Indie Gaming's Last Stand How Willem Delventhal Is Battling Corporate Dominance! | 316

foreign [Music] welcome to another episode of Game Devlin chain the number one game development podcast without game developers and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon fam and with me a special guest William Kevin thall how are you doing well indeed I'm doing well I'm doing well thanks for having me Brandon of course man uh before we get started you know this is the part of the podcast where I kind of ask you where you're from where you're at where you're heading to give a short introduction to the listeners and viewers out there awesome yeah uh my name is yeah William Davenport um or Delvin tall we were just joking about how there's a uh a fight in the family about which is the correct pronunciation um I'm a game designer and game developer been building games since I was 15 years old uh really sooner ultimately

um I am currently living in Georgia but for the past couple of years my partner and I have been traveling around the states so we kind of we've kind of been everywhere for the past few years awesome man so we got in touch through email but you know your your introduction was super compelling uh you're doing a lot of great things for young developers out there uh how did you get started in the game industry uh and how you know what Drew you into it absolutely I love that question um it is a so I feel like every person answers this the same way they say I played cool game I decided must make game um and that that's really ultimately the same answer for me as well um my uh interestingly enough both of my parents are uh in theater like theater theater not film and they thought that they were among the generation that thought that video games were evil so we were not allowed to have video games when I was young but thankfully I have two older brothers who broke them down um my middle brother actually bought a Super Nintendo that he then wrapped up

and had his friend give to him on his birthday so that my parents would feel too guilty to take it away that's how we got our first video game console um so I played all kinds of games Chrono Trigger was the one that really like uh uh just maybe absolutely love it as a medium and as a way for us to tell stories and engage and have fun and when I fell in love with games I started playing around with making games I used Flash Flash action script two and then three uh rip flash we miss you and I sort of half accidentally sold a game to addictedgames.com when I was 15 for a whopping 500 but you know it was enough for me to go oh this is a career uh and so I started building games more seriously and eventually when I graduated college I worked at uh I got my first industry job at Lumosity they're the brain training game people who I worked for for about four years great man your path is definitely uh very interesting and almost unconventional because you know as a game designer going through school

uh I remember flash I I do feel like game maker was another tool back then yeah for there was so I felt like there was a lot of accessible game developer tools for game designer specifically back then uh if you even Venture into the PC realm specifically you know the modding tools of Counter-Strike uh and other you know you know specifically Source engine was a little bit more open I think there is some return to that but there has been kind of like a dead period for accessible tools now I mean we're talking about Unity unreal yeah I'm not dismissing those but like it is more of a behemoth of accessibility tools yeah and how do you feel I'm asking you specifically like the differences of the tools then versus now in terms of somebody having an idea and wanting to

see an end product immediately yeah interesting question um you know I I don't know I think I think as with as with anything it's not necessarily better or worse it's just different I think we sort of um what a lot of young game developers don't really understand is that uh we're still in an incredibly young industry um the Giants that we all know and love um you know the George Ramirez um are still the will rights they're still alive and in like the prime of their careers um those people who invented game development are alive right now uh and they're still making games um so so some people don't really understand how young we actually are um I've been building games you know for like 15 years now and even in that period of time I've seen dramatic changes and I this is a great question because I would say that it was in a sort of Proto State um 15 years ago there were tools uh modding absolutely I kind of forgot um modding Halo uh Halo Combat Evolved was

one of the first one of my first game development experiences and I had so much fun doing that um and then flash got me into it and then there were a couple of others little tools there's there's one that nobody seems to know about called saw blade software that was Mac only which was a terrible uh product decision but I made a bunch of platformer games in saw blade software um now nowadays I think the big difference is that it is much better polished and much better corporatized which is a blessing and a curse it means that we have much more amazing tools what Unity can do what unreal can do what Godot can do is he actually incredible um but what you pointed out which is that they are heavy they're slow they're sluggish and they're really unapproachable is also totally true um it's really hard for people to get started but once you do the power that's at your fingertips is unimaginable to Willem 15 years ago yeah I agree I I mean it's heavy but there is a like a smaller Gap into

