GduX.me 2020 | Day 1

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foreign [Music] [Music] the world has changed game development has changed in 2019 g-dux was created as a platform to give a voice to all game developers

it is a virtual conference made by game devs for game devs it was a groundbreaking idea however this year everybody their mom is throwing virtual conference well what sets gtx apart from all these copycats is that we have presenters telling their story not just about their wins but also highlighting their hardships to become successful for three days straight from june 1st to the 3rd anybody with the internet connection can tune in to arm themselves with the best tools and advice to not only survive the industry but thrive we have speakers that will teach you how to survive long term and demystify marketing come and learn how to protect your own work and your brand review a case study from an indie game and understand the conceptional process behind it overall look at the game industry and move forward with a business mindset

and teach you how to navigate that world through the lens of an artist we'll discuss important topics like the emerging market of user generated content and what that means to us developers from a legal standpoint furthermore take measure the tools that we have thus far and talk about how to move across different industries outside of games we will acknowledge how game development is evolving and how we can remove technical barriers to make games faster but that's not all we have amazing developers that will be streaming gameplay live and provide behind-the-scenes commentary of the development of these games such as sky the children of light the distant biggest finally to cap off the best spiritual game conference ever we'll be doing technical breakdowns of amazing personal art projects to get you to approach your projects with a bigger [Music] for your own purpose i hope to see you there on june 1st

[Music] this is an official call for all game devs to report to g-ducks.me immediately blue champs over [Music] [Music] [Music] good morning the time has come and gdux has finally begun i am your host brandon pham and for the next three days i will be here moderating our panel of amazing presenters that will be bringing you raw truths about the game industry and telling you about their hero's journey they would detail their guide to success and highlight what their hardships were and how they overcame it

so welcome from wherever you are streaming us from i would like to remind you at this time that we do have an active discord channel where you can find the link at the website gducks.megdux.me feel free to drop in to conversate with other viewers or even interact with the presenters themselves throughout the conference in addition if you'd like to be part of the gdux history and be part of the show i will be opening up the caller hotline within the discord channel in between all speakers and presenters and chat with you live to kind of get more insight about what's going on out there to the general masses as always you can ask questions in any of these social chat rooms i do have my little birds out there doing recon to get those questions over to me and get you those answers another way to help spread the love and stay engaged is to tweet at gducks.me and at bluechamps i spent my whole kids college education on buying this

one-of-a-kind desk plate so please please justify by tweeting at me i will read them it's what i live for for your tweets also as part of the fun i want to mention the good folks at masterpiece vr they are a 3d software one second one second they are 3d software that are about virtual reality and creating and making tools super easy for you and uh make it even easier so a slight technical difficulty so give me a sec right here [Music] there we go part of the live stream is that things are going to mess up so also as part of the fun i want to again mention the good folks at masterpiece vr they are 3d

application software centered around using vr technology to make good and great game development easier and faster they happen to be our sponsor for this year's gdex.me event and for the next three days we'll be giving away 10 free one year indie license for masterpiece vr all you have to do is go to gdux.me to sign up to the mailing list and tweet again at gdux.me and at masterpiecevr on how you're enjoying the show so the instructions are pretty simple however feel free to go to gducks.me again gdux.me and give it a read and to make sure you don't mess that one up all right so i'm going to read this last part because my teleprompter is like killing on me so and at mr peace vr on how you're enjoying the show the instructions are pretty simple however feel free to go to gtx and read it over and don't mess that one up like i am right now lastly i am trying to do this

and i'm truly a one-man army what you see is built by with all my blood sweat and tears if you can't tell g-ducks isn't controlled or backed by any major corporation i'm in a model mattel room for god's sake so any donations greatly appreciated and is put into organizing the next gdex event so go to gducks.me and hit the make it rain button at any point of the live stream for the next three days and literally make your cold hard earned cash fall from the sky and into my room so seriously one dollar goes a long way two dollar goes a bit further and so on and so forth okay so before we kick off the best virtual gain dev conference ever i do want to spend a moment uh with everyone to acknowledge what's going on right now in the country it's been made pretty clear that you know this just in 2020 sucks so there is social unrest everywhere and frustration pouring out in all the major cities across the states and it is heartbreaking and rageful to

see what is going on right now on top of dealing with a pandemic i want to personally extend my sympathies for all the parties that are involved that feel their voices aren't being heard and even though g ducks was created a year ago to provide a voice and platform to game devs my aim has always been to better in the individual who works in the game industry and it's still a very niche thing to do compared to the bigger issues that we are facing right now but it's something i'm very passionate about and i just want to do my small part to help my fellow colleagues and the people i've met throughout my career in this great industry to have a more joyful and successful experience so if anyway i can provide some entertainment as well as dish out some education the next few days that can help prepare your career forward i'll be honored to help whatever way that i can now i know what everyone is thinking why am i dressed this way uh the answer is simple i'm a goddamn vet and i've been in the trenches of the game industry for over 12 years now

although not everyone outwardly expresses themselves so openly as i do this is how an experienced game developer look and feel like in the inside battle worn and tested i come from a background of working on triple a games and it wasn't until five years ago where i began exploring away outside my nine-to-five job which is how the podcast game dev unchained was born what started as me bitching about the industry with my friend quickly turned into seeking successful professionals who have moved past the distractions of office politics crunching and job insecurities and after 250 episodes talking to hundreds of these experts i finally learned enough to step out of my comfort zone and have been running my own business for the past two years and work solely for myself now gdux isn't just about quitting your day job it's more than that because that's what i've learned is people in the industry define success in a variety of different ways for me i just wanted to be home with my family have more control over my future

but you and for anyone that is watching and what you will hear over the next three days are stories that are drastically different that will walk away at least get you to walk away from this conference or roll away from your computer with your chair made at least aware of these options that leverages your particular unique set of skills so it's clear that i've been spending the last six months bringing together a fantastic array of presenters to help you win i'm not going to lie um quarantining because of covid19 has has really sucked but i've been pretty productive to put this all together for you for free so hit that make it rain button although production cost has been tight this is a true indie game dev conference run by game dev i've been taking shortcuts and you know converted my uh my motel room

oh wow i see my video turn off one sec so [Music] man the illusion is breaking everywhere

i mean this is part of the fun right being exposed so anyways uh going back um so i've been spending the last year or last six months kind of organizing everything together and to make sure that uh that i'm bringing the best g ducks that i can to bring you the best information that i can uh to you and to your homes so last year when i ran the first g decks it was one of the first virtual game dev conference ever thrown at least for g ducks it was a on a very short list of virtual game dev conference last year this year because of the pandemic everybody is throwing a one which is great however man they have been so hard to watch it's just pretty much a zoom call for the last for like six hours uh basically making it feel like going to work so i knew how to step it up at least set up a camera instead of a webcam to kind of do my best uh to bring you the the conference that you guys deserve

so uh as i'm stepping it up you know setting this camera being in quarantine and being responsible the couple things that i want to bring out to you guys is that the next few days is going to be a lot of fun entertainment is first education is second we want to make sure that game developers all out there are getting the information that you need and this is the place to be if you have been kind of nose in the sand and just working hard and trying to get through this these hard times at least right every time i make a cut that means i'm making an adjustment so in post you won't see any of this but this is

part of the live stream man you guys come here for the mistakes in accidents right i mean that's part of the fun so you know for damn sure that this is live so maybe the next gdex will be at a fancy auditorium when the pandemic is over but even my motel room office is already looking better than what's out there so far so it's not powered by unreal engine 5 but at least it's not running on zoom anyways i've been rambling so uh for today's program in the next three days in between the presenters i will be introducing interviews i have gathered the past six months and checking in with how covet 19 has impacted the industry remote working has been a dream of mine for a long time but the majority of studios were stuck with the tradition of being in an office and refused to change their way so obviously once epidemic hit it changed everything it was a wake-up call long overdue however where game devs and game studios you know are were they ready for doing remote working so drastically i mean

i've been investigating this in my unchained reports and i've been asking around essentially to a group of friends to make sure that you know we're getting this information to you guys so as a reminder go to gtx and me to kind of get the full panel of the next day or two or three days of uh speakers and uh [Music] and we're gonna have a lot of fun so this next clip i'm going to show you guys is finding exactly how game devs are coping with the pandemic so let's kind of start this off in the right way it's been about a month since we talked about we're actually caught up all right so it's been another month of covid kind of want to hear your thoughts and

updates within your own network uh you know personally professionally everything just give people out there a little preview of what your life is all about right now you know it's the same as it's been since we started right so i'm just working from home uh i'm in my office like pretty much all all day you know from anywhere from six six in the morning or seven in the morning until five or six a night um you know take a couple breaks for lunch and whatnot but that's that's it you know and then on the weekends uh staying home although i go out sometimes you know to go get things if i need them but otherwise you know it's it's the same it's the same it's been you know how are you hearing from uh companies i mean we know all know you're you're very connected right we're kind of laughing at the horror show that most companies are going through kind of well i mean the poor i.t departments

being crossed with wire essentially would love to kind of hear your thoughts has things uh have things kind of plateau gotten better yeah for what i'm hearing people are are working they have some sort of setups going on you know of course for some people is that ideal but it's it's uh it's you know yeah it feels like everybody was scrambling in the beginning and now people are actually working right but it's still i think um people are more being more impacted by having like kids at home and and having the balance you know managing their children and working from home and that that's been a struggle for people for sure this is certainly in strange time for the entire world and especially for the game development industry while with quarantines there are more people playing games it's had a really negative impact on people who are pre-launched particularly people who are looking for funding and networking connections

gdc and e3 are really important events for game developers especially those who are currently looking for publishers or funding and that puts them in a really hard financial place to not be able to go to those conferences and make those connections in person additionally many developers who are indie or just getting the start in their careers invested a lot of finances in attempting to attend gdc with gdc's postponement unfortunately there's many non-refundable tickets and hotel reservations which is negatively impacting those developers who invested that financial amount into those into attending gdc and now see that as a loss and they might not have the finances to attend another event or to make up for it it's been a change for sure but

i think the world never played that many video games yesterday so all our customers are all these in this game it's a bit complex to organize now that everybody is working from home but the number of players grew um and also extensions like uh vr headsets have never sold that well and so people have time for video games people have time to try new things also very good times for the video game industry i would say even if it's complex to organize it's a good movement for the industry what's your view on it jeremy how are things over there on this development side i mean yeah i think for for us it's been uh it's been an adjustment as well and i think we're um i think the way we work is is

it's somewhat similar to against you we're still even though we're in a big company we're a small part of the big company and we have small teams and all working from home so um it's been it's been a challenge but after the first couple of weeks um everything feels like the new normal and um and things are going on smoothly but yeah it's definitely a change yeah i mean it's a you know i'm sure it's no different than what a lot of folks are dealing with for me personally it's not a whole lot different i work on a remote location anyways i live in new hampshire and our you know corporate offices in minneapolis and we you know development sites are in alameda california and wolkenham uh uk etc we have a number of different sites so if i'm not on the road visiting customers or going to gdc things like that i'm typically working from home so for me personally the routine's pretty pretty normal for the company it's definitely been a change you know all of our teams all you know finance marketing development everybody's uh made the shift to work

and remote and we've handled it really well i mean i think we kind of got ahead of it a little bit we kind of anticipated it so we made sure our infrastructure was ready and um you know so the teams you know our development teams are i think they're actually going faster than before i think people you know they tend to when they're home you almost tend to work more i think the traditional uh negative connotation of people working from home is that they're not going to work as much they're going to hang out with their family and friends they're going to goof off whatever but i think the reality is and i'd like to get your opinion based on what you're hearing is that people almost tend to work harder they tend to work longer because work never really there's no break point so work never really stops nights weekends etc um so it's actually on our minds in the management team of how do we keep people from burning out right how do we make sure they're taking the break of you know work versus life yeah well the the government told us to stay

inside pretty much but people are ignoring it for some parts so when i i'm living on a big street and when i look outside of the window i see groups of people gathering and stuff like that i stay inside for the most part and play video games i have no project right now i'm on vacation and next week i will enter home office again i think yes perfect so i'm just working from home um the the job i do is a part-time job so i work three days in four days i work on my own stuff but right now i don't have any personal project or anything in the pipeline i just finished a commercial job a local animation for a video game um yeah but other than that i just play online games we've got work for home for people

who've been there for a while um but it's like super uh like if you absolutely need it it's not like a every week thing and it's definitely not a something that most people do it's kind of like if you want to sneak in some overtime hours or if you're not feeling too well but you can still work from home um that's been the case for most of the time there but since the kobe 19 thing broke out um we went full remote so the whole studio had to get ramped up in like two or three days so i t and like all of our programmers and stuff and the producers everybody's trying to get everybody organized and get anything people needed like there's people that uh we work with that like didn't even have like personal computers that could run unreal engine and stuff um so they had to like build personal kits for people to take home uh in some cases and then make sure everybody's uh you know hard drives and stuff were clear um and good enough to run like all of our stuff so they had to get all that stuff ramped up like super fast it it was crazy um but and then not only that we

had a stagger when people would come pick things up because of the social distancing thing so like yeah so it's are pretty much on the front lines like doctors right now touching everybody yeah exactly dude for sure man yeah it's one of those crazier thoughts so it took you guys a few a couple weeks is everyone pretty much set up right now did you guys have enough rigs to kind of hand out to everyone or do you guys have to order stuff like you said just to uh supply people yeah things uh most people were able to get set up at home um we're studio full of nerdo's so most nerdo's have good like computers at the house you know yeah um so most people it's just a matter of like vpn in which is like a lot easier to set up um but there was like a few cases where people like only had mac or something like that um and didn't have like a windows partition so uh in those cases you know i don't even know what the percentage is maybe like two or three percent of the studio needed rigs or something

um but yeah not too bad not too painful all right i mean uh just talking to your friends i know you've been in the industry for a while you probably have a lot that you're speaking to especially in this time where we're like um talking to more people usual that's the funny thing right during work hours we're talking to more people now because of the social distancing stuff uh what are the situations you don't have to name any studios uh how how are they faring are they doing just as well or uh worse i've been really surprised man like i said like i worked in um in visual effects in the past and stuff i worked at like uh frame store and moving picture company and double negative and or sorry not double negative frame store um and digital domain and like i've been following them on social media a little bit and seeing how they've been handling it because a lot of their stuff is like a lot more it's all client based so like having clients trusting employees to work on their stuff from home is like

something that's never been a thing um so it's pretty cool seeing like how as these different industries are handling it um there's been like a lot more trust in the artists and people doing stuff and like being trusted to do the right thing at home and hopefully this will kind of set a precedent for the future right like they'd be sick if a lot of these industries you can start moving towards that right

here we go oh my god see this is part of the fun so this is me you yeah no worries they can't hear you just yet so they're just hearing me so let me introduce you real quick so muyu uh has taken a seemingly bizarre 15-year route through the game industry with stops in aaa facebook mobile indie and

even children's web games he'll attempt to make sense of this by discussing his strategy of investing in himself to fight the constant battle and finding a place in the ever changing industry so right now you are piped in how are you doing you move yeah not bad not bad thank you oh my god man this is part of the life live blenders i got to get the jitters out dude but uh thank you for coming on and then kind of sitting in and being there in the room with me while i do this at least to kick things off oh my god see my temperature i know it's getting too hot yeah let me let me go over and cut over to you all right you can just hide in the background i know right cool um should i just go yeah so anytime that you're ready go ahead and get started yeah how's it going everyone um yeah as

brandon mentioned my name is mooyu and i've been in the industry for a little bit over 15 years now um mostly i've been a game play programmer but i do wear lots of different hats at different times and i'll kind of get onto that um as we go on and i don't need to do too long of an intro because basically the whole talk is a giant long intro um so yeah let's get started um i guess the question that i found myself thinking about is just do i belong in the industry and it's a question i constantly end up asking myself um and as time goes on i feel like what it means to me changes dramatically but i'm always trying to think of do i belong in this industry or should i go do something else is it welcoming to me that kind of thing um but yeah i'm going to talk about some of the times i've asked the question how it's changed throughout my career and some of the things and actions i've taken to adapt to the industry um so you know we got to start at the beginning so the first time i found myself asking the question if i belong in the industry was right after my

insomniac games interview it was finals week in college i was you know i just spent two hours in their offices and i was blown away it was really magical and i just thought there's got to be some way that i can be part of this thing but at the same time i could see like how confident they were and how smart everyone was and i just felt like there's no way they're gonna let me join this company um so yeah i i remember that eerie feeling and i remember it was really punctuated because i i mean i'll tell the long story another time but i accidentally almost stole a car on my way back to getting home and that was really really weird but it was just a really surreal experience um but the thing i wanted to focus on is that the first time i was asking do i belong in the industry there's a question that i was asking other people to answer you know it wasn't something i was thinking about myself or anything it was very much um what does insomniac games think and do they think that i am a fit for their company and the industry it was completely out of my hands and it was a really you know i guess natural place to be but

it was definitely powerless um from my perspective and when i look back on it now it really seems like something an attitude that is a little bit dangerous at times because you know having that mentality you'll work on any project you'll work on you know pretty much anything you'll work crazy hours you'll do things that maybe you shouldn't be doing if you were thinking about yourself um but yeah i was lucky enough that they did you know let me you know come on to work on match and clank um i didn't get the position i applied for but they gave me a different one um and it was cool like four days later i walked into the insomniac offices i sat down at my desk and i felt like this is crazy like i i feel like i belong in this industry like they've welcomed me in i've kind of got past the gates um but then i started trying to work um and i thought i was a pretty good programmer at college you know like i i taught a lot of people other stuff like i was usually the lead of my project but i didn't know what i was doing um i really really struggled for the first

