonna be here for 10 years or and here's where you're gonna end up then you know like that just doesn't happen it's much more common for the company to want to see if you work out first and by the time I see that the project might be over and you might be wondering somewhere else but there's more of you out there that they can get so they're not too worried about it when I was in triple-a it was normal to be on a team for a project or

two and then move on like really a couple of years for you know for your growth at a company before a fulbright the longest I stated the studio was four years and that was to Cameron and that seemed like a really long time at the time that was multiple projects two or two and a half years was more common was more usual for me in fact I have a good friend who for a really long time has gotten laid off or the studio like collapses under her every two and a half years like clockwork is weird it's like - the month so this that I'm describing is a landscape where it's much more likely for our workers you change jobs in order to get a promotion rather than looking for one inside their own company so by definition the company cannot really do much about stewarding growth because they don't see it like it doesn't happen under their watch and this is of course even aside from the basic promotion problem that the game

industry sees a lot of where a good worker on a team is promoted to leading it or a sub team or whatever and it's an entirely different skill set that they may or may not even get training for and then the team is short one really good person so it's really rough like this is a problem that hasn't been solved the industry still super does this nowadays career paths are starting to pop up that are called like craftsperson or expert kind of roles where you just get deeper and more precise in your discipline and become the expert on it that other people in the company consult and the mentor of newer people who want that role but this idea is not really spread everywhere so it's hard to count on it so Studios want your output to be predictable and like possibly larger or better but seldom different they want you to fit into their plans and predictions and on charts and you will understand this you start your own company it is very tempting to on a tree

employees as predictable work outputs for planning purposes like any leg up you can get for planning such a big and weird project as a game needs all the visibility you can get honestly but still you need to think about people as people and what they want and what they need if you're lucky the triple A's do do you're at has a career track you can follow that you actually want and they like explain this to you and you get a choice and a chance to follow it I have a story which I'm actually going to cut down because I think otherwise I'm going to get like really long where basically I was a company and I got sent to GC with a bunch of other people and when I came back my manager was like so uh why didn't you go to any art direction and art manager talks and I was like what excuse me so like first of all he like just completely assumed that that was a natural progression for my career and

thought it was so obvious he didn't even to mention it to me and like secondary of secondary importance was fact that like wasn't what I wanted at all back then so I like kind of dodged a bullet there like out of obliviousness but it works out okay hilariously nowadays I do a lot of art manager stuff but I probably would never change it this long so yeah in a interplay it's a pain to hire people so like if you're a good fit with the team in other ways then just can you do the job can do that have the output you can sometimes move around a little bit you can get your nose and other things there aspects of a game usually this involves doing extra work on top of your everyday thing if it's something you're interested in learning it's hopefully less onerous sometimes you go through time periods or jobs entire jobs where you just don't have the time or energy to delve into

another discipline if you don't have the extra brain space for a learning on the job for long periods of time your job might be taking out too much of your mental resources and you are probably headed for burnout so that's bad in general people you work with who you know are your peers but in a different discipline don't necessarily like jump out of the woodwork to help you or like care enough to put in the effort you know poking your nose into another discipline it can be hard and weird and maybe at any different particular job and why not just be possible the obstacles might be too much for you get anywhere with this I come from you when I was on - I wanted to learn more about the design part of the job and I didn't have the assertiveness to bug people for assistance so I looked at the XML talks which were where a lot of design stuff was happening and I learned a little but I wasn't able to try out changes

basically in those ducts by myself due to pipeline stuff there was like barriers between me and testing what I was doing and that is just the kiss of death if you're trying to learn on your own and I was too nervous and like felt sort of ungrateful to ask a higher-up for help with it because I I thought that they would not want me to step outside my niche and they'd be like well how can you be doing her the job were painting for if you're doing this and and I was too I was too nervous to look like a bad employee to really like branch out kind of a bad choice but it was it wasn't exactly set up to make it easy in a larger company it's structurally you know great it's good to learn your skills there sometimes you completely luck out and everyone's learning something you want to learn like a department is switching a new software when you're hired 70 wants the first game company that I worked at who's in the process of switching from Lightwave 3d to Maya and so I just got to learn Maya along with