as a hobbyist to actual game development in a studio conversion right versus word before yeah you can publish something prototype uh get it out there in front of people which is fine right but the skills sometimes don't really translate to in an in-game Studio setting right yeah um you know there are like you know just to be on the subject before moving on you know unreal for fortnite is I think one of the biggest impact for accessibility from gamer to game developer that I've seen uh in recent years I mean there's a lot of like uh user generated uh content uh push right with roadblocks and and that whole Space uh can you kind of talk about your views on that on on that kind of like space and how it is evolving Gamers to game developers yeah that's interesting um I uh let's see for for the first time

I was looking at job postings and for the first time I saw a game developer that was exclusively unreal for fortnite [Music] um wow that must be recent yeah it's like a week ago or something um and that was a bit of a trip um there was a I went to GDC this year which is something I highly recommend to anybody if you can if you can figure out how to afford it it's unfortunately not super accessible but one of the GDC talks uh was a dude who started a company building games in Roblox and his company I don't know exactly what they're worth but sounded like they're making a couple million dollars a year um probably more than that even um you know maybe maybe 10 million dollars a year um so that's a pretty dang sizable company and uh they're building games inside of another game um so I I don't you know I'm not sure I'm not sure how I feel about it I I think there's I've got two sides um the side of me that wants to be more

optimistic says like that's awesome you know we should be building things in Platforms in games um that we recognize and love um you know imagine like if Pokemon uh if Nintendo released like some sort of Pokemon SDK or something and you could like build Pokemon games and how amazing that would be and what incredible stories we would get from players and um like what a what a what a beautiful thing that would be like that side of me says yes absolutely more accessibility more ways to build games more ways to play this game more ways to play games yes but the other side of me that is a little bit more nervous is basically inside of me that's a little bit more nervous about capitalism in general yeah which is that you know the bigger that places like Roblox become the more Authority they have the more control they have and um and the more they can box out the little guy yeah um it's already really hard to make it as an indie developer and the more or places like Roblox take over more of the industry the less pie

there is for those smaller devs yeah there's definitely a not fully realized uh model of what that means right I mean earlier days there's games like Minecraft there's games like a little big planet you know even Mario has kind of like a Mario Maker right and it's more like a fun idea of like hey is your chance to play and be a game developer in a sort of indirect way right Roblox was the first time I felt like they really monetized that model to a great degree and it is kind of weird I always try to explain to people especially in games but also outside of games of that no the industry is really split in very different categories where there isn't really a lot of like overlay of people understanding how each model works because this Roblox to me is a complete stranger in terms of what I

know from the game industry right and uh I I there is no Bridging the Gap even there's no like Universal website that we can go to as a game developer that really explains like this is how the Roblox game developers do as opposed to like the mobile game developers and even an educational game developer it's like we're still separate and maybe at GDC there is some kind of overlap but even then I feel like it's like if you're not attending one conference you have no idea you know you just don't know right and I don't see that really being fixed anytime soon it's just like Natural Curiosity you might make you venture into that that room right but uh I I yeah I do feel the fear that is underlying uh all this with with you is that there might be a monopoly that is gonna hit us by all surprises right unreported for fortnite I I'm actually kind of surprised and

didn't really think through that people are actually posting jobs for unreal fortnite mind-blowing like I never even thought about that um so I mean it's great in a way like a yeah idea you know it's uh yeah I thought it was just like a little little uh sandbox right for for you know uh I want to label them as wannabe game developers but like right yeah and now now they're like if anything they're like influencers it's a weird again another extension of the game industry are influencers right who play our games who are bigger and get paid better than us uh but then there is no real interaction I do see some influencers like Dr disrespect and others are starting to team up or create their own game studios yeah uh to extend you know I'm sure they have great ideas you know we all started out as Gamers