week and then the second week i struggled even more and the third week was terrifying um i remember i came in on the monday of the third week and two of us had been hired at the same time the guy that got the position i applied for and me and i come in on the third weekend he's gone and i just i didn't even know what to think when i asked what happened they said you know they had to let the guy go because he just wasn't keeping up with you know the rape of technology and how fast it was moving and they just thought that he was sort of left behind and that terrified me just the idea that i just got in the industry and i didn't realize that at any point the industry can just move out from under you um and that really defined my thinking of my first couple years in the industry um so yeah two weeks later um i find myself thinking like my version of do i belong in the industry now is constantly thinking am i good enough skill wise am i staying ahead of the curve am i learning things

fast enough um and the terrifying afterthought is like even if that's true now like how long is that going to last um so i really became obsessed with becoming the best programmer that i could be but i think the the good thing is that i was asking a question of myself but i think the bad thing was that i was very much defining myself in terms of what the industry needed from me and specifically what insomniac needed of me and it wasn't that they wanted anything bad of me but it was just that i was very much in the mindset of just serving someone else and i think that gets a little bit dangerous and for me where i started getting a little bit the table started turning a little bit and i started thinking a little bit more um was i gotten or one of my friends got in contact with me like i called my friend but this guy was like eight years older than me um and we went to church together when i was a kid and i always looked up to him and i you know one of the reasons i had interest in programming was that he became a professional program and my parents told me that he was making lots of money and

it was great when i started insomniac he was sort of like oh my god how did you get this amazing job i really look up to you can you help me out and i was like you've been programming for like 10 years what what do you mean i don't understand um and he explained to me that you know he had a job at a government agency where they did a very narrow thing and the first year you know he was learning all kinds of new things on how to do the kinds of simulations that they were doing but for the last nine years he was just kind of doing the one year of experience ten times and i just thought you know it really you know really hit me ha because i just worked on you know ratchet king clank three wrecked and clank four russian tank 5. i started thinking like am i really learning new things anymore like am i still developing because you know in the back of my head there's that there's that industry that's going to slip out from under you that's the thing that's constantly terrifying me um and i just felt like i can't do this um like i feel like i'm just gonna get left behind if i just keep you know typing out

ratchet games and i had a friend that yeah basically called it that he's like it's typing time you're not really thinking anymore about how you're developing things or what you're doing you're just typing the game you already know how to do and so the obvious thing would have been for me to move on to a game called resistance insomniac was also developing this first person shooter that was like you know realistic graphics for the playstation 3 playstation 3 launch title um and i thought about that for one second and immediately something inside of me was just like no you don't want to work on resistance and it was it was weird like i it just hadn't occurred to me that until that point that i really should be thinking about what do i want to work on um so i found myself thinking well insomniac is definitely something i'm gonna have to move on to um but i have all these other questions about like is this sustainable for me where do i want to go and one of the questions i was asking is like is it possible for me to have a life and make games at the same time i was working just crazy hours at insomniac and they would ramp up at

the end of each year when we want to release the game and one of the side effects of that is any friends that i made around you know july to september i would disappear for three months and then come you know the the next couple months it's time to make new friends because everyone's already you know forgotten me um that was one big question that was on my mind the second thing is like can i actually develop as a programmer um like can i find somewhere where i can keep learning more about programming and you know fight that curve and prevent the industry tied away from crashing on me um and i wasn't sure um but like i was i think that was the one i was most optimistic about um but the thing that i thought was most interesting was that i started thinking about like do i want to make the games that the industry wants me to make and that actually was aligned in the sand for me um and i think i i mean you'll see very shortly that i was very much tested on this and i i think the decision that i made is like i need to find somewhere that i can keep

learning to program better and then i need to work somewhere where i'm not making basically murder simulators um and so those are the two ground rules i set for myself to like find a place in the industry and like it may have been just the worst time possible to grow a backbone um because i asked around all the la studios and saw checked out what they were working on everyone's working on you know games where you have assault rifles or pistols at the very least and you're shooting people and i asked around you know some more studios in california and like i talked to recruiters that did like sort of like a nationwide search for me and every project was you know some kind of gray or brown shooter i think it was the year that like half-life 2 came out and doom 3 and years of war and you know even like i think they just released the halo and didn't make another one for ages um so i think at that point i kind of thought maybe maybe the games industry isn't for me um and i just kind of resigned myself to start looking for jobs elsewhere but luckily um

it got bailed out because at gdc 2007 littlebigplanet was announced and one of my friends happened to have a connection there and it was just the perfect game like in in the same way that viscerally resistance was a game like i knew i didn't want to work on little planet was everything i was hoping for um so you know it was creativity it was cooperation it was you know really lovely in terms of like the vibe and the bright colors and so um i likely got a meeting with uh the media molecule team at e3 when they were in town in la and you know luckily for me they wanted me to join their team so i packed up my bags and moved to the uk where i still am now um and i joined the little planet team and it was just an amazing experience i mean it was like i think about like when i went from thinking i was a smart guy in college and going to insomniac and being definitely the dumbest person in the room um it was that again

and so just you know being full in a room full of talent was really inspiring i learned so much about programming but i think because of the creative tools we're developing and also because i was able to sit um in the game designer area um i learned actually it wasn't the programming skills that were going to get me to my next step in my career like i very much realized that you know what like it's how i interact with people and it's how i take the time to understand what a game designer is trying to do or you know what an artist is trying to do with a feature and like how can i make the tools that make their lives easier or make the tools that match the way that they think about their creative process um so yeah i had a really great time working a little big planet um and lo and behold there's a pattern in the industry they said oh and we're gonna start working on little big planet 2 and i immediately just thought back to what my friend had said about you know the same year of experience 10 times i just thought okay um i need to move on but i'm really

inspired by what they've done and so you know i started thinking again okay this is the time that i just like okay well i saw what they did and it really made me think i can't just think about what i don't want to work on i need to think about what is the actual change i want to have you know like what are the games i actually want to make and instead of like where the last step was okay what does the industry happen to be making do i want to make that i started thinking about well like how can i make the industry want the games i want to play and the games i want to make and i think that was really important for me because i just thought back to that situation where i was sort of at the whim of the industry that if they if if i hadn't met the media mall co-founders i would have just left the industry and i think there's so many talented creative interesting people that you know would be interested in the industry and would have come around looking at that time and just found a bunch of murder simulators and realized oh you know what this is an industry for me i'm moving on um so i just thought

about how much talent we're losing and how how i guess powerless i felt in that situation so i started thinking about what are the kinds of games that i want to make um and so uh i guess the main thing was like i was focused on themes you know like i was focusing on how do i make a game with positive themes that engage new audiences because i guess the other part of it is that i feel like if i don't make the games that appeal to new types of players i'm not going to be able to continue to make games that appeal to new types of players like it you know at the end of the day it is the games industry and it is a business and so for me it was trying to think about how do we make the games that draw in new types of players to ensure that we can make a more broad range of games in the future and i thought back to the media molecule founders and what they did and i just thought yeah it was just amazing you know they came together they decided what game they wanted to make they made it uh it was hugely profitable um and it was you know a huge cultural success and

i thought well i guess the way they did that was they started the company so i decided it's time to start a company so i started a facebook games company um and we made a game called monstrosity and it was a game about nurturing little monsters it was about playfulness and growth and creating safe environments for role play um and you know i really enjoyed working on it um and it's interesting because i always talk about this like it was like this massive disaster um but actually i think i think there were a lot of things that went right i mean i think there's a lot more things that went wrong obviously and i'll get to that um but it was an interesting experience i think you know it wasn't sustainable as a company um and we ended up having to shut it down um and it was you know incredibly stressful i think the one thing that i remember the day i made the decision and it was like as a small team i came to work and the first thing i did was like i checked all the community messages and report responded them and i

started working on some features that were requested um and then i started doing like some of the back-end programming because it was easier at that point for me to do the back-end programming than to ask our back-end programmer and then i had to like do like our business development stuff i was you know had pitches and phone calls to answer um and then i was doing qa on the features i just done and i had a freelance artist that i was art directing and it was just it was way too much for me and i just couldn't sustain it and like every time we released new updates like the revenue was growing and wasn't growing and like the unsustainability of the business met the unsustainability of my stress and um i decided that we just had to shut the whole thing down um and so interestingly like after a failure like that um you'd think that i was ready to leave the industry again and i was you know contemplating my state of existence um and i just you know would be in this state again where i'm just like what am i doing do i belong here um but actually

i i wasn't asking it at that moment and i think the reason was kind of interesting like i think firstly like it was a failure but there were positives like we had millions of players we were making some money not enough um and i didn't have enough help but one thing that was really nice about not having enough help is that i got to try on so many different hats um and there's a lot of nice things about like being a small company and having to wear a lot of hats and the first thing is that you just appreciate everyone that normally wears those hats like i think before then there's times where i'm like ah this department they're not pulling their weight or their job's easy why are they making my life so hard and really everyone's job is hard and i think it took trying to do a lot of those jobs to make me realize that um and i think the other thing is that because i had such a huge appreciation for some of these roles like it made me just start appreciating that so much more on the people i met and it started making me build a community of people that were really good at doing the things that i

was really really bad at um but the other side of things is that there were a lot of things hats that i was wearing that i wasn't so bad at and especially some that i was really surprised by i think community management was something that i was surprisingly not bad at and i really enjoyed and despite being a programmer who usually is terrible at anything social that was a big surprise to me um and i think i never would have gone down that route if if i wasn't forced to and i'm really glad that i did because it's something i really enjoyed doing um even to this day uh but the other one was business development i just thought you know business development is for i mean i thought business development for white was white guys who could shout really loud um and i actually you know that wasn't my brand of it but you know when we were running the company i got very close to raising money and i think there was a point where you know i was talking to vcs and they seemed really interested but i didn't have the confidence that i could move forward and continue running the company even if i had funding but i just thought you know it's not really worth pursuing

these avenues and pitching but i wanted to get better at business development and running a business i just wasn't sure how um so i think i was i didn't want to leave the industry because i thought there's this thing i'm really excited about um and i want to learn more about it and so i needed to train up and like i guess this is sort of where i would have like cut together a montage if i had any video editing skills um and i actually you know have tried to edit videos and it's one of those examples of things that you try and realize you're terrible at um so yeah there's no montage video here but i started thinking about like what was it that helped me develop my programming skills early in my career and could i replicate that same thing for um business development and i the thing that i realized is so when the guy when i came back in that seat was empty um i freaked out um because you know that guy got fired he had way more experience than i did um but then you know an hour or two later

someone moved into that seat and that person actually ended up being my mentor for the next two or three years and taught me you know almost everything i know about game programming um and the thing that i realized most about him was that he made sure that i had a safe environment where i could experiment with things and take risks and fail um and he was a really really important mentor to me and and you know the story i tell about like my fondest memory of the video games industry is still the time that we were trying to make this get this builds for ratchet three it was the first you know game i'd ever worked on and they're like we're gonna make disc builds and for weeks they were like okay we're gonna try and make the first disc build and every time they're like oh they just didn't build the distant build um and they'd be like okay we're making a disc build don't check anything in we're making a disc build and you know for two weeks they'd been saying that and i'd never seen a disc and disc had never been made and so you know again they come through say don't check anything in i check in stuff and lo and behold the disc builds um and the disc build and they load up the disk and it crashes on load and it's the thing i

just checked in and i was petrified and i just remember uh you know this guy my mentor tony they come back and they're just like who checked in code what's going on blah blah blah and tony was just like just go make another just go make another another just leave us alone um this happens all the time go away and it was just such a like an eye-opening moment for me because like i felt like i was gonna get fired i mean i i always felt like i can get fired um i um but you know that tony made sure that i was safe to take those risks and make mistakes and he was always always there to tell me you know what risks i took that were good and what risks i took that were bad and you know i it was pretty obvious to me when things paid off and when things blew up in my face as well um so i think that's the thing i think you know what i learned is that one i had to really want have a reason that i wanted to develop this skill and it's because i didn't want to get fired um and i had to be bad at it to learn to get better um and i think one of the important things there is like that i think about now is

that like there's times where i really want to develop a skill but i don't actually try i just do a bunch of research and i feel like that's valuable but that's not growing i think it's not until you're actually trying to do something and failing at something um that you do grow and given that i think the only way to grow is to have an environment where you have mentors and where you can fail and where it's safe um and so yeah i thought back to how i learned and developed my programming skills and i thought i want to do that same thing for bizdev and lucky enough there was a company that was working really closely with us when we launched our facebook game because they hadn't launched yet and they wanted uh information about you know how they thought their launch was going to go um and so they you know asked me a lot of things and asked me about a lot of the business decisions i was making and you know gave me advice on things um but they said you know they really valued me as a business person and they wouldn't bring me on as a full-time

business person but they bring me on as a programmer and uh but they still involved me in all game design and all business decisions and i think a lot of companies would say that to recruit someone and then just like fall them off when it came through but like really like this company was amazing to me they were a silicon valley venture-backed company they'd raise something like two and a half million dollars or something like that for the seed round um so you know it was really interesting for me to work with them and for them to let me try and make some decisions and try and contribute to the conversation and for them to mentor me and teach me what i was doing wrong and what why my first company failed um and it was just you know an incredible opportunity for me and it just makes me think about you know people that provide those safe spaces for people to grow um and so you know i developed those skills and i thought i'm kind of at that point where i'm researching again and i'm not doing and i thought well maybe it's time for me to try to test out my skills again and i feel pretty good about my

programming skills and i feel okay about my business skills um so it was time to try again and that was knights and bikes um so yeah i was the sole programmer on the game so i programmed the game which had three different modes one was that you could play single player with an ai partner so the whole game had to work with either characters being ai and for momentarily moments where both of them are ai from weird bugs that we found um where both players were controlled locally uh for local co-op and then for the version of the game that you could play online co-op um so yeah i think that was really an aggressive goal for me and i think it went well and i you know still feel pretty good about my programming skills and the business side i think went well too i think you know we ran a successful kickstarter campaign um we got a publishing deal shortly after that we've negotiated a book deal and three incredible books have come out so yeah knight's advice says three books based in this universe written by gabrielle kent and they're on sale now

um and we even signed like a deal for a tv series that's currently in development so you know i think all around i felt like okay my skills are developing at a rate where i don't feel necessarily i need to like go back and find a safe space for growing my business skills um like i i feel pretty good about those two skill sets um so you think like after success like that i'd be like i of course i'd be long you know i'm awesome i did everything it was it was great and blah blah blah but like i find myself again like asking is there a place for me in the industry and it's it's weird that like after my failure i'm like i definitely belong here and then after my success i'm like i don't really know um but there's you know there's more to it like the first thing is that there's two things that have changed in i guess my life in the world the first one is that last year my son was born and as some of you can imagine and some of you have experienced when you have a child like all of your priorities get

shifted all of your available time gets eaten up and all of your financial risk tolerance just vanishes proof in mid-air um and so that's changed a lot about my perspective on you know how i can take creative risks and that kind of thing but the other thing is that my eyes were open to representation um and i think growing up as you know in a chinese person in the western world i just kind of thought they're never gonna tell my story like i'm never gonna actually feel represented in the media um and you know i think you know every now and then something would come along and they'd be like oh this is like the next big asian film and i'd watch it i'm like i don't really get it um and but what changed my mind first was a game called florence i think it did an incredible job of you know packaging a universal story that everyone could understand with like specific details that are specific to florence and her heritage and i really felt those things

really really strongly i was on a plane back from gbc actually and i was just crying my eyes out the whole time and more recently i saw the film tiger tale on netflix by alan yang and how specifically it captured the taiwanese american immigrant experience was mind-blowing for me like if you would have told me that they had spies inside my house and captured the parent the story of my parents i would have believed you um and i think actually feeling represented really opened my eyes to a lot of things um to how important that is um i think representation matters for people you know who aren't represented enough so that they don't feel alone but i think you know we're seeing now more than ever that representation matters for everyone else just to remind i mean it's sad that it requires reminding but to remind everyone that we're all human and we should all be treated as such um and so those are the two things that are really on my mind now

um as a games person of just like can i tell or can i make games that tell new stories and can i do that without you know leaving my family uh abandoned on the street basically um so yeah it gets so complicated for me now because you know i guess the first question is like are there new stories that i can help tell um you know and it even makes me think like do i have a story to tell um and i'm not really sure yet um and it makes me think about like well are there people out there who want to work with me that have these stories that i could help tell um but then there's the other side of like you know is there a financial balance for trying to change the industry and change the audience and build an audience um without you know incurring the huge financial risk on myself and i'm just getting older and older and i think about how long you know i will i've been working on nights and bikes and it makes me wonder like do i still have time um to try to try to make these changes and