the entire art department and it was so cool they actually sent us the classes and everything was amazing I don't know if that happens nowadays at all but it is nice when it happens big companies have more potential to have people at more levels of mastery and specialization which means you can find someone tailored to help you out there's usually someone to ask stuff just by virtue of there being more people to ask I hope you happy to let you mess around a little and show you where stuff is unless the company is very unhappy and everyone's miserable you can't really do much about that larger companies can potentially have more available niches for you to fit into even weird ones they may have all kinds of weird roles that smaller companies can't get away with smaller companies you know sometimes might have to be like no seriously we need all these animations on rather than a large company being like we have a lot of animators it's ok you can if you do a little something else maybe you know if you get most your job done it'll work out I let's see one of the things that I

did when I was at 2k Marin is I just got into work dealing with the subtitles subtitle system I somehow ended up to be the owner of the subtitle system just because I kind of dug in there nobody else was really paying attention to them and they were in a format where I could edit them easily and so I just became the de facto owner of the subtitles in all the languages so it was a lot of loke stuff and I still managed to break the built-in multiple times with subtitles but it was it was cool and I learned a lot um you have to feel secure in your role in the company in order to feel safe enough to try new things if this like talking about the stuff sounds too scary it might be hard to get something positive out of this course of action because you might not feel right about it and like it's really hard to just force yourself to do something that's terrifying some disciplines are hard to shake its

tactic with if a lot of specific tools and software are necessary if what you want to learn might be an obstacle because you might not be able to get them so learning broad broadly in general learning it gives you confidence and insight it gives you like the more you learn about how a game is made the more you know I mean the more effective you will be the better our worker you will be in any context you now know more of what you're doing you know more about what you're working on you know how things fit together you want you're less likely to make a choice that works for one part of death than not for another it's cool in general learning how things work is fun and interesting it's good for you cognitively and if you strike out on your own you will need it because like sort of by definition you're a smaller company all you have is your collective knowledge like the knowledge of everyone that you start your company

with that's what you've got to work with so the more knowledge you have in there the better your company will be when you're starting your own company there's no other expert for you to walk across the office and ask you if you don't have anybody you know if your potential in DB studio doesn't have a UI department that you can just kind of like chat with and bounce ideas off of and like you don't probably have a couple of sound guys where you can ask one of them what the best naming convention is and like why they use it now and these two use another one any number of things all these things that are hard to like do asynchronously it's like you when you think about the difficulties of running at running a studio you're like well I can email someone ask for advice but it's just not the same as being able to turn around and ask someone come back a second later for something you forgot or

do something ask them for feedback things like that it's just it makes things so much easier it really is much more it's much more positive and experience uh you can yeah you can ask people that you know some of these things and talking person is usually better people importantly people teaching you while on the job are getting paid to teach you technically so when you write to someone for help they're helping you for free so that's just something to bear in mind additionally for you learning on the triple a job is safer there's more people that help you clean up a mess like me breaking the you know build with subtitles which should not have happened but here we are there's more chances for people to talk you through it so you know if you get stuck you can get redirected stakes are overall lower because mistakes can be caught by

experts instead of missed for months by novices like if you make a mistake when you've already started your studio and it's something that has long-term repercussions you might not know for a really long time and that could really get you into trouble I assumed that all of you watching this have the social intelligence not to like get into a situation where you'll straight up get fired we're trying to learn some that your job aspect of game dev just don't want to get emails about them so yeah I'm certain to end here it's good to learn how things can go in the industry here I'll click on this without them being your problem in your problem alone nobody expects you to solve the problem the communication problems between let's say engineering and design but you can watch how they play out well you're in a big company you can watch good things and what happens make sure any make sure

you figure out why things are going wrong if they're going wrong understand it like think about how you would rearrange the system to fix the problem because you're gonna be making systems and you might have similar problems to this like when you start a studio you're making a system for people to get work done and you have to be able to like debug it you know if you can't figure out how you would and to fix the problem at least you can define the problem precisely like you know this guy's behavior is is correct for his previous job it's not correct here we need to talk to him get him to knock it off even if you don't have the authority to ask to knock it off at least you know what the problem is rather than that guy's dick don't just complain about broken stuff or annoying people because it doesn't help it it's good to complain when you have something like concrete to complain about it's