they they extended that to a professional level right to entertainment value level and so they're I'm interested gonna see what their contribution is and again it's welcoming to kind of see the game industry growing but it is a weird cannibalizing industry yeah we eat our own and it does kind of shut out for those who don't have the influence uh right uh to to have the financing you know who are you gonna pick right doctor's disrespect or or this unknown Indie developer that plays right yeah so there's a lot of questions and fear that I feel just as you as a game developer that I don't know how this is gonna turn out is it a net you know uh benefit yeah positive or or not or not I I think it's a it's a it's a good question and it's a sort of um is it difficult I think it's an

impossible question answered I think we just won't know until you know we get further I I I'm more unemployed yeah I mean hey gbt can make games now so it's all happening all at once yeah like our chances yeah and there's there's the like you know there's the dunes of the world the the the uh mental bandwidth of us Imagining the most horrible version of the future one of the consistent bad guys is basically just capitalism and maybe being a little anti-capitalistic this uh this podcast but whatever I guess um you know there really are there's the versions of the future that are something like a dune where there's just a couple of corporations that own basically everything and and that version of the future is completely 100 possible yeah um like there's nothing stopping it from happening and if anything I feel like we're even drifting that way um what I really want to see personally is uh you know a return to Renaissance like I really want to see a uh a decentralized I know that's like a hot

stupid buzzword but a decentralized game industry we're more smaller studios are making are making enough money to survive them they don't need to be making a fortnight but you know enough money that they can pay their bills and eat some food um because I think like undoubtedly the diversity of thought is what makes um Community interesting like it's it's why roblox actually is doing so well because they lean really hard into the diversity of thought of their creators um they give them incredibly robust tools uh you know there are 13 year olds making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year right now because they made like a cool version of tag you know um and that's something that I think is good it's just a little unsettling to me that one person or one corporation owns so much of it yeah if there's definitely a division of camps that are happening right I mean Microsoft is playing Activision Blizzard right they're trying to get that deal going this is Sony cam with their own first party and

third-party games uh you know Nintendo just making Nintendo games all the time Epic on their own right is basically went through a controversy of gobbling up Indie titles and making exclusive uh steam I don't know what they're doing with it like I feel like that's like do some creative stuff right releasing like Counter-Strike two out of nowhere right once in a while uh but there's definitely a uh you know there was an indie uh Renaissance you know with steam green light you know there was a period of Super Meat boys and all these fantastic games coming from you know two guys in the garage uh and and it birthed amazing thing even during the pandemic there was a couple of standout games that really uh create a community during basically a very lonely time right for others like fall fall guys right but even as soon as

something get got big fall guys got bought by epic you know like 10 minutes later and it was made in unity which is like an insane like what how does this go you know and it doesn't seem like it's possible as much even though the tools right are so available from idea to publishing right it feels like for marketability and actually sell through that you have to sign up to a camp now to for Success right um I'm seeing less and less of what the Indie days were right uh and uh yeah you know at some point you're gonna have to I think maybe half and half right nothing's black and white but there needs to probably be some sacrifice of unique individual Vision right to kind of align with corporate you know speed need right yeah I think

um there's a so there's a term that I use sometimes that I wholeheartedly believe in which I call tactical optimism basically um I think a team is more likely to succeed and I think um like a society is more likely to succeed if we're optimistic um hey if I think we've all experienced this we've had like a friend who's super negative and like man it just kind of sucks to hang out with them um the uh so so that in that in that lens um I think you know one way or another there's more money being made in games and there are more people who are self-employed or just employed in general in games than there have ever been so I say that because I don't want any listeners to be like damn yeah games are just ah the good days are gone and we're screwed that's definitely not true and and in addition to that I want really what I want to see as a call to action um I want to see more people working together to build really cool stuff and supporting those smaller Indie devs