to try and grow and try and learn the new skills i need um so yeah i mean i'm genuinely in a phase right now where i'm asking myself if i belong in the industry and i have some time to make the decision like one like i'm not of sound mind i'm not sleeping because the baby doesn't let me um but i still have some work on nights and bikes to finish up so you know that's one thing to focus on and i'm working also at a company where i do get to work with a writer and think about story telling and the tools for storytelling and that kind of stuff so i don't really know yet but i still have time to decide i feel but what i do know um is that you know i need to skill up on storytelling skills myself and the story or the skills required to help others tell stories i need to find collaborators that have stories that they want to tell um but more importantly like it's really important to me to make sure to contribute to making the industry a place where more people feel like they belong because it's just the virtual cycle like if we can't

you know have the audience for interesting new games then we can't have the people the interesting new people to make them and like so on and so forth and i just feel like you know that pinwheel has got to start somewhere and one of the ways that i'm trying to help that out is i'm part of a group called park and play we're based in the uk and we're dedicated to supporting people of color in the games industry but there's so many great initiatives um going on right now on that front that i feel like that's you know it's one of the things i do feel certain about um in these really uncertain times but yeah that's sort of where i am i wish i could have um finished it with something more concrete and inspirational but i don't know what's in my future but i think the point of this talk is that it's really important to take the time to think about yourself where you fit in the industry where you want the industry to grow and what growth you need um to make that happen and you know and along with the growth you need what environments you need to make that growth happen so

thanks for your time everyone all right mew well thank you man uh it's been a fantastic time and uh you know one of these things being the first guy up have always been a challenging challenging proposition but i think you did great and i think your story especially is something um that uh that we all kind of look forward to as a game developer your journey is something very similar all right you're talking about all those times that you wanted to quit i mean during this stream there were times that i wanted to quit because getting the dinners out all the time it's always tough man it's always but like as the day goes through and then not getting the rhythm it gets easier so in the very very short way of kind of summarizing your experience in the game industry it feels a lot in that way we keep going back to it because at least for me i don't know what else to do man i'm not really good at

anything i'm pretty useless with my hands and uh and i i just love game development and and it's one of the biggest reasons why because i feel like i see professionals such as yourself who who have figured out a way all right through this turmoil through these confusion time confusing times um you've somehow kind of pieced together a path for yourself and and and just learn by stumbling um which is one of the biggest takeaway that i got uh from your talk yeah absolutely and i think i i think the the key is that like stumbling i mean stumbling is a privilege of sorts right like i think like having the ability to do so is something that i am very grateful for and i actually think about you know the guy that taught me that lesson about the the one year of development 10 times is that you know he wasn't in a financial position where he could take a risk where he could grow and learn and you know develop himself as a programmer and move to an industry like i did um

because you know he he did get in touch with me throughout the years and he's always jealous of you know how i get to work in the games industry and it's just a matter for him that like he needs his job and he can't take time off to like try and learn how to be a game programmer or anything like that and i i fully understand that it's a privilege i have but i think you know it's a privilege i have but hopefully i can use that privilege to you know make the industry you know less difficult to get into and more approachable for more kinds of people yeah definitely i mean fixing look up so i'm pumping this is gonna be so stupid throughout this i'm popping in my other camera right now uh but like uh for just as a reminder right just kind of go off what you're saying for anybody that's in discord in the chat rooms uh this is a time for you to kind of ask directly to mew well through me because i don't want i don't want to fumble you up with with ridiculous questions so i'm going to be filtering a lot of the questions throughout the three days so we do have

moderators going through all those chat rooms we have something specific to talk to to me about uh feel free to kind of drop a line and i'll try my best kind of read it online and on air but uh before that happens you know i have plenty of my questions uh for myself and i kind of want to kind of dig through it man like you were mentioning a few years before you kind of found somewhat of a rhythm you know of course your success now i mean you're doing this full time which is a lot already um how long was that process man uh if you were to say where you're you started to have doubts and you started to explore to now how long did it finally not to now specifically but to to the point where you felt you hit a rhythm where you're like i'm starting to understand business and game development like the business side is really hard because i think there's there's two things to balance i think you know learning the program was a lot easier because you know you eventually

do find your brand of programming but for the most part you're just trying to become a better programmer i think for me when i got to the business side there was a lot of trial and error of like what kind of business person i wanted to be um you know like i think for example one of the times i was you know trying to do networking and one of my friends invited me to a dinner um that basically ended up in a strip club and like all this other stuff and i was just like ah this is this can't be how business is done like this isn't the kind of business person i want to be um and there's a lot of business people that you know are very fake it to them fake it till you make it you know like just lie and lie and lie through your teeth and hope that you know once you've got other people's money you can profit off of it um without losing it but then if you lose it it's their money i think i think the business world is a lot more complicated and like i i would go to basically two events every single night for i mean probably i think it was probably about six months i'm not every night but like probably three or four nights a week and i'd be like you know practicing my

pitch for my company but trying to figure out like oh how are they pitching stuff and what can i learn from them and what do i like about what this person is doing in this person isn't it but i think also finding the other people you want to work on i think for someone to invest money in someone takes a bit of a relationship um so a lot of the times you know you're meeting these people and you're trying to prove to them that you're the same kind of business person with the same level of trustworthiness and the same kind of trust as them and i think that takes a lot of time so our publisher double fine you know we've had a really good relationship with them personally for a long time like you know we actually struck the deal because greg was sleeping on rex's couch for rez which is an indie event in london and i've known tim shafer because you know that time when i said in 2007 i couldn't find a single job opportunity that wasn't um a first-person shooter or some kind of shooter i remember i specifically remember this moment because i was on the insomniac balcony i was talking to a recruiter

and he was just like okay well the only game i have that's like not a shooter and i can't tell you where it's from or too many details but it's like you know a heavy metal action rts game i'm just like what is that what does that mean and that turned out to be brutal legend um but like because like i just had no idea like i you know i've always been in touch with tim about working at double fine and i think if they said double fine has a position open i definitely i probably would have ended up in san francisco instead of in guilford um but the guy just you know sometimes recruiters are not allowed to like give too many details of job opportunities away and because he just described it so weirdly i just kind of ignored it which is a shame and it's one of those things too like you're talking about you know tim schafer is definitely a legend within the industry and i think if anything he has a huge part to kind of kicking off this indie life that the possibility of not just scraping by but but also having the

ability to kind of go out there fend for yourself have a product and see it all the way through to to to publishing and and reap whatever you know risks and benefits that that entails and i think um it's crazy kind of thinking about the first kickstarter that they kind of kick-started kickstarter in my opinion right and then to now where yeah where were developers like yourself are finally uh kind of taking the torch uh and and and kind of carrying it yourself uh learning from these guys and we're talking about a short span of i would say like what within four or five years when the first major when they went that route right yeah i think they they did it in maybe 2012 i think and we did it in 2016. um and like i think that was one of those things like we had a good relationship with them and it made sense enough they ended up with our publisher but like for example they offered to take a look at our kickstarter campaign before it launched and give us advice on it um so you know

the they were just a perfect example for me on many fronts and one of them is like developers helping other developers you know they were really good about you know funding indie projects and like publishing indie projects but also just helping lots of projects that they had no financial interest in just because you know they thought the idea was cool and they've always put on like day of the devs which is like a huge showcase of like indie games um so i think you know they've always been somewhat a company that i've looked up to um in terms of like what i want to do and how that how i can also have positive change in the industry and i i i've been i haven't had my skin in the game as long as you have you know i'm still operating out of a motel room right wink wink so from the short time span that i've been doing this a lot of it has been about putting yourself out there to kind of have these doors open and not really knowing what the outcome in your life uh or career is gonna go like i did i had like a faint idea well before i

started where where uh i wanted to go and be at this place but then it wasn't really uh really driven by experience or or anything of that sort it was kind of like make it up as i go and and a lot of it was influenced by by by by people who who's kind of ahead of me and just meeting them and just waiting and making good you know not burning any bridges i think another part of that is that early in my career right we would get these warnings from veterans or experienced developers around us saying like hey never burn bridges you never know right but then there was these times where i was like you know i'm gonna if you're gonna burn bridges i'm gonna burn it right and i had like this little face whereas like you know i'm fully committed and then in full circle i'm seeing myself as a veteran now and going on to to create my own opportunities where i'm kind of going

back to these bridges and realizing oh wow you know i was really rash and short term in my thinking i mean i wonder if you had similar stories in that in that mindset kind of like i i definitely agree like you shouldn't burn bridges unnecessarily but i definitely think there are times to burn bridges um and there's definitely times that i've brought bridges that i wish i hadn't but there's also times like burnt bridges where you know i you know i've dealt with people that i think are despicable and that nobody should work with them and i'm happy i brought those bridges and i'm happy that i've been able to warn people off of situations that they that sound really enticing that they really wouldn't have enjoyed uh but on the other hand yeah i've definitely burned you know in my in my early career i definitely burned a few bridges i probably shouldn't have but sort of the idea of like you know going to these events putting yourself out there and trying to like find the next generation to get keep you in and the

thing that i've actually learned is that it's your peers that are like the really interesting ones like you know i was part of uh a program here in the uk part of baptist program called crew and i remember when i joined crew there were so many like young really full of energy ambitious excited people of saying like oh here's what i want to do and one day i'm going to do this and this kind of stuff and you know i was a little bit older but i still like love their energy and love their enthusiasm and now like i look at where all those are three or four years later and they're all in incredible positions and running like tons of programs that are helping other people get a leg up in the industry or um that kind of thing so i think you know never discount your peers i think your peers are the people that like one aren't gonna look down on you um and two that you can like really you can really vibe with them because you're at the same position and they're gonna be the future of the industry and you know you can always hope that they'll bring you along with them yeah definitely i mean um

at least for me man like uh i think there was a phase where you know i was really getting um anxious within the industry is getting a little burnt out where there was a time where where uh i would see these guys um you know fresh blood coming the industry bright-eyed and there was kind of like a you know little lingering resentment right it's like oh my look at these kids look at these this energy right like they don't know right but then it took a while where it finally felt like you know this is reinvigorating this is you know this kind of reminds me of how i was uh when when when i was bright-eyed and and and reminds me why i got in the industry in the first place so if anything it's a nice like full circle realization of you know uh there's always going to be things that it's going to happen within your career where you're going to always look at what's the next best best thing but it's

also very healthy to kind of reflect on where you are right now i mean we're making games this is a literally a dream of ours since kids and you know especially where you are right now you've able to kind of evolved and and and taking control and and instead of complaining you you've taken uh those issues that you've had and and just made it disappear uh through your own hard work and stuff like that i think even like in writing the talk i think that was the thing i realized i was just like what is the progression of like how i think about my place in the industry and i think there's like a big step between like thinking of the industry as like this thing that like takes her doesn't take you and that has all the power and you're just you know this weak thing that's you know hoping to be led in the gates um and i think you know when you start thinking about yourself and what you want to achieve in the industry that becomes like really empowering but i think the next step is when you realize

that like the industry is changing but like i always like at the beginning i feared that i was like the industry is changing and they're gonna leave me behind and it's gonna be terrifying and then you realize like the industry is changing because of people working in the industry and i'm a person working in the industry so if i know what change i want to see in the industry i can be part of it and i think that was a really big eye opener for me because i think after that point i was just always just like well wherever it goes it's gonna maybe it's gonna leave me behind and that's gonna suck um and i know like you know single-handedly i'm not going to change everything but like i can do my little part to make sure that there is a place for me in the industry and there are places for people like me in the industry so i do have a question from the audience this is from jakeel jakkil101 as a reminder you guys can ask these questions i'm going to make myself laugh like the whole whole day so uh so this is when you started your career in game development uh had you had work prior in other types of software development

so i had two internships um that i'd done so like um i was i came straight out of college so yeah i took like my last final on the friday and i started insomniac on the monday so i didn't didn't have any like proper professional experience but the first i think two summers that i was at um in college i actually met a guy in my programming uh one of my programming classes that um they basically he worked at the games company and they were like we need you to find us an intern and he was like i'm going to e3 next week and i'm like oh my god how do you go to e3 and he's like oh if you work in the games industry you can go to e3 i'm just like can you get me in it e3 and he's like well like if you come work with us like in the summer you can go to e3 next year i'm like let's do that so i i had like two three months since um at two different games companies because that guy moved from one game company to another so i think that was definitely like the big break for me um was that i was lucky enough that that

guy got me two different internships and like once you can see how the sausage is made like you can start adapting like the theory you have of programming with the actual industry version of programming um but then again like when i went to install neck it was a whole other level like it was so much more complicated than anything i'd done in those two summers awesome uh this is a question from official nebular gaming do you need to have a degree to be called a game dev no definitely not like like you have to be able like i think if you're making a game uh you're a game dev and whether like that means downloading unity and you know playing a sample like you're a game dev like i don't know like you can go yourself to game dev no matter what right i i think that that's becoming increasingly more and more true i think especially with um the pandemic going around and uh i don't even know how school systems

can kind of adopt into it essentially i i think there was some some horror stories kind of kind of being spread where where a lot of these students were still being charged while they couldn't go to a physical school and then they had like a really half-baked online experience and result of that um i mean these are institutions obviously that that continues to to need the the income and uh like those businesses they they will crumble if suddenly the the source uh stops right so in a way i kind of empathize but in another you know i i went through like a traditional you know college education and i uh took me like eight years to kind of pay it back with like stable job income right uh it was insane uh to expect that from from anybody um to to kind of start

their 20s and live through their 20s commuting and in most cases like moving around the country and in your case your country different country yeah around the world and it's very common uh and it's just we're not set up in a way where i graduate from one campus and then across the street i can work for for the next 20 years i mean most industries aren't set up like that anymore but game industry especially i i feel like you starting off your your your career then that way can be very detrimental so um yeah you know for me the value of college was probably much more than like an 18 year old just isn't a mature human being um and like you know from countless perspectives whether it was social or like the way i thought about learning when i was 18 was i thought you memorized a bunch of stuff and i think the thing that college taught me um was that learning is actually linking other things linking stuff to things you

already know and i think that was a shift that it took me you know my three years of college to figure out um and if you can learn that in another way great but like if you know you you need some time and i think that's the thing like i talk about safe spaces to try things and to grow and to fail and i think college can be that for a lot of people but i think the industry should be able to do that as well so yeah i'm not i'm not in high college per se like i definitely think you know there's values for some people in university i think there's value for me in university um like even just like being forced to do group projects was like a big turning point for me because i could code on my own but like the idea of you know having my code mesh with someone else's code is a concept i you know i don't think i would have experienced on my own um but again it's another thing that hopefully we can as industry provide opportunities for as well yeah especially now i mean i i'm a big proponent to online learning now but even with the force quarantine it gets

pretty lonely man that social aspect of it i really valued when i was in college i made a lot of best friends for life through the experience being next to people and so even with all this generation of developers who who are so used to living through social media um i think we pretty much value social interaction at this point i mean think i think if anything we've answered it that yes we need physical interaction and online is not enough matrix until they get those like until valve kind of get those index fingers uh with physical touch going uh it's just not at that place where where we want to uh to kind of dedicate our whole life to that so i do have another question this is from bewilder beast is there a particular work ethic technique or discipline that you could talk about being the sole developer how does how do you maintain discipline and focus

when it's just you and a keyboard so i guess the clear the clarification there on knights invites like i wasn't the sole developer like that was an artist i was the sole programmer on the project and like it's okay he's not here take credit i did everything and like the easiest way to stay motivated is like if there's an artist like just churning out beautiful art every day and every time you hit like update from sdn there's more beautiful for you to program um like it's it's pretty easy to stay motivated um in that situation and like even at times when i remember there were some times where you know there was a bunch of work rex needed to do um that there wasn't much programming work for me to do so i basically just jumped onto another project for i think two months and i shipped sub-surface circular with mike bithell um so i think you know i don't go to any like work ethic or any like specific you know paradigm to stay motivated but i definitely think like finding

collaborators that excite you and finding things that you want to learn that excite you finding skills that you can find value in yourself like those are things to stay motivated um but also i think you know for me like again it all comes down to like if everything isn't rooted in the change i want to see in the world and like you know if i accomplish that change like maybe i'll lose motivation but like the world is moving so slow when there's so many things that need to be fixed that i feel like eventually whatever i'm doing is rooted in the change i want to see in the world and i think that's never going to get solved and my motivation being tied to that it's always going to stay somewhat full but i guess the other side of it is like how do you not burn out because that's a risk that i always ran into it like especially before my son was born it was just i work from home it's so easy to just keep coding and keep coding and keep coding um i'd say that's more of the risk or more of the threat to me of just like burning out and just not wanting to do it anymore just because

your body is just so sick of it um and i think if i didn't have my wife to remind me like this you know i would get the points where she would just be like just so you know like you're being really snappy and like you clearly are exhausted and you're working too hard just sounds like this morning for me yeah like you know she'd be there to like remind me that like i'm working too hard and i need to like find some balance go outside and yeah get some vitamin d man it's important especially now yeah so this is uh from shadow monarch one he's asking belonging uh from india he's from india i guess the game dev scene here is not too big so how do i pass that bridge between countries and get myself where i can even ask the do i belong question to myself could you tell me some of the ways i can check out the game dev industry this is pretty pretty relevant yeah i mean it's definitely difficult i mean the short answer is it's not trivial