good to complain to higher-ups when there is a problem that can be addressed it's good it's really good to complain when someone has actually someone has hurt you these are really good things to talk about but if you're just aimlessly being like that guy sucks I swear on this I hope so God but anyway it can be really fun thank you it can be fun to complain a directionally but it reinforces your powerlessness it's really like it builds up your social structure around complaining and not feeling capable to do anything about it which is bad enough when you're inside that structure but it's much worse when you have your own company and you do have the power to change things but you don't think you can or you don't know how so like getting stuck in that mindset where you are like there's a problem here but not going any deeper than that it's bad for you when you're the one in charge

last note while you're in triple-a try to hang out with people in different departments it's really easy to just be friends with people in your own discipline it's sort of expected like but you can learn so much from people who aren't in your discipline just have a chat like go to lunch with them and I used to hang out with designers a lot in some past jobs I hopefully learned like all my design chops from just like talking with people in that way and it's so much it's it's just like you really can get a lot from just listening to people listening to what people will just tell you and just chat about and hear what their problems are that's also helpful for an indie studio is knowing what the standard complaints and problems and positive things are for people in every discipline so finally it really helps to not have your first experience with an

aspect of game dev be after going indie so when you work in triple-a if you work in it it's a great opportunity to pile up knowledge and understanding that will become more as before for you to draw on once you're out on your own you have access to a lot of people who know their jobs really well and you should make use of them bug people get get knowledge it's it will use it okay there's my twitter handle and you can look at it stuff I love I love your sense of self-promotion see like there it is that's so awesome thank you for sitting down with us to basically indulge in our to enrich our audience with everything that you've been able to pick up it running a company is especially a big one my foot right knee over here running a podcast and we're like Jesus Christ man this is pushing

our mics around this is all management that we have you know how much you can learn in a triple-a company that's like course man you understand all this of course that is the best place to soak up knowledge a lot of people the whole points of G ducks is to get kind of like encourage people to start asking around start thinking about these things because I think we get lost in comfortableness by going to a nine-to-five job and just clocking in and clocking out and just just letting opportunities kind of walk by you you know that person I never talked to you in that corner in the audio department maybe I should listen to him or her about his opinions or her opinion and what actually do you do here type of thing actually because we can all assume

but it's very true like a lot of people that are watching right now are sitting at their desk and outside of maybe within an arm's reach right those are your crew that's your crew that you lunch with talk with and do all your work with right even outside of my little office sometimes our cubicle right my I don't really know a lot of people much and it's weird like that you really just interact with people that sits next to you and that needs to change that needs to change because networking of anything opens up opportunities and it gives you more chances to kind of grow so I definitely sign off on that people you don't really talk to but what's what's really cool about that is let's say you do go fishing and you do find like one thing that one thing may have so many new

branches right where you're like oh damn not only did I not know this but now I'm seeing 10 to 15 other different like relatable areas that I can now explore and discover and so that gives you opportunity for so much growth so one question I did want to ask you and while I was paying attention to your presentation knowing that you started in animation and now are essentially running the company do you feel like you get an opportunity to still explore your own creative side or creative interests in game development while you're a lot of management in my company architecture let's say this dating is I'm sure anyone whatever you know list of these days I'm more involved in running a company um but I do get to help out with our team a lot I'm I do a lot of really close work with them and so it so they're they're doing the the creativity for meetings it's very nice I know it's there's honestly it's moving

the creativity thing it's I don't really I don't make a lot of images anymore to come I made a lot of traffic design stuff also like it's it's like a my my dad once told me about like you know really any job it's like it has some sort of creative aspect it's like you have you have a system that you're working within and you have to like cleverly operate within it and it's like that does take creativity even if it doesn't even if it doesn't sound like you're making cool paintings so I've got a question straight from the Twitter audience this comes from Typhoo question is what's been the most frustrating part of running your own business or something that you weren't expecting for example oh man so the thing that is mostly in my head lately is just it's kind of what I was talking about were like you can't really ask people for help when when you're trying to run the

business it's like you know if you have a real specific question I'm gonna say you can email somebody like just little day-to-day stuff you're like thank you that right did I handle that situation well like did I run that meeting in a way and like there's nobody you can ask for confirmation on it like you can't you know yeah you can't get some other manager to be like that's not how you talk to people this is anything or whatever like it's just nobody else is there and so you have to just kind of rely on what you know which is it's it's harder to if you need to learn something you basically have to teach it to yourself and that can be exhausting so like Madison that is that can get frustrating for me because I like to learn from other people I have another question from Hoxie 3d how would you recommend starting up a studio with limited indie studio experience I don't expect it to happen next year but I'm trying to build up an overall game plan pun mildly intended nice let's see