um so you right now can make a difference person listening right now um you know next time you buy a game maybe spend that money on like literally five or six Indie titles because they tend to be so much cheaper too instead of that one new Call of Duty or whatever the heck just came out [Music] uh I think people understand right the value of ND and individual voices and uniqueness yeah but I don't think they see really the impact of how these games really change the Paradigm of the trends right right I mean war zone 2 is huge right now right but they forget that it came from even before Pub G right from uh what was that game day of um yeah and there was Minecraft mods that's where I first ran into it there were Minecraft mods that were basically Hunger Games basically yeah Hunger Games franchise and that was where I went whoa this is a really cool formula and then pubg came out a couple months after that

yeah and then fall guys came out and it promote more like a you know a friendly competition type of obstacle course thing and that kind of killed I mean awkward Walker that's what I've started calling those yeah but so if you look at like the major trends that was the sameness right with Chipotle especially uh like rocket League all these games came from smaller teams because they can move fast they can innovate right and they really to stand out they have to be that they gotta do something new yeah and the the fear is that because because of these corporate umbrellas that are forming that this the sameness eras will last a little longer yeah uh and these games are already taking five to ten years versus you know three to five years on average right for for bigger games um even Among Us you know Among Us was a game that hit it big and when it went mainly three developers it was huge

along with Fall Guys yeah epic got kind of in trouble because they try to incorporate some of that in fortnite and immediately got called out on it uh right luckily they backed off so Among Us is still living but it kind of gave birth to a lot of betrayal games yeah you know in in the period afterwards but like if you talk about all these games that really got everybody talking about it in a viral way uh it's always been smaller teams like you know in the the big teams just keep milking the same formula until someone gets bored of it and they just throw something new in the mix well it's it's interesting the um so uh once again I was at jdc recently and in three different talks that I went to somebody mentioned creating a good game is 90 copying somebody in 10 Innovation um and I as a game designer is a younger game designer rebelled against that I was like no I'm going to invent something totally new but as I get more experienced I realize that that's that is true um we for the most part don't want

something brand new um because it just doesn't feel good imagine how many times you've scrolled through your Zoom library and looked at that one game that you bought and then never played because you don't want to learn how to play it for the most part we do want things that are familiar that that uh hearken back to those nostalgic days of games that we used to love and then have a Twist and then twist it a little bit give us something slightly new um the ecosystem of AAA which is the big if anybody doesn't know what that means and the big companies versus an indie which is small like usually 0 to 12 people um the ecosystem of those two is a really interesting sort of Yin Yang Triple A's would absolutely collapse without Indies yeah um because they you're right the Innovation comes from um Indies almost 100 end of the time they come up with new formulas a recent one that just came out the the now what we're calling survivor-like genre um so vampire survivors you're familiar with that um can you explain that more are you talking about the last game from Arcane

no or uh no vampire survivors it's a it's a 2d uh like um it's like a sort of eight bit it looks like Castlevania style art okay cool SNES Castlevania and basically all you do is walk around and you have a character who Auto fights so uh and you have hordes and hordes of enemies that's one of the core pillars of the game design of the genre so you've got hundreds of enemies coming after you and ultimately all you do is walk around and your dude like automatically whips at them um but you get upgrades and now your dudes whipping with fire and then oh yes I saw a book I saw a zombie version of this as well yeah yeah yeah so this is now a new genre and um uh vampire survivors it was not the first but they were the first ones to popularize it and it was literally one dude who's now made well over I think five million dollars last time I checked from a game that he built in a couple of months and now there are other bigger companies that are creating Survivor likes because they know that it works so so that ecosystem of of Indies uh like if we're talking