because i mean i obviously there's a lot of things online there's a lot of communities like i watch a ton of gdc talks i'd you know watch g ducks uh i watch a lot of talks i try and find communities online that you can interact with but it's it's not a perfect substitute um like it very much is just if you can't find anything physically local like try and find something virtually local to you um and try and find communities that will you know are at a similar level as you and where you can ask like one one thing that i really like right now is like in the uk there's uh games industry slack and so everyone in the games industry comes in and like you can ask the dumbest questions in the world and nobody's gonna judge you for it and i think that's you know it's the thing that i just keep coming back to is like there aren't enough stage spaces for people to learn and grow and i think you know for you what i would recommend is just start making a game and whenever you have a problem start googling answers and hopefully at some point

googling answers to the specific problems you have will help you find communities where those answer or those questions get answered on the internet and that will you know hopefully you know be a beacon for you to start your journey but it's it's not easy that's for sure so this is actually a pretty good question that uh i even i i'm pretty curious about so this is from andreas retina so how's the game dev industry in the uk compared to the us are there any key differences so i guess the the biggest thing for me at least is i feel like it's connected so the salaries in the uk are way lower than salaries in the u.s which sounds like a bad thing but it means the game budgets are lower and the creative risk is higher and i think that's actually one of the reasons why everyone in america in 2007 was making a shooter because the budgets are so high that you have to do the lowest risk thing and i mean

ironically if you and everyone else are doing the large risk thing it's really really high risk um so i think the uk industry for me at least it feels a lot more explorational and more experimental because one we have the nhs so you don't have to as a freelancer you don't have to worry about health care or health insurance or anything like that you like if you get sick you will be taken care of um but just that because the budgets on games are a little bit lower on average like i think there's more creative risk that's um willing to be taken up in the uk uh i also think that the uk has you know a great organization called bafta and they really as a culture support games and because they've been doing so much work to put games in the spotlight um like they have an award ceremony that just like the oscar for games every year and because you know they have everyone suit up in tuxedos and make it seem like you know we're professionals and this is an art form to be appreciated i think there is more appreciation of the

industry here um where i think in america it's very commercial and very like um a bit more jaded um especially when you get to the general population and the news media coverage and that kind of thing so i think those are the big differences to me but nhs is huge like not having to pay like when you literally are running a indie game company a lot of times you're trying to spend zero dollars or pounds period and just the fact of like if every time you don't spend money on health insurance you're increasing the mental strain of what is the risk if someone is unwell like it's just i mean there's nothing that makes it harder to focus on creative decisions when you're putting your own life on the line yeah definitely well i mean i want to thank you mu for uh for coming on man it's been it's a great way to kind of kick off because your story especially is exactly why g ducks was was made in the first place i shared a lot of similarities in your journey i

mean i i've had my my moments um even this morning you know uh with the stress and all my wife had to kind of like take hold and like calm the f down but these are moments throughout yeah throughout business that we we kind of figure things and uh and and try to move on and and just learn by by doing basically so before i kind of send you off uh if you don't mind to kind of uh tell people out there how to find you and uh we'll go ahead and just uh make that make that apparent so that people can can find you on twitter or wherever yep cool on twitter i'm one of mu and it's on the screen uh and recently we we released knights and bikes uh on switch ps4 and pc so pick it up and give me monies yeah it's well i want thank you so much me for for coming on man it's been uh it's been a pleasure thanks for having me we'll talk some more and uh yeah and

that's pretty much it man thanks for everything dude awesome right later later all right so it's no surprise that kova 19 changed everybody's winter spring and now summer plans but the group that got impacted the most in the game industry have always been the indie developers

every time i cut that means i'm fixing something so that's part of the fun right so the game industry have always been uh about the indie developers the conferences that have been cancelled for the year are often immovable marketing plans for these smaller developers and companies the budgets set aside were already committed for differences or conferences like gdc back in march passes airline tickets and hotel bookings can easily rake up to the thousand which is a lot for a small developer these are dollar amounts that weren't refunded and what's worse the curveball thrown to these developers created a lot of uncertainty if making games is a future anymore i had a lot of questions and i couldn't think of anyone better to answer them than rene gittens the executive director of the igda which is the international game developer association she came on the podcast a few months ago to help me understand what the global

impact is for all game developers the igda has been working on providing a lot of resources to support the community while we have our discord with over 300 active members that can help provide community and a place to talk for those who are trapped within their homes we also have been putting together resources such as information from uh the world health organization from local governments uh different types of funding and other financial relief opportunities both within the us and other places in the world and we've put together our own recommendations for how to work from home in a way that best supports your career and your mental health

that's awesome um besides that too in addition to that uh there were some talks at least before gdc got cancelled how game developers were still kind of thinking of gathering i think as the situation got worse as it was leading up to the week of gdc that people were slowly realizing yeah this is business as usual we can't just still show up do you know a little bit more detail about what did people even bother going at all uh as the week was coming close or did they just all write let's just cancel the whole thing and let's not even meet up because you know the whole city was quarantined by the time uh there were um various plans to gather at within san francisco despite gdc's cancellation however as the situation escalated those started canceling themselves uh i heard

at least one person say that five developers gathered together at one hotel in san francisco but certainly there weren't any large gatherings not that i was aware of that occurred during the week of gdc as you were mentioning like steam charts are shooting up there's a lot of people that turn into video games and entertainment such as netflix usually in recession times where they're especially at home a lot what kind of advantages are you seeing with any developers looking at innovative ways to kind of get their games in front of people now that everyone's at home but they're mostly relying on internet resources the age-old marketing plan yeah yeah i mean certainly marketing these days is very different than it used to be a lot of it is very influencer based versus printed and digital ads

however i've seen a lot of indie developers coming together not only to try to market their game more but to try to provide relief for people who are quarantined so i've actually seen a lot of developers doing the maximum discounts they can on their steam games and on other platforms just trying to make sure that all the people who need games to help buy their time have access to them additionally i think we really see the value of a lot of indie games in a situation like this for example kind words which came out this last year was remarkably popular because it shows how to provide empathy and kindness to other people and i think in these times that's something you really need yeah most certainly um you're talking about a couple events that you guys are helping out with uh gamedev.world a lot of relif efforts a lot of community coming together which is

the bright side of this uh side of the story where where everything seems to be coming uh well a time of uncertainty right uh yeah where do you foresee for the rest of the year i mean people who are kind of more up-to-date to the news and kind of seeing how other countries are kind of dealing with it or at least at the tail end of things uh it feels like the rest of the year is done like where we're just gonna be hunkered down and and this is this is 2020 uh for for everybody um do you see the impact of it really extending beyond 2020 because it's doesn't feel like business is gonna be as usual after everyone recovers um i think that there will certainly be impacts of this lasting beyond 2020 um regardless of how long the quarantines and outbreak occur and i think that's mostly because right now we're seeing a

huge shift in technology and a lot more people working remotely um as someone who has worked remotely for four and a half years of the last eight it's something that i'm very familiar with and i'm very familiar with the social effects of that i think that we'll see more people and more companies supporting remote work and remote workers and because of that we'll see those remote workers desiring more online communication so i think we'll actually be seeing a growth a continued growth of online games especially ones that support communities that really can collaborate and work together it would not surprise me in fact if we saw mmos becoming much more popular in the next few years it definitely seems that white people are uh kind of snatching up assassin's creed and games that extends a lot of playing time

in the last few couple weeks and um what what's interesting is that uh a few about a month ago we were kind of discussing on the podcast about the um the california ap5 uh which is a bill that was passed recently in this state uh how it was affecting contractors everywhere and um [Music] and then shortly after this this virus kind of spread and it's really forcing companies kind of look outside of physical work environments right and uh how do you feel that um that this is gonna be the pros and cons of this effect of forcing remote work and removing the stigma with remote work but also looking outside of the physical area of uh of a company for for talent and uh extending that talent

beyond the the the the project's deadlines and stuff yeah i mean i think even outside of game dev uh the advancement of remote work is going to be really good for technology overall um because more people will be working remotely we'll see even a bigger push for having strong high data internet connections and that is clearly beneficial to games as games tend to be the things that make the highest demand of those internet connections at least on a regular basis for studios um i think a lot of studios have generally been comfortable with outsourcing but we're potentially going to see a rise in that especially as remote work rises that can be both positive and negative

it certainly gives a lot of opportunities to people all over the world but it does mean that local laws can be i guess skirted is is probably a word that could be used so for example with ab5 it would be potential it would potentially encourage people to hire remote workers outside of california instead of within it however i think it's important to note in cases like ab5 while there were a lot of questionable parts and vagueness within that law a lot of the biggest concerns were actually already covered by laws that were uh active within california it's just that not all employers were already respecting them yeah definitely um one of the biggest discussion we because we had a you know our our local um lawyer consultant

kind of come on to talk about ab5 and uh the impacts of that and naturally um he gave a short short-term and long-term idea of what it could look like affecting game developers where you know in a good way it could really help contractors not be taken advantage of right and in the short term there are a lot of issues that can be skirted around like you said uh and then this with this rise of remote work uh everyone's at home anyways it makes no difference if you're californian or or not as long as you have the talent which opens a lot of opportunities for people outside the country um kind of work with these big game developers where they used to be very um nda protective of their property as they should um but that also leads to another thing that i i've been reading more about um

when we naturally think about game developers we think about the art resource technical resource uh that makes up a team but then there's a huge department that helps really ship the game like the qa department shipping and products and these guys are not really getting the type of fair remote transition and some companies within the united states are still forcing them to kind of come in because they simply do not trust uh these guys to kind of bring home the the intellectual property and continue play testing uh is there any news on developing yeah yeah i definitely saw a report that some qa houses were requiring that their workers still come in physically to their office and i think that is definitely a health risk and unfortunately um you know it's something that the igda definitely discourages we encourage

listening to your local government and their regulations and i think that we will see local governments responding um to to companies forcing their workers to come in for unsafe conditions for non-critical tasks non-society critical tasks i think that there are definitely some technical challenges that i can understand you know when you are doing qa testing uh you are sometimes really limited on the devices you can use you know especially if we're looking at the next generation of consoles uh those dev consoles can be very expensive and there might not be you know one per qa person um but i think that it is the responsibility of those companies to work around and to find solutions because there are many other qa firms

who have found ways to support their staff while still supporting their customers and making sure that everyone stays safe next presenter is known as star she will be talking about the mystery behind marketing many developers know the technical skills behind development let's try that again many developers know the technical skills behind development but marketing is still a big mystery to many why exactly does it matter when do you start what steps do you have to take the fact that many examples can become outdated makes it seem even more imposing what if it's

really just about perspective like many creative skills this is a simple and clear guide that can get you started on the right path all right so start i'm gonna mute unmute you and now everyone should be able to hear you how are you doing doing very well thank you all right so uh whenever you are ready to start uh the show floor is yours all right cool hi guys my name is starlight skies and this talk is about the mystery behind the marketing but i actually don't think there is a mystery i think it's pretty straightforward and logical but i just wanted to say real quick that every game is different and could require a different approach so what works for one game doesn't necessarily work for another game so just keep that in mind whenever you're doing a game that you can't just copy what other people do some games may sell very well but their social

media may not reflected that success like you know that maybe you you played a game and you really like it and you're like i want to you know see what their social media is like i want to see what they're doing hold on i'm going to minimize my talk real quick okay you maybe see their social media and you're just like wow this is a great game why haven't more people thought about this why you know why aren't people getting what i'm getting it's because they may not understand how they can get an audience through social media uh so that's what i'm gonna do today so i have many clients i do consultations and as i'm doing them with both solo developers and companies i have the same conversation over and over again which is that they understand the technical aspects of how a game works but they don't necessarily know like how to take what they're making and give it context to sell to a larger audience basically what they're telling me is i know what i'm doing but how do i show

it to other people so we've heard it all before that having a great idea is just not good enough saying the people uh will play it it's that it's fun it just doesn't work anymore but what i wish people would talk about more after that is that the fact that it needs to be marketable and i'll get over that in just a second but i just want to say that there's always exceptions to this for example if uh here we go just moving my screen over to second okay so basically i want to say there's always exceptions to this as in some games basically are not marketed at all and then become really popular but i wouldn't rely on that um i would definitely have a strategy to whatever it is that you're you're going to do because people that i've had like hit games have had experience with this before and they kind of get a sense for like what's going to sell and what isn't going to sell so we've heard this all we've heard this

term before developers wear many hats but people outside the industry may not understand how this works because they don't do game development they don't understand that there is a like there's all these nooks and crannies when it comes to development and you have to kind of fill in a lot of them and marketing is like basically one of these hats and i'm saying this right now because a lot of developers think it's just an add-on that they do towards the end of development but it is a mindset and you should think of it as its own skill it's just like with how long it takes programming how long it takes to do art or design it takes time to do this and it's not something that's just like attacked on towards the end in my opinion all right so uh many times people want to know shortcuts they're like my game is going to come out in a month what do i do and unfortunately uh you gotta have to put in the work and earlier the better in my opinion

uh so basically not one thing is going to make everyone hear about your game and it's like the myth of overnight success so what i mean by this is that you may hear about something that's coming out right now and you're just like wow this you know i i love this this is so great and you have not seen the years that it took to put together whatever it is that you're looking at that you really like so if you think that just like one facebook post is going to do it or one streamer is going to play it or like just one pr email it's usually not enough you usually don't see all of the the work that marketing uh marketers have to do to get eyeballs on whatever it is you're doing so try um to do what you can alright so now i'm gonna go over a little bit about like what is the market like where do we get this term like marketing coming from well it's how the public sees your project uh product objectively it gives an honest indicator of how well your

game is going to sell so the reason why i'm bringing this up is uh because a lot of developers think that the marketing is like shrouded in mystery there's a fog here like they don't understand it and they don't get it and they don't even know where to begin with with the idea of it they just know that they they want you know people to play their game they want people to like him but how do you do that so it's by putting this perspective of the fact that they're gonna see your product for for what it is and your friends and family love you very much but they're probably not going to be honest with you because they're when they see the game they're mostly seeing you in it right and they like you but and also like you playing your game yourself it's really hard to be objective unless you have like a lot of experience uh shipping games and you can kind of get what the market is a lot of times you're not going to be very objective to your own product so what i tell developers to do is if they want to see if they're like people are

interested in the game they have to to show it and i don't just mean like a local game dev group i'm talking about with social media and if people are not engaging with their social media just like a couple of likes um then that is probably being a good indicator whether it's there but sometimes sometimes uh your game is wonderful like your game is good and you just have to make uh another context to it so like maybe you can improve the arts or maybe you could explain it a little bit better make it a little bit less confusing um or maybe like you could just like dedicate your twitter to just the game itself and not have like other things that are cluttering up that might confuse people as to like what your account is about so that is just an example uh but basically the market doesn't lie to you if it if it wants your game it will tell you just what i'm gonna say right here all right so um i believe that there's a lot of like really good accounts out there that are like they have good games but they're they're just not getting that traction and i think

it's because they do the same things over and over again and they're not just they're just not putting enough variety of whatever it is they're showing to people and people get bored with that after a while like maybe they like in the beginning but they don't want to see the same thing over and over again so definitely want to try to show different aspects of the game to see what people like about them is it your characters is it your environment is it uh maybe even your voice actor or how you do that and um believe me people will definitely let you know when that happens and in fact you can use that uh for later on with the marketing because you can kind of like have a temperature of what people are talking about uh for example real quick uh the guy who made a short hike he noticed that people really liked the gif of the character jumping off the cliff and like kind of gliding away and so when he made this trailer that was the very first thing that you saw in that trailer and i thought that was really interesting because you only have a few seconds to

engage with people uh on trailers or on social media so you want to kind of get the quickest reaction that you can that should always be your goal all right so knowing how to use a tool is not the same as mastery knowing how to use social media is not the same as creating engagement so i know this is kind of the same thing repeated but basically what i'm saying here is that i think uh technology now is amazing and it's meant to be it's designed to be user friendly and so anyone can probably learn how to use any of these platforms really quickly the problem comes with people like not understanding how to use these products platforms to sell their games so i wouldn't yeah just because somebody tells you like i know how to post on twitter that doesn't mean that they know how to create uh i guess engagement like getting people to care about whatever it is that you're selling and that is incredibly important

so make sure that when you are want to hire somebody like a peer company or whatever that they they don't just tell you that they're posting and they can do analytics and and things like that that you actually see that they have a track record of having people actually care about what it is that you're doing and and they know how they can take whatever it is that you're doing like your game and and say it in a way that gets people interested all right so next up we have brown brand accounts should have a focus so there i just want to pause real quick and just say that brand accounts are very different than personal branding so i like companies are different than personal so your personal brand is like you your personality so if you like like cars or certain movies or um like any interest really like that is that's who you are and that's your personality and that's what you're saying to the world that is very different than a company brand because a company brand you're like an umbrella

for like all all those people that are represented there so you have to be a little bit more careful with like how you say things and i feel like a lot of times people are actually a little bit too careful with what they're saying and they end up making accounts that are just like really stiff and robotic because uh they don't know how to like become relatable and show through with their personality um uh really quick so you want to post video screenshots and gifs of the game as often as you can i cannot tell you how many times i look into an account of a game and i don't see the game like i'll see a key art i'll see a screenshot of a character but that doesn't tell me what the game actually is like i want to know who is this person what are they doing in this world what is going on here uh like as quickly as possible i need to kind of get this information so if you cannot say that and uh like consistently in a few tweets people are going to go to your account and like that's the first impression impression that you're giving them is that you you don't know