probably you probably straight-up want to just talk to you a number of small indie for advice just talk to them and ask them how they did it because the thing is that we started our studio seven years ago and the landscape is not the same if like one of the there's a dumb example is we incorporated our first company is an LLC and then we determined that that was like annoying for taxes and so then we changed the type of company but like that's a pain and just all this dumb little stuff like that it's like what kind of company where where will you incorporate it like you know how are you gonna budget it like there's so many things I think there is I don't there's a number of really nice people like Rami is probably a good resource for just basics I swear

to god there's like some sort of basic kit for like how to start a small company out there somewhere like you pretty much want to like ask around everybody's gonna have slightly different advice and hopefully it'll be a little more up-to-date than mine yeah I totally agree with that like I found that of all here is actually pretty resourceful to get you started a lot of times they tell us business ventures that we didn't even think about but but they're not cheap they're not cheap at all some days what you do they start a podcast you fight them on yeah you ask all the questions are that hourly advertising for them but yeah it's this just so much stuff Thanks I'll say this they're like seven years of experience you don't you know don't discredit your experience being relevant

that you're still in business right you may be seven years away from starting but you definitely have a lot of information on sustaining running and growth you know so I guess what was probably the biggest thing that surprised you about the growth of your company do you find that review it was behind success did you even with success still take like accurate plan like methodical steps and how did you guys like look at going from one game to two to three like what happened for your growth and what decisions did you actually say okay this is a decision towards growth that we're going to do yeah we definitely want to not grow big ever because we've been in big companies and it's just a whole nother job to run them so we want to keep small so everyone gets to have a voice and people get to contribute more right now we're at I think nine we've got a couple contractors so you can see what we say ten but sorry but Tacoma was a couple

fewer it was about seven been gone home was for full-time people so we've grown like percentage-wise a lot but by actual numbers hardly at all and weirdly yeah we planned this very carefully because we don't want to increase our overheads such that we get caught in the we have this many people so we need to pay their salaries so we need to take you know any contract that comes around so we can make enough money to keep paying them and then you run yourself into the ground that way it's just not a good mindset um also weirdly the overhead of running a company changes a lot between about six or seven and nine or ten it start like you need a producer at that point at like ten people you need a producer if you don't have a chaser you're gonna be sad

actually that's that's good in the studio starting advice if you want to be bigger than about seven people plan to get a producer and they should have experience in the game industry because otherwise one is gonna have to one of the you know other people is gonna have to do it and and it's always awkward to like say you're not working huh I feel like it's a lot more intense like there's it used to be seven of us now there's six and you really feel that presence is not being there anymore as a group and it's a really awkward situation because if anything III presume that in any CEO they're the you most likely will reach out to people you worked with before instead of a stranger and so it gets a lot more awkward if it's like hey is not working on sorry

right that's that definitely does happen but like it's also it's having an induce to do it's potentially on just give you the opportunity to bring new people into the industry so potentially you can get people who you haven't worked with before but that's also a gamble because you know worked with them before also if you worked with someone in a previous company and it worked out great and now you bring them into your smaller company as I think you imply it's just a different situation and they might not do as well that's the whole thing yeah well I've always heard small studios word gets around fast so what's uh what's been the best joy that you've had I guess currently and forgive us if any of this stuff comes from the podcast as well I I do like to ask repeat questions especially when I know they're bringing someone to a new audience but what's been one of your biggest joys I guess in growing the

company thus far um let's see meanwhiie what like growing the company is in itself it's really like it's actually really it's really nice feeling to be able to give cool people who do cool things a job and help support them and bring their ideas and interests into your company like I it's great it's great for everyone involved like we heard you know who's going to be on your show tomorrow I think great but like yeah she has been nothing but a joy at the company and it's just like we're lucky to have brought her on and it's great it's really cool to just be able to be like you're a cool smart person if you don't have any game industry like you know large to play experience or

whatever let's see what you can do and it often works out great we have such nice good agreeable like smartass people it's really it's it's a cool thing to build a company to be really good well then what ends up being one of the biggest things that challenges you guys and again not in regards to size but just say the dynamic of your company and the marketplace that you guys exist in right now what ends up being something like very challenging for you guys this time around correct so here's something this is pretty real for a moat people we know we have a lot we have more remote people this time around and it changes the dynamics a lot and it's hard you have to hire for different skill sets when you need people to be a remote like just the whole idea of they have to communicate what they're doing all the time they