about like a coral reef the Indies are the coral they're the Bedrock that all the other life can even sustain itself off of so if India's ever get starved out aaa's become the same thing over and over again because they're too scared to innovate and because they're too bureaucratic they're too big to um really be able to even push Innovation the minute somebody says let's innovate somebody else says well in my product experience Innovation doesn't work um and that's because they're pretty much right because Indies are willing to fail a bunch of times until they get that one Golden Nugget yeah well I mean this is kind of it bleeds true for even the tech industry I mean basically every company right I mean we're singing with the tech industry Facebook Google yada yada are letting out thousands of people pretty much you know paid figuring out they haven't done anything to innovate I mean the reason why chat GPT again another huge like next wave of the internet upgrade yeah right yeah came

from a small company uh and Google in in Microsoft's smartly enough bought into that but Google everybody else is kind of following and basically years behind right and and this is just true for anything basically yeah it's the David versus Goliath it's a it's an ingrained message that uh an ingrained story that is true just for Humanity yes yes and it's uh what I fear is you know there's obviously AI is like the biggest talk this year right it's interesting to gonna see how how Innovative open AI is going to remain which is probably you know already diminishing returns at this point because they're on by basically Microsoft um but I kind of want to get back to you and uh you know you have obviously this aspiration to to inspire young developers right um you know can you talk more at length you know you started maybe with Luminosity I

remember that it's one of the few I think one of the impacts as a younger gamer that I don't think a lot of people draw back to is of course we got the Mario's but it's a very Niche you know nerdy group of kids at that point that understands and know what that is right but like it was like the educational games in the classrooms like Oregon Trail for me that yeah I was able and even like the math games that made educational stuff interesting that Math Blasters yeah it took it took a good portion of my uh gamer life uh to to kind of eventually boost me up to game developer can you talk more about that space how did you get into it and yeah you know what the evolution you're seeing now uh gamifying things definitely yeah absolutely I um it's a I never really intended to enter this space um I think in large part on here because

that first industry job was at Lumosity which was specifically brain training games um so if you're unfamiliar with velocity they were super big you know one of the one of the companies that everyone's talking about maybe like eight years ago now and they essentially had a scare with the FTC that uh really killed their momentum um but uh yeah while I was there I started on an internal startup called bloomy kids where we were building educational content for two to six-year-olds and I think it just like it just created like an addiction or something for me as a designer um because those moments where I created uh you know we had really challenging props at Lumosity that I also found super fascinating that were different from any other design framework or any other design challenge it wasn't how do we get somebody to you know stick to their day seven retention better it was instead like how do we teach working memory to a two-year-old that doesn't know how to read and I just I just found that super fascinating

um you know trying to communicate non-verbally trying to create uh game design challenges that intuitively taught you something instead of having to tell you it um and now uh so I haven't really mentioned this I guess um after Lumosity I uh started a couple of companies um and the one that actually wound up sticking is the one that I'm working at now called the indie game Academy so we are uh exclusively explicitly a gamified online school for game developers um so our students get formed into multi-disciplinary teams that then build a game together and publish that game together under the guidance of seven industry professionals over three months and we do all kinds of things to make it just fun and it's it's such a simple premise but it works so well um we for instance teach classes in a virtual online castle so our students walk around an actual little castle and you know go find the classroom in the little castle um or we have the coveted house cup that

gets sorted into four magical houses the uh warriors uh the Rogues the Rangers and the clerics and those houses come compete in a friendly way to try to win the house cup each cohort um and it's a lot of these really small tiny tweaks that wind up giving it this uh holistic vibe that just makes it more fun and then metrically like by our numbers also works better we have lower dropout rate than pretty much any of our competitors we have higher conversion rate than pretty much any of our competitors and it's because we just have fun um and because we also have created a really wonderful supportive culture um so there's a lot of stuff happening in the space we've sort of known for a long time that gamifying Education Works there's a lot of authors out there I mentioned yukai Chao he's one of the ones I really like I also like Amy Jo Kim she talked about uh gamifying business but still super valuable and interesting um Jessie shell is one of the like old school names he's just about game design in general but he talks about applying game design to all kinds of different things