how to show that so i put below this fan art cosplay tattoos merch what this really means is whatever it is that your whatever it is how your customers or your players your audience like how are they engaging with whatever it is you're doing and i know that doesn't work for everybody because sometimes a games don't have things like this and i'll i'll go over that a little bit later about characters but uh you basically want to show if you're if you people care about your game and they're talking about your game you want to showcase that to other people uh next up we have updates and studio news and then reviews articles clips of let's play so this is just basically examples of what you can do that it you know and i have like a whole like long list of different like i break these into like smaller categories of like what exactly i want to post onto an account depending on what the game is but as long as you kind of keep it somewhat variety but also focus on

whatever like messages about your game yes uh also i put below here culture and trends you want to pay attention to them you don't want to pretend like you're an island on this huge sea that is you know the internet and if you seem like you are you know someone have a personality or relatable and you're like you know what's going on with it people react to that better for example when doom and animal crossing was kind of come out on the same day people loved this crossover of uh you know the two like genres kind of coming together and there was a lot of memes about isabel and the doom guy and and yeah that was so the fact that both of the brand social media accounts talked about this was amazing and the internet loved it and i got a lot of reactions a lot of engagements and so if you're making a game about like dinosaurs and then a dinosaur movie is going to come out you should definitely talk about that because that's on brand um even though it's slightly

not what you're doing like people will appreciate that you're paying attention uh next up i say talk to your audience and so we've we've all heard this before at some point which is that you shouldn't try to appeal to everybody and that's definitely true for so like i know everyone wants everyone's money right they want everyone to buy their game but obviously that doesn't happen you need to have your super fan so i in my head i picture it like this as a metaphor that you have like a bonsai tree and with this like bonsai tree you want to cut off the things that don't matter uh so if you post something and nobody cares about it i'm like okay that didn't work what will work you know what will your audience care about and you keep growing it and trying different things until you find that thing and then you can like roll with it you can um how do i explain this momentum you gain momentum when when you find something that you're is both like talking about your game and people what they like about your game so it's like the idea of trying to

create your your super fans or the people that will tell other people about it instead of just trying to talk to everybody so if your game is about like cyberpunk then you think about that culture that is around that and uh what they would you know but if you are if your game is about cyberpunk but then you're talking about like i don't know flowers or something like that that doesn't necessarily go in together so make sure that you are talking to the people that you want to talk to um be very careful though like i've talked about a little bit about how when you're doing a brand uh we all know that like a lot of these fast food restaurants like wendy's and stuff like that they've started doing that and they create a lot of engagement with having a personality but you can take it too far as well so like either you're usually pretty robotic and stiff and you're just like announcements after announcements after announcements and then your audience kind of gets like you know less interested because you're just doing the same thing and then you have over here which is you're too

quirky and too like you act like an actual person instead of a company that's trying to sell something and then people feel like that's disingenuous and they don't like that so it takes it takes a skill and it takes time to kind of figure out that balance all right so i want to give you some choices right here uh when it comes to marketing the first one is learn it yourself but you all know that time is money but what you can do you can create systems and automation so that it makes it easier for yourself like you create a formula of what you can do to to market your game um but also time is money so it takes time to create these systems i wouldn't just yeah i wouldn't just say i'm just going to do a bunch of busy work and just post a bunch of times because you like are not really paying attention to what you're doing so i would actually learn about marketing all right second of all is hiring a community manager so

i you know going back and forth with this you shouldn't just hire somebody because they know social media and then just kind of leave them alone because i've had this a lot with clients where they're just like i don't know about social media i don't know about community that's what you're going to do and then they they kind of like walk away but like when you have when you're a community manager you need to know what's going on with the game or the studio or the company you need to know like what you're going to talk about like how to create content and stuff like that and so if you're not including them on what you're doing it's a little bit harder also you should learn you should learn a little bit marketing for yourself so you know how to communicate with your community manager of whatever vision that you have and you should have a vision and you should have a goal is it to sell the game is it to get followers is it for discord is it to to get people to come to your booth at an event like have a goal and share that with your community manager and then maybe come up with a strategy that you can do don't just like say market my game and just kind of push them off to

do that um it's definitely more collaborative than you would think all right another thing you can do is outsource to another company uh so there's amazing companies like aval pr that can do that but unfortunately not every pr company is the same because what works for maybe another studio may not work for yours and so i would definitely ask around and say like hey your game is similar to mine use that pr company what did they do for you did you like what they do and definitely do your research before you do that because when you're outsourcing they're not in-house and so they don't maybe quite understand what it is that you're trying to do um and i mean they'll do the best that they can but sometimes it's a little bit harder if you know they're doing it from the outside but it's your choice the option is there uh next up i want to say you can get a short time consultant to make you a guide so this is something um i mean i've done all of these before but uh this is what i've done a lot as a consultant is people like this is how it works i'll do meeting with people and

then i have them tell me what their game is about and then i have to ask them a ton of questions and basically the questions are there to kind of give them a framework of how the public will see their game and then after that i tell them like basically critiquing them of like what was confusing like what didn't work or what could work and things of like what i would do so a a consultant can give you like a guide or a plan or create that system or automation and then you do it yourself so you you have several different options uh all right so next up when do you start marketing i get this a lot and obviously there's no one size fit all for this just like everything else here again marketing is very experimentational you have to feel it it's intuitive and it takes time and experience to get to that intuition but to answer the question when you start marketing for me it should be the

idea and i know that sounds crazy because you're just like star i don't like how do i post on social media about my game i don't have a prototype or anything yet well marketing is not just posting on social media or media or like getting a discord or going to an event marketing is again that mindset it's that hat and so when you have a game idea and i know a lot of developers have many game ideas think about the game idea and how other people are going to see it so it's not just uh like this is the game i want to make sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't it should be like this is the game i'm going to make and i believe that people are going to find this interesting because of this which brings me to what is the hook and we all know when we're watching a movie trailer like they have to have that hook in there of like what's going to get people into the theater and the same thing goes for game development and there might be different answers to this out there but this is how i define it which is something

familiar but with a twist and like this is like the quickest way i can get into people's heads of like you need a hook and and this is what the hook should be now again like this is not all the time because some games are like really out there and weird and not familiar but still might do well like the truly innovative games but most games are you know just the same thing we've seen before but a slightly different i know ryan clark who like from crypto necrodancer brace yourself folks has said before it's uh like you're going to two restaurants and one restaurant is like a generic restaurant that you've been to uh and there's a lot of restaurants like it and then there's this other restaurant that sells really weird food and you don't know what you're going to get from it well you want to kind of combine these two things all right next up is practical ideas for you well i'm going to a little drink water here's some practical ideas for you first up is again have systems create

automation don't just wake up every day and be like huh what am i what am i going to post today because then that that's what starts to make it stressful for you is that you have to think of these new things every day i do something called a content bucket uh for something that i call maintenance mode again like a lot of companies call these different things but this is just like how i do it and like maybe the company you've worked for might have call in it something different uh but basically what it is is i take like two or three days and all i focus on is the whole month of like what i'm going to talk about in social media and then you can schedule out ahead of time and and obviously like maybe get some approval from people to make sure that it's okay before you send it out um and i call it maintenance mode because a lot of there's some studios out there that like they know they're making games and people are excited about it but then they get so wrapped up in development that it might be like four months before

they are you know say anything on social media and people are like hello like where's the developers i haven't said anything there's no updates on steam forums like what's going on here and so maintenance mode is basically what i do is i do things ahead of time so i don't have to think about it and then i can like put my focus into other things um and then that way they know that you know that the company's still alive you're still doing things they're still listening to their audience uh but you can also also focus your attention on other things because you can't do everything in one day so yeah definitely definitely want to do automation make it easier for yourself all right and the next thing is the opposite of maintenance mode which is the big pushes so are you about to do an event um about to do like a big pr update about to port your game to another system and announce that you know whatever your big pushes are you should think them through so sometimes people are like oh no like we're about to like put our game on switch today we better tweet about it um

it you know i i would take the time and really think about how like what can i tweet that's going to make the most people want to retweet it like what about this is the most exciting for it besides the fact that it's going to be on switch right so i would think like think it through and i would try to do ahead of time like on on a if you're looking at your pipeline and your schedule of like when things are going to come out uh try to get those marketing beats as much as you can okay below that is don't get caught up in busy work this is super easy to do and this happens a lot with us particularly cm's that um get really into a routine and they just kind of do the same thing over and over again i've told before that that becomes really monotonous to your audience and um it gets boring for the whoever the person is doing it as well and it also like the goal should be to to get more engagement and to grow your audience get more followers that sort of thing um that also goes into quality over quantity so back in the day uh there

wasn't as many people on social media and so posting a lot people would engage with you more just because you posted a lot because you had things to say but these days i believe this is like to me the new trend that's happening is that developers should like not tweet every single day but they should be like have the quality tweets that they know is going to get more engagement than just than just tweeting just to tweet right um i think sometimes that's okay if you uh you're in the middle of a development cycle and you're doing something really tricky you don't have anything much to talk about you can do some of those like low ball tweets but in general i would focus my energy and my time onto things that people i know people are going to really like all right so really quick i want to talk about the fact that you need to be flexible so again earlier if you just do the same things over uh it gets boring for both sides and so how do you get this flexible mindset how do you become experimental uh always be researching

because first of all the industry is always changing and how people do things five years ago uh may not be the same way as they do them now so be paying attention to what other people are doing to this industry and what's interesting and what's working for them and also i don't just look at the game industry i look at the fashion industry i look at tech i look at uh beauty i look at maybe yeah did i already say fitness you know whatever whatever is out there cooking content creators like i just want to know what are the trends what's going on what is the culture saying and how does that relate to whatever it is i'm doing and if i can find some correlation there um i will do that and again see if people respond to it and again if you make a tweet and it doesn't has little response people don't like it or people actively don't you know are not then just delete it like it's just a tweet it's okay you know it's fine um if you don't like your

trailer redo your trailer right all right size uh i think examples are really good i wish i could like show you the individual accounts and what i like about each one of these but really quick pokemon animal crossing rgg studio who does the yakuza games kit fox frog detective new blood no more robots wholesome games and adult swim games i know that's a lot uh so that's good that means like a lot of people are doing amazing content out there that you can take from and these are what i like like it may not necessarily but what you like so when i talk to again a lot of developers um i ask them okay so you want me to do content for you you tell me what companies like you really like that they're doing just because and a lot of times they're like i don't know like i just follow my friends on social media uh so again they're not really having like an objective perspective of just like the content of what companies are doing they're like looking at the games and like steam and sales and stuff like

that which is fine um but i kind of give them a few examples of what i like and then i say is this something you're interested in or is there another angle that you want to put on it again it's like it's getting that mindset it's getting that framework for your game and that context because with development you have to be really close to what it is you're making in order to do problem solving and then for marketing you have to like kind of be far away from it and look at it from an outsider's perspective looking in okay so what do i like about these accounts well um i feel like there's two ways to do content creation one is um education which is like you're telling people things so i feel like no more robots what mike rose does is fantastic he's telling you things about sales and the things he's tried what hasn't worked uh that sort of thing and education is really valuable so people will follow you for that because you're giving them value the second one is entertainment and so i think instead of just posting announcements all the time you should be telling a sorority story you should be

telling a narrative so i for example animal crossing they have tom nook the character tom nook is talking on that account and so it feels like the character is talking to you um for pokemon they just showed a different pokemon and their and they basically show off the personalities of them and for igg studio what they do is that they kind of have like inside jokes so if you don't play the games you may not know these characters or why they're doing the things they do but for their core audience that knows these games and loves these games they will create uh you know engagement with it and that makes other people curious about it so again you're not trying to get everybody out there but you're trying to get the few people that really like your game like understand how they're thinking and talk to them and respect them all right so i have two takeaways that i wish you got for my talk uh hopefully uh the first one is marketing is integral part of success for games now so again a few years ago marketing could

have been just an add-on towards the end of a development cycle you just had like an article and a newspaper you just showed your game at an e3 you know a trailer uh but with the over saturation the things are now it's becoming more and more part of the development process uh number two not just any game will be successful have a strategy again when i think of marketing i start with the idea of it like i need that that pitch that concept needs to be really strong uh for for people to care about it so uh yeah don't just take any idea and think it's gonna come a huge success all right that's me i'm startlights guys thank you so much this is who i am in all the social medias yay all right well thank you star uh for for for doing that so far and uh it's one of the i feel one of the uh biggest misconceptions with marketing as you kind of stated that

game developers have always used that as like a last resource and in a lot of situations a bit too late and and it wasn't until recently where i i finally kind of got away from game development and started to kind of dive into kind of telling people about what i do where i realize holy crap this is a whole different world uh aside from making games you pretty much have to kind of treat marketing as if you're developing again you're developing a product there's an audience at the end of it uh at that and you know whatever you tweet about whatever you promote is it interesting is it something that people not just about the product that you're promoting but like what you're saying it does it command an audience so i i definitely want to hear a little bit uh on is this something that that you went through uh like a formal education or is it more

like surveying the industry i mean how did you come about to developing these skill sets uh where for me it sounds like it makes sense to you but for a loss a lot of us other people like game developers you know it's still very new grounds i'm so glad you asked that i have a lot of a lot of thoughts about it uh well so i'm from ohio which is kind of like i i talk to other people in other countries and i feel a kinship to them because when you're not on the you know the west coast a lot of times you feel isolated from everyone else and you're just like i don't know what to do but i knew that i wanted to be a community leader as soon as i graduated from college as soon as i joined my first game studio i wanted to run a community because i wanted to help other game developers and as i was doing it like there are so many programmers a couple sprinklings of artists out there but uh there was absolutely nobody that was marketing so like this community had all of these games and nobody knew how to sell the games and i was like um this is

really interesting like i actually started off in industry as a 3d environmental artist and i totally thought that i was going to be an artist and i didn't know i was going to go into marketing but i took it as a challenge and then as i did it like i realized like whoa like i really really like this because i thought of it as a game in itself like with social media and um i will tell you that when when i talk to other community people because i have a discord uh full of people like me that do marketing and we share ideas and thoughts and tricks and trips to uh tricks and tips yes and basically what they tell me is a lot of times they did marketing and community stuff but when they were hired they didn't have any gaming experience and it's kind of seen as an entry-level position however you do need to have some experience and skills of doing this and companies just don't know enough about marketing in order to vet people who are are going to be effective to whatever game that they have and so like how i learned how to do it uh just like a lot of these other people had did it

was just like pure force like just like brute force researching studying um i watched a lot of like youtubers things like gary vaynerchuk and even like tony robbins and people that were not in the game industry because it nobody was going to let me go into their company when i had no experience and like teach me everything and so i just had to do it myself and the benefit of this by not just doing whatever every other studio did is that like my marketing became uh more interesting unique because i was coming at it from a different perspective than what i saw other people do i think every developer does uh like every difference like like exactly i was about to say that yeah like every developer very very much like in the game industry we're we're at least the best one the ones that that you don't want to mess

with are the ones that are self-taught and are driven and are not being told what to do because they they just genuinely are very passionate about it and uh even though there is formal education to go through marketing and there are some relative things that you can carry over i do feel like the industry our game industry is very unique and there's a very uh there's a very s there's a very specific language to kind of talk to gamers and game developers where we tune in and listen because we kind of tend to move away from something that sounds too corporate or looks too corporate and we just have this this this this certain a detachment when it automatically sounds that way so i think your messaging has been really great in in the way you you kind of been expressing how you came about is very relevant to any game developer out there it's like oh man all right so you know let's just bust out the books let's do some research let's treat this as a discipline as a

skill and with respect as something that will carry forward for my future essentially if there's anything that i want to do to brand myself so i'm going to hit the questions right now and i want to remind everyone you know we do have a discord channel open but within the social chat channels go ahead and ask them we do have a moderator in there to kind of pull these questions in so this first one is from russell campbell uh the question is perhaps are there ways to appease the algorithm to bring adjacent audiences into your target audience um okay so i feel like there's this approach here to marketing that i understand where it comes from that um like you want to use numbers and that sort of thing to to figure out where people are going to go but unfortunately that only takes you so far like because and the reason why is because these social media platforms are always changing and discord is changing and and

people and their trends and culture always changing so numbers and things that might work like before may not work for even like two months you know like just like with what happened with the virus you know people thought they were going to go to events this year and then all of a sudden we're doing more online conferences and so things change so i would not depend on algorithms i would depend on my intuition and i would be on the lookout to see like what are what is some what are people that are doing something similar to me and how are they doing it and how can i if i was to do what they're doing what would i do better so you need to come of it as a human perspective and you need to come up it of like would i care about this and i know that can be that's hard to do but that is a muscle that you can train yourself and like all the studios that i i hope you people screenshot at that those other studios and you check them out and you can kind of see what i'm talking about yeah i mean uh that's an actually perfect segue so we are collecting all the slides from all our presenters that

will be uploaded on the website so shortly after this conference uh after three days because i'll be online the whole time i will upload those and you guys can get the information so this is uh a question from i force uh if i'm a new game dev should i start to promote myself as an individual until i start promoting a game in a brand fashion or is that not necessary oh dude i definitely say uh personal branding and this this goes to everyone here okay so i'm not just talking about games here a lot of things i'm talking about because you know i'm a twitch streamer i i was like i've been streaming for five years and i'm a partner and like i did that on purpose to see what is it like for a content creator and so i wanted to get into the mind set of like how they think and and what they want uh so that i can as a game developer can better like give them that and so i definitely think you should do personal branding here's another reason why you should do personal branding is because a lot of these companies