have to tell you what's up all by themselves they have to like just push their status at you constantly or else they just fall off your radar if they don't communicate they're gone and that means that like you know unless they're just being a producer for themselves like you know what they're doing and they don't know what you're doing and it's just like you're not you know behaving as a team so yeah it's because I know it can work really well but we're sort of half and half right now and it's definitely like it's more difficult than I thought I definitely thought that you know okay we're use the internet all the time what's the difference but there is kind of there's some specific skills of just like spontaneous status updates and like video calls every you know every day for no reason just like chat with your coworkers talk about little things over video calls instead of over slack or whatever that just help kind of like tie you together and help people understand

what you're doing rather than you just kind of being outside of might and but it's it's a mother it's a bunch of other stuff to worry about it's different skills well I've got another question for you this one I believe is also coming from Twitter no discord it looks like to make this question a little easier to read when choosing people to work with how to non-work-related things come into play like external interests and tastes interesting there that's definitely a little wool squishy um I think that it's kind of unavoidable in even these kind of like transactional relationships like this or you're like we're a higher utk job for money even in situations like that you do interviews and you want to like the person like you want your not gonna hire somebody or you're like boy mmm-hmm I have to look

at them everyday and I'm not real excited about it like you want to like them and so it's actually this is really common in fact it's pretty much universal that especially small companies have a significant significant founder effect which means that you can kind of tell that everyone on a team was chosen by the founders or you know if the company gets a little bigger people close to them you know like you can hire people and then make him hire people conceivably but it sets the tone when you are a small company that's bringing people on especially slowly they bring them on to fit on a team and if they super don't fit you might you probably won't hire them so like there's no real way to be like dude with the same things that they're into like because that's not really that well-defined usually in

order to get hired but it is often the case that the founders or the hiring the people who do the hiring will affect who's chosen and part of it will be because they're like I like this person I think they can do the job I'm convinced by them like that super does happen I don't think I think like I'm trying to think of the people that we hired and I don't really remember interests coming into it that much I mean like Nina she makes her own you know small games all the time and we thought those were great and so if those count as an interest then that was basically like the reason we hired her is because she had already made so many amazing like small personal games I don't know if that counts but that counts that counts she's interested in it and it was on the side yeah I think especially within an indie CD you people who do really well and this kind of goes

back to how success in triple-a doesn't guarantee success in Indy and vice versa indie success doesn't really make you a great fit in triple-a those are totally two different domains and if anything what has been true for people who thrive in smaller indie grooves are people who actually spend time after work doing side stuff and then falling into it it seems like they're able to juggle different disciplines better project management less less management overlooking you like it's more self dependency so I definitely agree with you on that one that follows up with my question which is when it comes to people right hiring up in the studio even growing up slowly there's a lot of variables people as variables even one day they're happy one

day they're not happy one day one is awesome by themselves but when you put them together with other people that you think are awesome they're not awesome together so these are the types of things I'm probably sure that you're dealing with now being a founder of the studio and you're more moving into the management role how do you prepare for that I mean D is it more I think we touched this a little bit on the podcast but like would love for you to share with everyone that's watching right now how do you mitigate risk and problems with people yeah that's a good question it's definitely it like you definitely need to keep an eye on how people are getting along I mean we also do you one-on-ones so in case there are you know major problems we hear about them from people before hopefully they get too big but like yeah you have to keep an eye on things you have to help people learn to communicate better like you

have to teach them the skills like you have to learn to listen and determine where the problems actually coming from and catch it when one of those problems happens and talk about it with the people involved and people can were perfectly capable of getting along and doing good work together it's just a matter of paying attention to the things that matter to people and trying to nobody nobody's gonna like kill each other in our company so like most this stuff is relatively minor like that doesn't sound like they believe I you know know what this concept is you know or whatever and it's just sort of like small things but you know people could you can always improve like everybody in the world can always improve their communication and like sort of I don't know positivity I guess sounds like the flea kiyose thing I've ever said in my life