um and I think one of the reasons that it hasn't actually innovated very far because the term gamification was super hot like I don't know 15 years ago now and now is almost like a bad word um the reason is sort of stagnated is because I think basically real game designers stopped doing it um so like an educator says I'm going to gamify my classroom and they can only understand a surface level of the of of game design and they say okay I'm gonna stick some some points on this and then our students will love it um and honestly you'll get a lot out of doing just that like just points um but there's so much more to get game design as any game designer knows then a reward mechanism and uh and pretty much anything that you've learned in design you know focusing on your design pillars emotional deliverables trying to create a core Loop that's engaging and enticing on its own all of those things apply to pretty much everything it's just design and design Works across Department

cross-discipline across industry um so you know I have like specific insights we've learned at the indiegam Academy but I think really the biggest one that I want to convey to any of you designers out there is what you do um uh what what you are essentially studying is human motivation you're essentially figuring out how to get somebody motivated to play a game because unlike any other product out there you don't have to play a game you can stop at any time you know I don't need I need to use my crutches otherwise I can't walk I don't need to play video games um so that that like that it's really powerful that um that simple mindset take game design apply it to other stuff get people excited about it yeah I I think uh inspiring younger students I think is at an all-time low right now uh there's so many uh factors to it right I mean we talk about gen Z generation they're you know the YouTube phenomena of like quick money right

attitude there's also this onslaught of AI tools you know with uh chat GPT just giving me the answer because I don't want to think right uh and I I even suggested in a couple of podcasts to go to my guests saying that like college campuses educational system need to hit a pause button because the way it's structured right now doesn't really uh uh cover the why well it doesn't work but it doesn't cover the reason why a student shouldn't just use chatbt for the for the answer there's no motivation there's no yeah it's like the the the line of thinking critical thinking is just unnecessary to a lot I put in this effort when I can just Google it exactly right because you know you're talking to a generation where I want to buy now right I want things now right without putting in the hard work hard work is a very they associating that with our age group now

where it's like it's not necessary and it doesn't equal happiness right like the grind is like a s almost slavish term of like old thinking to a lot of younger students or younger people right I don't think if I could interject for a second yeah I don't think they're wrong um yeah yeah I don't know you know I think you you bring up a great point and I think that's a really fascinating line of thought that the like education is missing the why why do I need to put in the grind why do I need to focus and I think part of the answer to that question is that it is unnecessary um you know the amount that we work in our society in today's uh with today's automation um is exactly as much as we all agree to yeah um you know we could that's not quite true you know we couldn't all work zero and still survive and function but we could work half as much as we do now easily and still all survive and have ample um but we've we've sort of bought into this

system of well if you just grind harder you get amazing riches and rewards it's the American dream being propagandized into our generation and older and the new generation is like I'm not getting rewarded for that work so why am I doing this this is pointless yeah um and I I guess really the the only thing that I wanted to interject is like I don't think they're wrong honestly I think we're way overworked and I think we're way under rewarded and I think wealth is way over um uh centralized far too few people with far too much money yeah there's definitely a lot of questions that have popped up in discussions uh I I feel like aren't fully explored yet because we're coming off of pandemic everybody was at home I mean there was a crisis of people job hunting and jumping ship right uh remote working became a thing why show up to the office when I can save out the commute time right there are definitely aftermath but because of

all these like uh things happening all at once people kind of made like really quick decisions and I think a lot of our friends are kind of suffering from it too we're just like yo I don't like this new place with these people I kind of miss my old job because now everyone's kind of being forced back to in the office it's like uh in in a very indirect way it's like hey if you're not back in the office next week you're fired right and all these job cuts are happening like I think there was a lot of valid concern CERN of like the system in place right um but you know I I always feel like there's you know one extreme to another extreme is never like the answer right yeah and I would even say like the there is like a spirit of the competitiveness of people who are willing to go in the office kind of beating the one who are remote because now they're accessible to the bosses you know who you're going to fire when you're going to lay it someone off so there's so many questions and