don't care about you like they're not going to help you propel your career right and so if you just do work for them you're giving them your time and your energy and you're creating their money but that doesn't mean that they're going to take care of you and your career so definitely have a personal brand um and keep it focused just like i would do a company brand and uh i rely on that over and over again because like when i whenever i need a new job or i'm looking for something or i want people to care about it i have years of me building up relationships with people that where people actually care about me because they know what i'm doing that makes sense no matter what i'm doing they're going to care about it yeah definitely uh and i totally get that too i think people tend to uh i think the opposite problem is happening right now where people market too late so i feel like just getting the practice in learning who's your audience what works what doesn't work while you have a smaller pool of people where

you're okay to messing up and having blunders it actually works for you and you kind of in my opinion it kind of builds up in a natural way so this uh this question is from for sebastian uh what's the best social media to promote the games and two questions what kind of advice we could get for the automation process of sharing content about our game all right i'm gonna answer the the first question uh definitely twitter right now i'm not gonna say it will be forever but that's where a lot of journalists are on and you want journalists pr people to look at your game uh um for for gamedev you both have texts and visuals it's really hard to sell games on instagram because it's really they they need a particular like square format when it comes to video on instagram and it's harder to upload because you have to do it through a phone you can't upload on a desktop and so when it comes to game development that doesn't work as well with facebook um it's better for like if you want uh

older audiences or like people outside of america because more of those kind of people use facebook and so a lot of times it depends on where your audience is if you're if your game is for kids uh tick tock tick tock you can grow really fast really quickly on tick tock right now and it's not going to be like that forever and i know it's kind of scary because it's a new medium but if you're if i'm going to have a game for kids that is where i would go i would just sit down and figure it out uh so what was the second part of that question second question is what kind of advice we could get for the automation process of sharing content about our game i don't know if i understand that what kind of advice yeah i guess they're trying to look for a way where they're not constantly waiting to tweet uh whenever they have a thought like whatever ways that they can get rid uh i think in a way to kind of

um uh to do the process in the morning and just let let it kind of be the week's worth of social tweets or whatever i think that's where they're what they're asking yeah okay yeah um so what happens nope i think we lost connection all right one sec as she uh reconnect with us everybody so keep sending those uh those questions and uh uh we will get back to that as soon as that happens let me kind of make sure that she's coming in so this is how you know that we are live because problems do tend to happen

all right well keep those questions going i'm gonna buy some time i mean i believe star is gonna reconnect as soon as i get the connection going i'm gonna have you guys come and talk hopefully you guys are enjoying the time uh it's definitely getting hot in the office i didn't anticipate the realities of uh i'm doing this for like four hours straight wearing a jacket but that's what i do for you guys dedicating my soul and physical well-being and turning my motel room into a sauna at this point i have like 10 computers going uh hopefully you guys are enjoying it uh i guess this is a good reminder while we are waiting for her to reconnect that we do have a discord channel going so if you want to jump in there go to gdux.me join the discord this is a way to not only talk to other people permanently that are watching

and enjoying blue champs content like g ducks but a way for you to kind of interact with their speakers all our speakers are in there right now since we have so many social live streaming channels going at once it's uh it can be quite daunting for our uh presenters to to be in all of them so i believe star you're back yes i hear you my computer crashed because your knowledge was still incapacitated your computer yeah no worries i bought some time i got the blue screen of death oh my that's scary no worries so uh now that i have you back uh i think i'm gonna resume a couple of questions here uh uh unless you you can remember what we kind of left off and did you finish your thought on that okay i was gonna say i'll just i'll just make it super quick okay so basically um it's like training your brain of like

what tweets work well and so after a while you're like okay if i say things in a particular like direct way um also like i just wanna say real quick hashtags don't work please like it shows that you don't have confidence if you use the hashtags like you want to take online um i'll be right back when you're doing an event i think like hashtag like gdx.me i think that's okay because you want you're like hey people use the hashtag so i can see the tweets right it kind of unifies the tweets but if you're trying to get people's attention with it that doesn't work so yeah but on instagram and like that works hashtags works on instagram so again it depends on the platform but on twitter yeah you also want to be short and sweet like you don't want to waste people's times and so the more direct you are like the quicker you can say something for example the marketing brands of like mac mcintosh said think differently milk had like the got milk nike had just do it you know like having these like taglines these like really quick like you get the idea of the company really

quickly like soon i'm sorry i know that makes sense um yeah um if you have an idea for a tweet write it down like right away and try to have a collection of them um like i have like a hundred different ideas i do for content whenever i'm struggling for something i go back to my own resource that i've created and i'm like oh yeah i can do something like this okay cool and then i put it through all right so i have another question from ross fifield have you got an advice for a studio who may have finished alpha on the verge of wanting to give or outsell early access keys and want to go for beta release how would you build that audience and reach prior to getting to finishing the alpha so getting some noise during alpha um i would create art assets as soon as possible like i like that's why having like a vertical slice is super like i wouldn't say super important not everyone needs a vertical slice but creating art assets

creating key art creating like and things that you can reuse over and over again um but also have a strong tagline so there's this game called uh this war is mine i think that's the name of the game and their tagline for the game because it was a really hard game to sell it visually wasn't it was like a dollhouse game like you you could see inside like a cut view so it wasn't like a dynamic uh like breath of the wild kind of visual game and so what they did is the tagline was in war not everyone is a soldier and that right there tells you the game it tells you the narrative like you know what it's about so the fact that like they were focusing on this idea that um about the the civilians of war um they could do that so again it's about being a human understanding context uh knowing what appeals to people and if you don't know then try it online like do because a lot of uh publishers will be like hey guys you know we're looking for our next game you know give us your pitches and so i see

like hundreds of developers will like to raw fury or devolver will show them the game and if nobody's liking your game or interested in it or don't want to hear more about it like try to figure out why and also i want to say you know the idea of like fail faster yeah that should be for making your game too like not every game idea is going to be successful so if nobody if you're putting work into it and nobody's caring about it i would just like x-nay on that game and start all over again with another game because we all have we all have like new ideas right we all have different games um that doesn't go for everyone but so this uh this is a question from feinstein i recognize the name he's actually one of our presenters for day three ben uh so fine spline i don't know if you wanted me out him it's too late uh have you ever experienced an ad that you thought would tank but it ended up doing really well oh

i don't know if anything i've done has actually tanked um i think one time i tried to do a poll about like where people got their indie games and a particular set of uh people like an eastern european thought it was too american-centric and were complaining about it being too american-centric but a lot of times like um i started off small and nobody cared about it so i'll get i'll go i'll go i'll just tell a story so i'm an artist and i was struggling with art like nobody cared about my art it wasn't good because i was always pushing myself and always like putting it to the limit um so one day i couldn't sleep and i was like i just want to do art for fun and i'm just going to do something really quick and it's going to be really simple i'm not going to think about it and i posted that online and that did super well and i was like oh oh i was putting way too much effort into this like i need to just like take a step back and make it more simple uh and people react to that better

like you don't want to like act like you're trying too hard and that's what i was trying to do with art so i wouldn't say i had anything tanked now i've had people not like things but a lot of times that's out of your control you know like for example um they don't like there's a bug in the game and they're complaining about a bug in the game and you're here posting about uh something else and like they just want to complain about that like i've gotten that a lot definitely so this is a a question and again to remind everybody feel free to throw those questions in there this is boan if a strategy isn't working for at first how long should i stick with it before trying something different that is where intuition comes in um i'd say if you make about 10 tweets in a few weeks and nobody's saying anything that's when you need to reevaluate again how you're explaining their game how you're showing your game or if the

game itself is even something that people want and it's good to try yeah again fail faster try it again um yeah and the more things you do the more you learn as like you know there's that story about angry birds how they made like 50 failed games right before they made angry birds and angry birds was obviously a shock to them and everyone else but uh that's that's how it it does sometimes um and also some games require like some people want to make like realistic aaa games and that also takes a long time and so in those situations if you're trying to push a games like graphics to the limit i would wait to do marketing until it gets to that that time uh even if it's like closer to the end of development and then show that it's a lot of smoke and mirrors we're like magicians yeah i mean it's pretty relevant to to again like the similarities i mean we

are within the same industry but anything that's outside my cubicle anybody i always relate them to like too far out of reach in marketing department have been something that you know i never really mingled with and never really learned from you know i never really talked to on a day-to-day basis even being a lead at a major studio um you know interaction is very very minor it's like can you provide this to do this we're not sitting down and they're not walking us through what they're planning to do with this piece of artwork right they're just kind of i really i really hate that too because i feel like a lot of companies are just like you community person you're off in that corner and you can't sit with us cool kids you know we're developers and i've gotten this so many times and i'm like no i need to know what you're doing you need to know what i'm doing because we're collaborating here with aaa company obviously that's not necessary you have uh leads but uh honestly every developer should learn a little bit about marketing so that they

know what the goals should be right yeah i totally agree i wish i had um paid more attention to the company meetings when they had the slide decks and explaining with numbers uh i genuinely just never really paid attention until it was too late where it felt like finally the knowledge started creeping back when i was applying it um to my own own work and i feel like honestly a huge upgrade has been just talking to you for the last couple months finally you know paying attention to it so definitely hit up star and and and hit it up on the twitter to kind of seek advice because your advice really woke me up in a way where i was like oh okay finally all right i gotta roll up my sleeve and do some stuff because you know what you say is it makes a lot of sense but it's just one of those things where i got to pay attention right i think a lot of that is just people need need to

pay attention and treat it just like anything else especially like their product exactly so this is the question from go ahead oh god i was gonna say really quick this is why it's not a mystery like developers act like this is such an ambiguous thing that they they can't possibly figure out it's like that fog in dark souls like you have to get through this wall to see what's going on here yeah uh but in reality it's actually straightforward and logical and if you understand humans and you understand like how you like things you probably can understand why somebody else likes something okay that's all right well i have uh one last question here and uh this is from nightwolf for your games media can you post your own let's play along with others or would it be better to have a secondary account for let's play to try the distance youtuber from the indie company um i would have to see what you're saying but i generally like to put things as together as much as possible some people

like to create different discords for every single one of their games or different accounts for all the games that they have and i like to make things easier for myself so sometimes it depends on like what that is but um yeah if you're if you're trying to build a personal brand and a game account at the same time just be very careful of like what you're doing and uh make sure that your game has something to do with the let's plays that you're you're doing um i would say like new blood is a good example that studio because they they're really good at showcasing their games but also how their personality reflects how their games are so um definitely would want to probably check them out and see how they do it yeah it's an actual problem that i've been struggling myself it's like i do like the idea in uh consolidating my social media efforts because it is with every new account a whole you're taking on a new kid right and you gotta

put a lot of care in it to kind of see the fruits of that labor and it can be very exhausting managing like two or three or five twitter accounts and multiple discord channels and facebook channels uh i mean like you mentioned before it becomes a full-time thing and uh needs that attention to to kind of build a community in each so uh yeah i mean that that be pretty much sums it up star i want to thank you again for for coming on and giving us your knowledge and and spreading the love of marketing because it is something that i feel finally uh that people are finally appreciating especially i think a lot of it has to do with um there there have been more and more branded uh at least self-branded uh developers out there uh coming out to kind of seek uh how to promote themselves so at the same time i feel like just like myself

there's a tension finally given uh to a very beneficial aspect of game development which is telling people about your game who would have thought it's not yet it's not evil yeah it's not evil at all yeah thank you so much i appreciate you having me and giving me the chance to talk about this and i hope the rest of it goes fantastic well thank you so much bye everybody well i'm still on bye star what are you doing i don't want to log out oh my god all right all right everybody so uh as we are prepping for the next

set of speakers i i need to take a break man uh so uh as you guys are drinking water i have my water right so you don't know what's real what's not real in my my set here i mean everything's real but um it's not quite unreal engine five but it looks pretty good in my opinion uh so while we uh resume in about five minutes uh i'm gonna go on a break but we're gonna have a next set of speakers and i'll do the introduction and everything so just give me a couple minutes i need that plug plug in a couple of my hardware it's running out of battery so i'll be right back everybody don't go anywhere and enjoy some lovely music i guess

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so welcome from wherever you are streaming from we're about to uh go live with the team at sky the children of light but before we go on to that i just wanted to remind everybody that uh we do have a discord channel up and running so if you want to find the link go over to the website g dex dot me feel free to drop in to conversate with other viewers or even interact with the presenter themselves they are all in there sharing their screen in addition if you'd like to be part of the gdux history and be part of the show i will be opening up the caller hotline in between presenters when we find the opportune time to talk to you directly i want to kind of give you your take of where you're joining us from and how are things and uh i do have my little birds out there in the social channels to kind of get your

questions in for all our presenters today throughout the three day conference to ask them directly it will be filtering through me because i just don't trust you guys right another way to help spread the love and stay engaged is to tweet at gducks.me and at bluechamps i spent pretty much my whole kids college education to buy these one of the kind desk plates so please please please justify it by tweeting at me i will read them it's what i live for now to read your tweets also as part of the fun i want to mention the good folks at masterpiece vr they are a 3d application software centered around using vr technology to make game development easier and faster they happen to be our sponsor for this year's gdex event for the next three days we'll be giving away 10 free licenses year-long indie licenses for masterpiece vr so all you have to do is go to gducks.mediux.me to sign up to the mailing list and then

tweet at gducks.me and at masterpiece vr on how you are enjoying the show so the instructions are pretty simple however feel free to go to gdx i mean to read them over if i'm talking too fast and i'm throwing too much information right the history so that pretty much sums it up all right um before we go on and talk to the team at sky uh there's a segment that i want to introduce a clip so the history of game companies have been mostly about garnering up uh or gathering up major hubs like santa monica san francisco austin texas seattle washington these are major cities hubs that encourage us developers to commute to and from for hours to get to work and back from work in most cases the most coveted jobs require you to move across the country uprooting your life and saying goodbye to all your friends and family this was just the way things were and it was a blasphemy to mention the words of merely working from home so what if it sets a precedent brandon

uh if i let you work from home then joe over there would have to work from home and it'll be utter chaos right this was shortly before the pandemic as you can imagine so how would i peer pressure you if you're not in an office be able to exercise my power over you i mean these are the things that i think management have always been kind of echoing uh in the last few years so again since the pandemic has kind of hit everybody at once and kind of forced our way of thinking to change everybody is working from home it's a celebration but also the reality is dusting off old traditional ways of making games an industry had to force to adapt to this new method which required rebuilding the infrastructure and being in a new normal even though we're all having you know is this a real life is this fantasy i'm finally at home i'm with family and all this stuff it's super fun it did present a lot of issues since most studios aren't set up for this to suddenly handle this that's why

the perfect person to discuss this with is none other than the chief technology officer at poor force brad hart so as you guys get the setup feel free to enjoy this clip i think you were somewhat prophetic the last time you were on talking about having people source up to to perforce 10 000 companies is less impressive than having ten thousand people onto ontario's at the same time from the same company and that was almost a year ago yeah it was almost like crazy that you kind of foresee this type of near future issue for perforce that you've been warning everybody about and it is so much happening i mean the game industry themselves who are the hugest proponent for using perforce for over two decades now are are still having a lot of issues just

thinking at a different angle with everybody being remote uh i can't imagine other industries at this point who are 10 steps behind learning learning where they i mean how how's that uh handling all that type of uh questions coming in at this time yeah i mean it's interesting like you said it's kind of been you know scale across the globe and thinking about remote teams and all that has kind of always been in our wheelhouse so we we designed for it um part of the vision that i've had with the product is that that's only going to increase and it's going to get more difficult as you know 4k 8k all that you know comes to fruition it's not getting easier to work in these environments right with the size of the data so we're we're always trying to stay ahead of that curve and build that culture in our company to support those kinds of

environments and we have stuff in our road map that's going to just take this all to a new level from a scalability perspective for people working remotely working locally it really doesn't matter to us i want it to be ubiquitous where wherever somebody seed is in the globe they should experience the same uh performance and the same ability to do work uh regardless of where they're located so that's really driving the strategy on um you know a lot of our products so we're well suited for it fortunately so uh aside from that though like um as this was happening around the globe and finally hitting north america i think about a month delay uh you guys were already set up for this type of situation where you even with the preparedness were you ready for the whole world to kind of plug in and and kind of use the number one files file management system out there i mean i can't think of any other type of

um product out there that is allowing teams to kind of coordinate cooperate and work with each other at this scale uh literally every company in the world right now is is needing this type of file management system to talk to each other essentially aside from you know video chatting all the time yeah no i mean it's it's been it's been uh from an infrastructure perspective on our part we were ready because we saw sort of the it's kind of the mold that people were working in anyway so where you know you can use perf like the perforce products anywhere but where we really shy right where we really stand out is when there's some dimension of scale right whether it's you know lots of files huge files lots of products lots of product variants um or you know lots of people working on it or certainly teams distributed across the globe so we it's been always it's just been part of our messaging right and part of our uh enablement is to allow this sort