we're gonna give you more opportunities to answer questions so I got two for you here I'm gonna just rapid-fire them for you first one is from xx Stevie ocean xx what's the most important thing if you hire somebody focusing in terms of knowledge so what skill sets I guess are you primarily looking for when you're hiring somebody I mean this is okay so leaving aside the obvious like you know what we're hiring the job whatever that job is like this presumably yeah probably like if we're hiring them as a programmer then they need to know how to do that that kind of thing which I assume you're asking about something else yeah nowadays when it comes to having a partially remote team communication is the thing like I I need to they have to like respond quickly to communications they have to be super willing to just talk about what they're working on and put stuff forth I think

that yeah being a good communicator and clearly putting time and effort into that is a really really positive thing and next question comes from looks like let me see a blurred a Bilardo give me if I've butchered the name super sorry great ei Blart so I don't know what's your thoughts on leveling up without the triple a company do you know of a great way to get direct learning without the triple a incubator oh man co-working space if you're lucky that could conceivably work but that's it depends on what you want to learn and it depends on ya what you have access to I think if you want to learn like business running skills you might be able to do that in a co-working space of some sort there are game like they're

sort of game centric co-working spaces like I think yattaman runs one in San Francisco or used to um and there's like I don't know if there's some in a lot of major cities where people like Indies can just show up and use a computer and make games in the same space as other people that stuff could be really useful because you can just turn around your chair and be like hey well you look at this until making socks or like you know whatever or we will you read this email to my publisher over before I send it you know stuff like that that can definitely help other than that yeah let me think how what I want to learn it's like that's my primary way I'm like I know it's like easiest and there's so much like you have access to and your interval and so I'm like doesn't suck clearly the right way but yeah what would I do if I if I didn't have that um it's a good question that's that's hard yeah that's the carking space or

something is the best thing I can think of but that's you're right that's rough yeah you guys have no ideas for that what would you do if I didn't have access to triple-a I guess I mean 2019 tells me I would go to like community colleges that are online like YouTube I always brag that YouTube is the best Community College in the world cuz you can learn anything at anytime and be a part of the community in that same thing so I guess I would seek tutorial ization like online schools or even like programs like that like six minutes that's the best I got all's good that's I that that's the I mean I I totally agree that that's a that's a smart way to start but I feel like it's really easy to run into that wall where you're like I'm stuck I don't know how I'm stuck and there's no one I can directly ask you know what I mean polycount and art station may be the next to you find those like refined communities maybe might be annexed well

I mean definitely going through those conferences III Game Developers Conference any of that source has like a bunch of developers around but it's also like hard to to network without having an in you can't just randomly walk to people because we don't like that we have like random people coming up to us unless I know you but it is tough you have to somehow get and be part of community somehow I know there's a lot of local places that have meetups that's a good way to do it that's similar interest there's a lot of the army devs there's a lot of like meetups that just they just go to bars start talking it might be something like that I think it's not yeah not attacking a group is probably the best way to do it try the latch on to one person a similar interest that likes you enough to start you know opening up your network in that way is like I'm trying to do something is that something you're interested oh I actually know this person and I think that's the spark that usually helps

because Eko it's actually going to DC and blinking trying to target people it's gonna be a lot tougher than going to these smaller bars around your local area and then striking up a conversation and you know play a game of basketball you know your game it being a friend local meetups is really smart that's a good call that helps long video yeah so while we're where we're at that point Carla so we definitely on the screen follow for a Carla at our Twitter handle right there at zesty cab start a conversation with there and see how awesome her talk was read or thinker follow Fulbright definitely go look it to the games that they're working on and play them really really like they will make you feel like that's one thing that I think their company brings back to the

game industry is feelings yes so it's pushing the medium seriously I give credit where credit is due you guys are pushing the medium in ways that I'm appreciating and I think that more developers should take notif or even fans of games so definitely go check out what they've been working on if there's anything else you want a plug that we haven't yet Carla this is all yours what I can say is again Carla thank you very much for being a part of the first ever G Ducks I I want to say G ducks Expo but it's actually just say G ducks because the X stands for Expo yeah yeah so anyway he's the first-ever gamedev okay next you are part of this and thank you for making it possible by sharing your wisdom and expertise with our audience always another shout out to our audience for being cool for being interactive asking great questions our moderators for spending their time just the same amount of time as us to go through all the comments and pull out the good ones that

we read and lastly Brandon who keeps the lights on around here so thank you so much Carla it was great talking to you again we wish to continue this conversation and everybody please please please go visit Fulbright and check out the good work that they're doing over there thank you for having fun then the questions were super good idea thank you [Music] [Music]