Indie Game Developers and Canada

[Music] that did you went to school in Hong Kong yeah yeah yeah so oh man that's awesome yeah I was born in Hong Kong I didn't move to England until I was 16 but I've got British paradise yeah wait wait okay so this is something I wanted to talk to you about why Canada right you're living in Canada right now or you're staying in Canada right I'm currently staying in Canada but I live in I live in the UK okay yeah so can we talk about why you went to Canada yeah absolutely okay um so it just it just goes back to wanting a little bit of a change I was working from a kind of a small cramped office in the South of England and it was brilliant for a while but it did get it did kind of like kind of got a bit off and we were working with some of the guys who were local there other

developers and we that sort of arrangement kind of fell apart a little bit so I wasn't able to see them so much which was also kind of a good thing to be in the area and and as I said my wife finished her PhD and rather than her getting another job in the UK we thought why don't we take the opportunity to travel around a little bit and go see a bit more of the world we've been in so I as I said I was born in Hong Kong I moved to the UK at 16 I've got British parents for his passport and then so I spent 15 years in the UK and that was kind of having been outside the UK I knew that that was kind of a lot more out there than I wanted to see it's a big world you know um and being fortunate enough to like travel to places in support of the game to various locations and stuff ex-players and things like that and and again my wife also she was desperate to kind of go travelling or backpacking but because adventure pals wasn't finished that wasn't something I could I could really do so we thought right why don't we move

somewhere for a while set up shop somewhere where we can do those things but kind of I can work during the week and yeah so like I know a lot of people do what's called digital no madding where they move to say Thailand and they work on their laptops from the beach that was something we thought about but it sounds so cool yeah but that would mean that she'd have to take kind of a career break just as she finished her PhD yeah so we found we kind of looked into it and we thought about different places and we found Vancouver where so she works in the kind of environmental field just a kind of quick quickly explain it um so here there's a huge amount of like industry for that it's very very environmentally conscious there's a lot of NGOs and companies and things here that's good for that Plus as a huge indie game scene in Vancouver it's it's amazing right now I was gonna talk about that right right right so we can get onto that in a censure but it's also incredibly beautiful like you can kind

of you know that there's so much wildlife here it's it's just an amazing part of the world and we moved at the beginning of the winter and my goodness it almost broke us like it was just raining non-stop and we thought we're from the UK we can we can handle rain not not like they have it in Vancouver it's a little different yeah but the summers are here now and is blazing hot and it is incredible so we're really happy here we might have moved along again soon and obviously our families has been faces still in the UK and massive once is still based in UK so well you know I think that a lot of like indie game lovers would be surprised by how many games come out of Canada it's wild like a lot of my indie game friends are from Canada and they they their studios are there funded by the government I think that's right a lot of ways yes it what is that all about it depends which state or province you're in a car loan which one it is but some

of them offer things like up to 50 percent of your employees salaries back in tax credits as a wild I think that's Toronto and then there are other all sorts of crazy like amazing program funding things for game development that out there based here which is just so good and so yeah so like I mentioned clay who made over here also map Thorsen's here who made full of course and Celeste and I mean those are just kind of the two that popped in my head but there's also a bunch of mobile phone game developers like hothead games and others that are all based in Vancouver which is a tiny city so it's a really cool place to be if you're making video games and so they have meetups like full indie which if anyone is here I can definitely recommend you can go like I went along kind of by myself since I kind of didn't know quite what to do you know I didn't know anyone and then I kind of pulled out the Imagi pals and everyone kind of flopped around it was fantastic I got to

meet lots of people I think like if you like until people see your game they don't really know you know is this guy for real or not like is he know so at least like I got that out and that was great and then recently we had twitch Vancouver where the adventure powers was also featured and that was full of amazing people as well so I got to meet a whole bunch of people there as well so it's like it's it's it's great like there's there's a lot of indie game stuff happening up here yeah so you're you're um you're a well-traveled guy you've been in North America Europe and then you grew up in Asia that's wild don't tell me about Hong Kong yeah I mean Hong Kong was just a brilliant place to grow up in it was it's really it's I think it's really different now my parents are still there and they tell me that it's different it's a different place now like when I was there it was kind of a nerd yeah right so the handover was in 97 and I was born in 86 so I had I could give ten eleven years

of growing up there although we had a year or two in Lhasa and Tibet when my parents think that kind of they kind of like to travel around as well they ran like the Holiday Inn in Lhasa and Tibet and I was a toddler in Tibet and I had like I had blonde hair and all her clothes would like touch my hair there's this white guy yeah exactly what is this crazy he's like it is heard but he's a baby what so that was yeah that was really cool so yeah so it's a brilliant place to grow up like it's it's very like technology tech tech advanced very international went to an international school most of my friends were from all over the world really from all over the world so I think my best friend for a while was Malaysian I had a friend from Nigeria I had my Dutch best friend as well for a while and you know from from obviously from Hong Kong as well so it was an amazing kind of melting pot so when I

went to the UK it was a bit of a culture shock where it's a much less integrated society you know and maybe I was fooling myself a little bit because there's an international school so really it was a Western environment but it was it was very bizarre coming to the UK where there's a very different attitude or at least from the school I went to towards people from different countries and different backgrounds and things like that yeah but yeah and then it's a great it's a lot of fun you can get up to loads of trouble when you it when you're a kid as well because yeah it's very safe like there's great transport so you can go off have beach parties and sneak into bars and do all sorts of fun you know stuff