of global spread of data um and collaboration regardless so a team in the uk can just as easily contribute uh to the same set of code or assets that a team in california or boston is right and there's literally no difference there's no um restrictions uh that are slowing them down and so it's just it just really fit in line with how we work anyways and you know we've been seeing the trends as well where people are moving their uh infrastructure using our platform where traditionally um you know certainly across all across the board 10 years ago and earlier it was all local right so massive files large servers you know all the people are working locally and if per chance somebody was to do something remote it would have

to be through some sort of vpn kind of situation or you know remote access etc whereas we've seen some of our biggest customers are now looking to move and have already started moving a lot of their infrastructure of perforce into the cloud they've already started that and they're looking at and being very attentive to the different regions where they set up servers and with our products they're setting up the the different replication technologies we have again so that somebody on this side of the globe we don't want to have a positive experience and somebody on the other side of the globe to have a negative experience so with our products and our replication capabilities which we've been working with customers for years with they replicate that data all across the globe so it really doesn't matter where you are um we're going to give that same sort of local like experience whether it's local hardware or it's in the cloud it doesn't matter what sort of ubiquitous uh with us so that's kind of this situation is just sort of

right in our wheelhouse for what we're what we're doing anyways so we've been fortunate and it's and it's shown too the certainly with the gaming market with people at home and uh you know some people aren't working unfortunately um or even people that are working but can't go out to dinner or go bowling or go to the movies gaming their demand is up right i'd love to get your your take on that we're certainly seeing it i don't want personally you know me and my wife play like you know golf on the ps4 every night right after we put the kids to bed i didn't wasn't doing that before um and uh it's it's kind of a an interesting you know trend so our customers are they're they're under the wire they've got to deliver software and you know games because they're seeing a lot of pressure to to produce content for people uh what have you seen there no i i definitely agree i think at first when people were anticipating how many we're going to be at home and turning usually to to entertainment

to kind of ease the time suffering basically a lot of people were kind of guessing that they won't be spending as much money but more like going towards freeware or mobile games you know on a cheaper side but data are in saying that people are spending more money uh towards game industry stuff um which is great for us um for everybody essentially because there's only so many times i can lap in my backyard very limited space before i have to go back in the house and do something and so uh and not knowing how long this will be people are saying summer or even this is 2020 basically right a lot of people are adjusting to the new normal and everything uh something that you touched on a bit that has been somewhat controversial and i just want to know your opinion on it

since it kind of correlates you know to your company but also to the industry overall has been data cap right that is a very new concept in the last year and a half and more than ever thankfully recently a lot of the internet companies have relaxed their measures on data cap letting people actually spend more time uh how do you see that conversation returning after this kind of subset because that's a pretty insane thing to think that um we should limit any of that charging people yeah i think you know my my from a personal consumer perspective i mean i'm completely against that right uh and the data throttling and all that um and i think it would be a you know to your point it would be a horrible look in today's climate you know for them to be enforcing that and uh trying to garner more dollars out of the consumers um i think uh it's interesting to see how that will play out moving forward once we're kind of out of

the out of the fray here even if it's late this year or next year whatever when things are back to whatever normal we're going to have it's going to be interesting i think you know i i heard something like you know people people were kind of talking at the beginning of all this like you know you can learn a lot about your company or the people that you do business with the people the the restaurants the stores the you know your own employment you're gonna learn a lot about um companies and people based on how they treat people during the situation right um so i think the companies that are being you know empathetic towards uh you know the situation where people are home a lot of people aren't working um you know and then how they deal with it now and how they you know how quickly do they kind of go back to business as normal and try to try to try to squeeze right i mean everybody's in business to make money but

um you know it's going to be i think there's going to be a chance for some companies to sort of separate themselves based on their approach right um you're seeing it with the airline industries right like so uh you know i fly delta a lot and they kind of came out and basically just said your status whatever you had is good till 2021 right like don't worry about it uh marriott did the same thing so it's like some of these companies are they're thinking about what the daily person's thinking about um and what life's gonna be like when they go back to normal and um it's just it's just one example right so um you know i know uh my cell phone carrier they're increasing the amount of free hot spot usage you can you can use right now i think those are good things to do i mean a little bit of good grace and goodwill i think goes a long way um like to your point though i i don't have a forecast on what they're gonna do once once they can kind of start to leverage things again it's gonna be interesting

but i think it's an opportunity to sort of separate out a company's mindset and their persona you know once once things kind of loosen up a little bit so we're gonna change things up a bit keep you viewers out there on your toes the next set of presenters are from that game company team one second see whenever i do a switch like that it's because the teleprompter is not working that game company team my old boss cecil kim who is now the art director over there will be presenting with rika yoshino who is the environment artist and our team manager at the company they

will be playing a demo of their recently released and highly popular ios game sky the children of light while playing through it we will talk and provide insights behind the development of sky so what is sky well you have been living under rock for the past year sky is an open world game where you can fly explore and interact with other players they will showcase the beautiful world and fly mechanics in this part maybe music instruments that players can play with so i'm gonna pipe you guys in so now the audience can hear you guys how are you guys doing good good thank you all right sorry yeah i hear you guys just fine thank you for uh sitting there patiently okay so let's do a mic check real quick cesa how are you doing good very good all right rika thanks for having us do you hear me just fine uh yes i hear you all right

so we have skye going on but we're just gonna use our voice and cecil in this hour we'll be doing uh fully sounds because for some reason i think there was some audio mishap in the background um but we'll we'll survive through this so uh elise uh to kind of start things off i gave a slight introduction that doesn't give you guys enough justice um see so why don't we start with you kind of a little bit uh about your background and then we'll follow it up with uh rika oh yeah yeah i mean i've been working games since uh yeah since like 90s mid 90s so since then i've worked on final fantasy 9 and uh got over series as a concert artist lead concert artist and then visual development league after the studios mobile games pt games uh eight years and then you know the time was done so

close the business and then i joined the that game company so that was right after um skype was launched in uh ios and now it's available on android worldwide so again it's growing the uh current right now director at technical company nice to meet you yeah enrique let's go with you next yeah of course uh hi everyone um i'm rika and you know in comparison i am um a lot more greener than cecil is in this industry so um in 2016 i graduated from university of pennsylvania and since then i've worked on spy party with chris hecker and after that i had been with that game company for a little over two years um yeah nothing too fancy in purchase diesel but yeah i think our both our resumes are is

tame compared to cslo so uh i want to thank you guys for both coming on and so we're changing the pace you know we've been having a lot of uh speakers and so we we kind of designate this g-dux conference and as a as a bunch of presenters because this is a mixture of uh different amounts see how i'm going to be above the tv right now uh and and for the next hour we're going gonna look at sky and kind of think and talk through about the development stories behind it uh the challenges and uh and give insight you know this is if anything more of a dev stream than a game stream so uh this demo right here although we don't hear the sound i know sound is a huge component i guess we can talk about that a bit where uh for players out there i think i see actually cecil um playing with rika so this is a multiplayer type of game um this is probably a first for for the

studio right to having multiple players online uh persistently you guys mind talking about more more of that aspect um i mean i can tell you a little bit um go ahead rika oh uh journey has had multi yeah journey has had multiplayer but this is the first time where we're trying to use that like specific aspect about multiplayer and make that into game um so you know now we actually have as you can see on the screen we actually have interactions with other players you can actually unlock chat so um you know there's a small part of journey that what made it successful and we're gonna try we were trying to expand on that idea for skye what were the uh what was the biggest hurdle uh making that transition because a single player experience and you guys

are definitely really really excelling in that regard um i mean aside from the the actual development getting network programmers on board and and attacking attacking ios like this is the first iphone game as well right yeah um you know our company our studio has historically done consoles um but uh yeah the difficulty about making this game um compared to our previous titles is that because it involves other players um and you know uh more intimate intimate interactions with them so including chat when we open you know when we open that door it kind of you know puts us at a risk of how what am i so um how am i supposed to put this in words um

you know when as when there are a lot of players in chat and all that stuff involved i think the tendency for games is that um negative things tend to appear more and because our games is about you know altruism humanity people showing kindness to each other we have to be you know very clever about how we you know make this sandbox um and set it up set up an environment in a way that players can actually enjoy each other where you know players are encouraged to help someone else rather than be more you know self-centered or self you know driven by self-interest that was probably one of the biggest um design challenges that the team has faced i believe and cecil is this uh i mean you come from a bathroom from a lot of single-player well i mean

of course that section you have a little experience of actually diving into you know network and and actually multiple players i mean however that experience kind of brought over to the game company into this game yeah i mean we i i did experience the launching of a live live product and working on a schedule to release new content but this game is it's basically like this open open world theme park for the players to come in and just just like heavily focus on like social interaction um so the map is pretty big i mean the world is like made of like seven um world they're all like connected and to support that i think the engines that we use with our

proprietary engine that supports the uh terrain meshes and like all these cool effects and stuff is it takes years i mean i joined later in the production but i think it's a lot of it came from journey as well but i think that being able to do this in a mobile device is this is the really good example of a company's uh the philosophy like making a product is timeless meaning like it's it's visually like it's it's none of a kind and it's also the thing we have to push for players can do is is is pretty amazing and i'm sure like um uh our creative director general batean and designers and teams that wanted to test out like what what is gonna work for the community that we uh wanted to invite and play our games and finding out that core gameplay

which is in this case exploration is huge in our game and there's some sort of mystery and there's puzzles and like similar to journey on top of visual aesthetic and landscapes but we allow players to go everywhere anywhere and um basically they're communicating your emotions and you you see i mean that's my buddy uh phil i asked him to join um he played quite a bit he's like he looks pretty good with all the cosmetics and stuff so you don't have to talk to them you just have to unlock these emotes um and you can explore different areas that you haven't been to because of uh you you don't have a strong wind buff or something and your players can actually take you there so it's to make it short this is a

amazing like um open world theme park experience when there's no like intense comparative uh nature or um fighting or anything like that right so it's very uh psychologically very uh relaxing too so this really helps me like especially late at night soundtrack and everything it's just if you like flying i mean i think there's many games out there um did a flying mechanics great in the console side of things but it's amazing so so that's why i i love working on this game um currently we are um until like fifth season sixth season so we update season like every three months and just getting better and we putting out more because we we know the community likes now more communication happening between our

community and fans so i mean worldwide this game is both content-wise it's growing and then user base is like we're getting close to 20 million now so oh wow that is remarkable in terms of uh being uh i like a lot of time they don't know what's building because we we take very minimal approach of taking player like what to do right just like journey though but then people find that oh you know it's just it just feels good in the game and then once you develop a career character to unlock a lot of things then like wow is it that we are holding hands now oh the right guy is putting me on me i mean phil is not following me so how many players can we show you uh some flying yeah so how many players can be in a in a server so how many players at once can be with each other

um up to eight players eight players okay okay every level so yeah right now i'm hearing sound guys showing off am i hearing from your mic okay or maybe pulled it next to the mic actually it might be the cheapest way to get sound through here there we go i assure you guys to give this a download because it is free right now on ios right so the sound and and visual quality you know we're not doing it too much justice but again this is part of the fun of doing thing live stream but um sound as you guys mentioned before and music plays a huge part in this game can you explain in what way exactly well i mean we focus on emotional like art when you play the game

so the composer of vincent diamante a amazing composer um it's just like classical concert right and then the music itself is really focusing on like the pacing and like the feeling of discovery and things like that so it's it's actually if you have a speaker on it's one of the few games my wife don't don't get annoying to me it's kind of nice keep playing yeah it's not god of war so here like yeah well she actually liked the golden one too yeah oh okay okay out of our journey and the sky games she loves soundtrack [Music] um so right now zereka is taking me to under under uh ice this is actually on the under ice special area so because we want to focus on when you're like little kid right the things you

want to do is like you want to go to like like outside outside where like and then ride on this ice or jump up to the cliff that's kind of dangerous but don't do that so we really want people to yeah don't do that kids do stuff together and when you like strip all this uh noise of other multiplayer has like a lot of ui interactions and collecting and all that upgrade and stuff you really understand like the interaction is mostly about you're expressing your feeling right yeah so look at this like this i'm sorry maybe jumping back and forth but i have to like really talk about this the attack that we have one of the great things uh how we um create this uh simulator sky uh clouds these are like because we

we have this awesome tech especially like this clouds feels real right and then we do have uh some sort of like magical collisions where you you are allowed to fly everywhere but we have to still guide user to follow a certain direction and i mean it's hard to explain but uh just clouds are almost like touching you almost like like like guiding you it's not like hitting a wall that you cannot go through it's really feels good and when you kind of come around the clouds and so here is the one of the most the architecture um based area is almost like palace um here we we have uh we just went through the race you can actually start the race with other players too there's a starting point if you have eight of your friends that are in your group you can slide down and you can actually do this

so platforming and flying doors are always fun but we also really want to have a good multiplayer component such thing as like holding hands and piggyback uh carrying each other and like high five and hugging so yeah i mean a lot of new users there's there's a good amount of people that are not into imperative games right and but then they want to play multiplayer but there are not many multiplayers that only focusing on positive emotional notion of experience so we we're getting a lot of uh touching letters from the fans they're telling us like just because this game they're actually like

not not feeling good about towards society and their life and stuff [Music] so this guy you can see oh that's uh that's not my friend but reika this is a white guy's plan that's why rayquaza is singing a full uh texture body but i'm seeing as a great closet okay who's that yeah it's a friend it's a friend i made through a friend's friend um so the you know the magical moments kind of happen in this game where you know your network kind of um expands you kind of meet these new people where you've never met before but it's because it's your friend you behind them you help each other out um i don't know this person very very well but we have had a couple of interactions um i don't have i don't think i have chat unlocked with them yeah actually we

don't but um you know it's through actions like going through a level uh which we're about to do now um together that kind of brings us closer um he has just disappeared camera shy this is uh it's a beautiful game like it um i know this is kind of going back to to a little bit of c so i mean it reminds me a lot of like final fantasy and the feeling that you get from playing those games uh yeah there's a huge musical element to it obviously but even without sound visually it seems like uh like you mentioned before in orchestra an experience kind of you're walking through so rika actually i i have a question so being on i'm part of the environment team and coming from that background i mean how big is the team to to assembling this uh

type of game per level yeah um our team is about actually we don't have a right number in my head um for 3d artists uh it's mainly me um and aaron and trev so we have three 3d artists uh we have two animators uh we have two concept artists one includes uh sea salsa ue and season both of them are craft weeds um so that is more on the actual art side and on the audio side we have um uh ritz who's the audio designer and vince who is our music composer so size is about nine we work together to kind of bring right now we focus on a lot of seasoned contents but for levels like this for example it probably would require maybe about three four people to bring it together um does that answer your question oh yeah i mean that's that's incredible

size i mean cecil can definitely speak in lengths of how team sizes have grown over the past few generations but i always kind of like even though i never worked on the ps2 error consoles i feel like that team size and it's kind of like what you guys are echoing and other nd developers are kind of repeating are a little bit more intimate like a smaller team size but able to kind of produce amazing content and again uh for something like sky it's completely appropriate um to to work that closely together in a smaller scale and and still have amazing you guys are mentioning 20 million people downloading the game and playing through this world [Music] i mean what how do you feel about that like yeah i know you've been on teams that are like 300 plus um but recently just been

how are you liking smaller teams recently well it's great i mean it's uh definitely you have to wear more um hats um and the inner department um conversation discussion is crucial um so i do i do get involved get invited to design this question even narrative this discussion so everyone everyone is uh bringing their own feedback to a different angle it's a small team but i think now we we're seeing grow growth in uh in our community so we definitely have to ramp up and hire more people so if you like playing our games and if you're really into uh this type of visual style

yeah you can always uh send us your resume you hear that everyone just tweet that cecil if you want a job he'll go ahead and reply to you that's what you're opening up to dude so well i mean like as part of the success in and kind of leading up to what you're i think about to say like now that the the game have proven to be having an audience and you know you guys still want that intimate control of being a small team when you're ramping up are you guys talking about uh increase in seasons or increasing content per season what exactly are the type of resources are you looking to grow the team for yeah so typically um when when you see a trend and then growth in a

player base there's two things we have to do which is like stabilizing the game more people play and we see more problems and more divorce and everything is important to everybody so you need to have uh definitely [Music] polish the game further and also you have to create the content not only worldwide but also [Music] uh regional focus contents too like so right now we spend three months um doing a one season but we are hoping to be able to like do more frequently right [Music] and then you know i mean this is this is this is just a starting point we're creating a theme park meaning uh do you know well kind of mentioned that he's

dream of skype being more like disneyland meaning when disneyland opened in the 60s there was only three rides and a few places you can visit and now it's like more right i mean so if you think about that when you come to come back to the theme park you wanna you wanna go find the place that you haven't been and so every time it's a new opening or new area so you want to you want to give players to more places to visit and play um and then you know it's like i think it's great guys brings a lot of good direction when we come to designing our um contents like including like instruments and cosmetics you can see there's a caves and hats and what do you call it pants

um all those things are like seasonal like content and i think it's really has to come from the user's point of view say they're very um opinionated about what they like what they're acting like and i think i'm not good at picking my own clothes right so i think it's a reika and a lot of our company actually really like wanted to hear from like all the users they pretty much look around the office and look at the people who are better dressed let's not talk to season for a second let's talk to rika how to dress up these characters yeah definitely yeah

sorry sorry um yeah is that uh we actually have you know a good chunk of female employees um and we quite we we're you know um our biggest core audience is actually female players and we're trying to incorporate more of our female voices in the studio um you know because it is a game industry and as a whole the lack of female devs um is pretty apparent overall but you know we are trying to we are we're aware of that and also you know we give power to everyone equally in terms of you know like their opinions on their seasonal content right we try to involve them as much as we could i think that that's fantastic i think more and more game studios should and if they haven't already uh need to think like that because it's a diverse group and especially with for an iphone game ios game

um there's just a bigger audience uh and it will a more well mixed audience and and so it really starts from the development team to kind of express coherently with each other for for for having a gaming audience that kind of have the same kind of mixture when it comes to inspiration erika uh i mean are there games or mediums or uh like movies or entertainment that that you guys draw from for sky initially and now um i think it varies from person to person on the team um you know geneva fisher draws inspiration from like disneyland and the park um you know i personally kind of never played games until i played journey and that was normal where like i'm gonna go into games um this was a senior year in college it

was a pretty drastic decision that i have made but it has impacted me enough to want to pursue this interactive media hold on so you never played games until college or you didn't get into game development to college my parents are extremely anti-gay so i really what was your career uh that you were going for before like doctor animation oh animation okay so you're not so far off sorry that was a lot too far off but not too far it was a little intimidating but you know um i think wanting to create things versus liking games um and playing games is also different from each other i have started to play a lot more games ever since i enjoyed this

industry um and i'm slowly trying my best to change my parents minds about it right yeah if you were like me when i met cecil he told me that i i got to play all the games he worked on before i can talk to him so i don't know who made you if that was the same case but the fact is the funny thing is i did play all the games he ever worked on which is the crazy thing you're not telling me i played everything even parasite eve that was one of my favorite yeah i loved that game so yeah i mean we wanted to show like uh want to show the musical instrument but there's no sound right now right uh i only can hear the sound through your mic and so uh it's kind of fitting that we're in quarantine so we're not getting direct feed of the audio so i think people are at least hearing the sound through the mic and getting an idea i mean the sound as far as i can tell is matching up to

the visual it's just as important and amazing [Music] yes what you're seeing is a little bit of our lore these guys are elders and throughout the game you have these ancestors you meet [Music] foreign

yeah i feel like every time i turn my head away from an iphone game it sneaks up on me on how much power it can produce nowadays it kind of scares me i i feel like uh and i guess this is a a good point to kind of ask rika like or obviously developing for a phone has its constraints but i mean how rapid has it been for uh if you were to well of course it's not matching the consoles but like it feels like nothing's holding it back much now that you can do these type of games yeah um i haven't worked on um previous console titles from tgc so i can't really say

um but it's i think it even surprises the artists on our team how much the phones can handle these days um because it is a mobile game we have techniques to kind of work around limitations but even then i feel like we're throwing a lot of other phones and we're just constantly shocked how much the funds can take um so yeah i think devices are getting you know more and more powerful um i i can't say anything besides the fact that i'm also shocked that whatever i make actually manages to not happen just throw whatever in there pray for for the best i mean i mean you were just we definitely have to optimize but you know when we are going through iteration process we can't always keep um optimization in mind when

we're just testing um and yeah the game still takes it and it's pretty awesome that it does yeah i'm still i'm we're going through this huge world and it seems like there's a lot of exploration that'll that the players are allowed to but there are these sort of story moments or end points to kind of carry the the moments forward which is the perfect blend in my opinion of single player multiplayer it's really impressive that i mean when you were talking about how i'm talking about the environment team the characters are great too but i'm an environment guy so the environment team being so small uh typically how long does it take to kind of construct one of these levels uh from beginning to end from concept to to finish um yeah there's kind of two teams involved in that so one is design and one is

art um at least at tdc a lot of the levels start off with designers block-ins they usually think of the gameplay they think of multiplayer aspects social aspects um and artists kind of go in and polish that up um so i can't speak for design too much i think it varies um some block-ins are quicker some iterations take longer at least for art i would say like maybe one or two months especially the first few levels are given they're given a lot more priority because you know for funneling issues um we want the new players to experience as little friction as possible so those levels get a lot more time so i think total they have gotten more than just two months but um and a lot of so but the other levels are probably anywhere from one to two months

maybe a little bit more depending on the complexity but um yeah because it is a live game it's uh we go through the levels and we adjust them um so yeah they they're on they're constantly going through change but it's about i would say it's about a couple couple months to actually make a presentable level not just drawing on a piece of paper i do want to remind at this point that we are opening up the floor for questions from the the audience out there uh so i'll we do have our our our moderators doing recon to kind of field those questions over to me so i can ask to the team here at that game company uh both season rica so this is your opportunity to talk to the devs directly feel free to drop a question uh as we continue streaming

so let me kind of look at this as we keep going here so all these puzzle elements it seems like it plays off of um the keyboard sound uh can you explain a little bit about the design yeah so this is like the reika is uh she just pulled out her piano and it gives out this music note sheet so we also give out the music notes so you can actually follow that and learn how to play certain songs but this is more like um the keyboard in itself so all the sound and how it works uh matches with other instruments too so we do get a fan video of like four or five players playing different instrument and stuff together so it's pretty lovely it's really good technology and uh fans loving it so each season we try to introduce the instrument

it's fantastic reika to you can you play any songs uh i could right now i don't get real-time feedback so let me try uh yeah i can play this spot uh man i used to know how to play happy birthday but um i don't have the right of a musical talent yeah we got three agents here we can figure something out so that's from spirit away oh nice let's see wow so that's from kiki's delivery service um and let's see

yes okay i got that right so that's pretty good yeah we can rotate the camera so we can see you okay can you rotate the camera so we can see you right oh we actually see here with the phone oh no i see yeah [Music] so does every player have like this this ability to play music for each other i mean i've never met um chinova is that correct um uh but it's kind of i know it takes an army to make a game but there's a at least at that game company there's a consistency here where the theme kind of carries across ever since journey where

there's you guys definitely have a a very unique theme to your studio and your output i mean do you guys start the day reciting like that game company uh rules and i mean like how do you carry across multiple games and and still be so unique like that's the level consistency is insane i don't know any companies that have done that since for a while like we're talking about the ps2 era where i feel like there was hits after hits after hits i i feel like this type of energy have been kind of disappearing um the past few years yeah well thank you cecil thanks for agreeing with me i mean how do you feel about this cecil i mean you've been industry for a long time working on huge franchises and you've seen like shifts and turns and big and small companies

come and go uh do you agree i mean do you see that type of you know this this this what you guys are doing with sky like there's something here that a lot of games don't have a soul i think exactly so right because we only look at the market that are proven and we assume that you know gamers are real quick for this and that but until we actually really bring something like truthful about human emotion right um but a lot of times people see it as a risk definitely right um but we're lucky to have a visionary like genova he he spent a lot of time communicating that to the team actually it took me a while to understand that and why is it important and why is it important to be said in the beginning

and to to protect that throughout the development otherwise everyone's have different ideas ah let's make it this let's do this and that but unless you have a really strong philosophy like grounded and we we are trying hard to also like teach that to new uh employees that come on board and i think just it's just it's obviously the people likes it you know we reach different audience and we're making um i hope there's more games like this you know i mean there's the other games are there momentarily have these kind of feelings here and there like some something like breath awhile from games too when you're running on running on the grass field riding a horse right it's like you just want to do that and it feels good because uh you know you know

there's like um yeah so i think we definitely will protect this philosophy and going forward um and then hopefully uh this will also inspire the developers so this is this time of time like this yeah go ahead sorry to cut you off i mean we i think uh i'm sorry um in time times like this is it's hard to meet people um and being connected so right because that's why we see a lot of people are playing this our game when you're throwing it out again you want to play with cecil go go to his twitter page and ask for his handle he wants to play with you uh so this is a question from our community this is from jackal101 so is your team and this can go to either of you um is your team mostly based out of one

city or do you have team members worldwide right now we spread yeah bakery right uh most of our team members are in santa monica uh you know in los angeles with us we do have couple international um well very very few because in select countries we're looking for um to hire some people to kind of help us with you know communicating with the fans and audience uh but majority for now it's it's in it's it's on the website it's in america um we do have some remote workers uh but majority are in in studio well now we're all working from home unfortunately everyone's at home yeah yeah uh so this is from uh atash quas i'm sorry for mr pronouncing your

name what was the inspiration for the lore of skye yeah that's not boring when that was yeah i'm not the person to answer this is a design question we have artists here guys come on we don't want designers here come on uh let's let me kind of move on to another question here so this is uh how long has uh that game company been working on arc new season oh in the new season wow you got a fan here then okay that was just interesting yeah i think we i mean the arc meaning i think the the new season yeah how long does it

take yeah right right planning and then development and then qa and all that stuff i'll say three to four months yeah i see it's pretty quick turnaround yeah this is uh crazy yeah yeah and then we do pivot in in between in in the middle of the production too so oh wow and make changes survive through it right yeah yeah i think that's that's the season that we um were polishing and then we had to like go home and lock down oh all right so did the this is actually my question here the follow-up is i mean how much does the lockdown like delay things for you guys um i mean i'm sure it took a little time to get used to it but uh how was that transition um

sorry to interrupt you cecil um i think our team has been handling it pretty well um you know we were all generally worried because we've never done this huge scale of work from home before uh but you know people are more active on um on our group chats uh communication has been a lot clearer um i can't you know i can't say for what your experience has been cecil but at least as a team manager the increase in meetings is a little incredible but um you know because communication is important during times uh you know during this epidemic it can't be helped but um timeline was production-wise we're doing pretty good and i think we're all fortunate to be in this industry where you know people are you know getting experiencing positive things out of our game uh we actually get to see that every day

so this is a follow-up question for you rika this is um this is from miriam mamura uh what's your favorite acid or environment that you built for the game my favorite asset yeah this is very specific all right it is very expensive i think i think i saw her she might be right here um uh let's see um go look for it yeah there's one thing that i'm kind of happy about um let's see let me actually try to show it in game um one of my first cosmetics that i have made was this piece of headset um it was the first time that skye had a little bit more of um you know natural hair uh everything has been you know pretty

smooth as you can see on some of the screen um you know it doesn't reflect all the different kind of hair that exists in the world um but i think you know as a new artist um being able to kind of you know having the power to like actually bring them make these kind of assets kind of uh it makes me extremely happy that like i get to be part of like trying to be inclusive to people you know it's hard because it's such a we're trying to tackle such a big thing but this was like a small thing that i did that made me feel like i made some kind of impact and it was really really nice to see like players using it um you know it makes me happy when people are using the the three sets of like afro and one curly ball and two curly balls

but you know introducing different kind of um assets to be more inclusive be more how to say like just be more open-minded about all the different players that we're trying to reach was you know this was like the first step that i took and it's something that makes me happy um to this day so it's nothing fancy but um this is one thing that i'm happy about that's very meaningful i i definitely appreciate that for sure uh so this is a question and i'll throw it back to um to you cecil uh this is from marie and skye i guess that's the handle uh would you ever pull the sky community for new ideas i mean what kind of uh community interactions have you guys done or planning to do to kind of help with the seasons um well i mean we we wanted to like always wanted to

i mean for me personally i i like creating a world where it's cool um we try to make new area but also as i mentioned again like we like to also um strengthen our multiplayer mechanics so but then like the most important thing is also like a memorable story that people can remember from the season so always all goes back to that too you know we want the player to remember the season day um certain season in the in the later so we wanted to really have a good narrative emotion that's kind of brings all the decisions together yeah

so for christmas season we had a story about old grandma wanted to have this family during her dinner so the way we did it is uh the grandma has to actually give the player on uh the bell and you have to bring the bell to the spirits that are all spread hide in the world then you actually mind them telling them okay it's time to come home you know so it's simple story but because i'll gain minimal approach in uh visuals and sound visuals and it's it's really cute i mean it really works like we actually see that happening at the end of the season people really like stuff yeah so that's like gameplay part and there's a story part there's always a balance right yep definitely so we're actually at the end of the uh the hour i want to thank you both cecil and rika for for

going through all the technical hurdles i i feel like us connecting on jdx have been a lot more tougher for you guys than working on a season on sky so i want to thank you for your time and and your consideration and i'm sure the fans out there loved hearing the the dev stories and your insights on creating this amazing game uh if it isn't obvious already i want everyone to go over to and download this game it's free for everybody but i'm gonna hand the mic over to to you first cso and then rika to say anything that you guys want to shout out to give attention to uh before we say goodbye for today yep yeah wake up cecil gentlemen yeah um yeah that means download the game um and if you're an artist just to

investigate how we've done certain things will be really good lesson for you because um yeah i mean and also if you're just a game designer then also it's good that like there's other mechanics that you can focus on and still brings the people to play and uh if you just straight game gamer then give it a try uh i say say this uh it's worth uh we like i mentioned like last year it was the awarded as uh apple uh iowa's game of the year so that was the huge uh that's pretty big recognition yeah yeah it's a big deal thanks for thanks for watching us streaming yeah all right rika yeah yeah thanks everyone for watching

our stream and people who play our game thank you if it weren't for the players this game wouldn't exist um you know all games will eventually kind of get boring for everyone but what keeps skye interesting is the people that we're only providing the sandbox for it um so thank you to all our fans and audience who you know who haven't played but who are thinking of playing thank you and yeah that's that's it um and also any inspiring students uh artists um and more female does uh feel free to reach out to me in-game if you find me or twitter um i would like to be of any help if that's possible all right well thank you guys um truly inspirational to see amazing developers making amazing games and uh i always like the fact that small teams can produce huge things

and not like they that game company have been having a bad streak and you guys need it you guys are just hitting home runs every time you deliver a game it seems uh it's definitely an enjoyable experience to kind of see a playful game and having like a good experience and from it to kind of distract us from what's going on right now in the world so i want to thank you both for coming on and as always uh you're welcome back anytime but i'm sure i'm sure we're all exhausted so uh i want to thank you all right thank you thanks all right all right bye bye all right bye bye

[Music] me

all right we've got two more presenters so uh before i introduce our next one i want to go over an important topic so one of the trends that have been growing in the industry has been aaa companies opting to not offer full-time positions but instead hire large groups of contractors as more and more vets are finding themselves vulnerable they are left with less choices in job security it's a very competitive industry and unfortunately experienced professionals are being pushed out to accept these contract positions that can be as short as six months with no health benefits these are people with the family support and are undertaking huge risk just to make ends meet as games get more complicated in teams not growing that much bigger the industry is facing a major problem of needing these skilled professionals that rather work at facebook google or these other tech companies so uh i have a dear friend that i've talked to a couple months ago sure fair

and honey is currently a senior artist at ghost story games but his experience spans across major studios like sledgehammer games raven software and naughty dog it was his experience at naughty doc that highlights this recurring issue that game developers are currently facing but in general back to the naughty dog talk i think i joined them when they were like starting to ramp up for the full production like one of the great thing about that studio was like the moment you entered you're presented with like you know hey this is the game that we are making like there's there's because because people come in to the office so they there's not much concept work on display but at the same time there is like presentations there's a lot of documentation that you can go through and like you know familiarize myself yourself uh what is like the game that you're working on what section of the game your

and the way it works is for us the environment artist is they essentially give you a full level do whatever you want to do and you it's like between you a modeler and a texture guy um and it was just ramping up at the time so at the time uh like when i started nothing crazy and in general i personally like didn't get too crazy like crunch even like after six months because i would take like you know lunch breaks go like you know have like you know play basketball but there is a certain point in the studio that you know you start seeing these emails like you know like hey if you want to work 60 hours it's fine we are approving it um you and like you know we are providing you know food and all of that although that thing is its own like you know i remember when we were at pocket gyms there was like and off like free lunch everything and they were so chill about it like

when you were going to some of these game studios they think they're giving you like so much benefits with providing you food and stuff dude these are tax deductibles um and yeah uh so there is not necessarily any force but you're looking at your peers and you're looking hey this looks really good i want to keep up you know you're an artist you want to create the best work you're doing and you have the tools to create the best work you're doing like there are certain times like you know when we were on call of duty the tools there were certain things that did not fit like you know if you're working like on sci-fi thing the tools are not suited for that but in naughty dog the tools are there everything is there uh so you are trying to push the best that you can do and you see your peers you're walking past like a vfx person he's doing a fantastic job creating just waves you know um like everything you see is so high

quality you want to prove yourself that you are capable of doing that high quality um and but there is not necessarily any force uh that says hey you have to stay this long but overall um i i over time but it wasn't in in a way that because again i took the lunch breaks hey maybe this worked in a way that they cancelled my contract after six months because i wasn't staying till 11 at night who knows but um [Music] i personally but i was seeing a lot of people who are there like for very long hours and like the person next to me you know the kid like he was coming off of it like you know this was his his first main gig and he was like staying till late coming to work like super drawn out and tired again and again some of the scenes that were given to him because the quality they

want from him um is so high he's just like there are parts that he was like how do i do this how can i get over this hump you know and it was a lot of that it's definitely crunch culture is um young man's game for sure i think i think even if you take your younger self right let's say you're probably a few years in the industry and you are starting at naughty dog you have everything to want to prove yourself and i think and that's the dangerous part of this whole crunching idea is that people have this misconception that there's a manager producer uh like a toga that comes at your desk and then points fingers and and forces you to stay or else right but the reality is like they can't legally do that right because it will cause an uproar but it's more like subtle peer pressure you see everyone in your