unanswers that are still happening I feel in in the workplace uh for all Industries but especially for games right that uh I don't know man who who's thinking about this we don't have like you know a website it's like all right who's actually looking through this and giving us in and we're all figuring it out and the game industry of anything everybody's kind of we we're in teens but everyone's been out on their own since I think the Inception of game it's like we were fighting through crunch culture and all this uh I mean it was only a few years ago yeah that we were unionizing which nobody ever thought would ever happen right yeah but we're starting to see more and more companies like unionizing um there's a lot of crazy things since the pandemic that were reacting I would say more Fallout right um than than like uh there's actual crazy growth but maybe there's just these years these years of time to kind

of reap from the savaging that we're going through right now so I just gotta wait a little longer to kind of find things out um but I want to hear your thoughts about that it's like there's so much from the pandemic working remote uh all these discoveries people jumping questioning the system but not really having another system to really fully get behind but just trying everyone's trying to doing their own thing and hoping that we hit the target somehow and be okay you know unscathed yeah oh man so much so much so much pain yeah well I like to uh let's let's get it to Young developers then all right to that demographics like what are they supposed to do I mean they're coming out of school right with all these skills that AI is kind of like yo we don't need Junior positions for this anymore remote especially are kind of staying away from Young developers because they need that kind of Independence experience to

self-govern at home right and there are missing the mentorship from being in the office from older developers to kind of show on the ropes that's where I learned most of my skills and upgraded but that younger generation you know the rare opportunities they're having right now they're not even seeing that you know the benefit of being around older developers right yeah yeah I boy it is it is a tough question and honestly chat GPT like alone none and the other things you've been talking about alone makes anything that I'm about to say to you sort of obsolete because who knows but um you know we've definitely discovered a couple of things at the indie game Academy and I've noticed a couple of things um I have a personal goal of helping 10 000 people make games I don't know just sounded cool uh and I've crossed about 1500 now so I've worked with a good number of people yeah and I've started to see some Trends so there's a couple immediate things that I can say that I

know will help you hands down and I think that's sort of the most important thing the number one rule and this has become sort of a meme at our Academy because people will ask me questions and I'll answer it with this all the time the number one rule the number one tip is just make games um you know I don't know if that's a disappointingly simple full answer but like it's true um you should be making games you should be making games with teams you should be making games with multi-disciplinary teams and you've been making games with people who are more experienced than you are um as best you can so go find somebody who you think is really cool and say hey I'm looking for experience you know are you willing to hop on a team with me maybe do a game jam with me if you don't know what game jams are oh boy go look up game jams uhio jams or luna dare are both amazing um and just build some games um a lot of what you just talked about losing from the physical workplace uh are filled in by um by just building games with with a team explicitly exclusively

um now I uh I think the the reality of the future is um people need to be more self-driven are going to need to be and already are um there is no longer I mean a lot of people are still getting in-person jobs and I recommend them for exactly what you're talking about I actually went full-time remote like three years before the pandemic and now I am so sick of it and I just want a job at an office um because there really is a lot that gets lost um in fully remote environments a lot you know there's the saying that like 80 of communication is body language and if all we have is a video screen we're not getting that um so I I think uh you know you really just need to be self-driven and and it and it unfortunately requires some of that grind um I don't know what social mechanism we're going to fall into or what is the right one I think we're all agreeing on some points we're all agreeing that uh

pay should be more Equitable we're all agreeing that we should have to work less we're all agreeing that there should be certain things socialized such as education and Health Care um but we don't know exactly how to just make that all happen and I don't think we can guarantee that it's going to happen so you know the um part of sort of uh part of the approach I think you need to have or the mental mindset is that yes there's things that I want to change about the world and I want to change about the world um and don't forget those and act towards them as you can but ultimately you're in a game right now with certain rules um and those rules reward grind and they reward ass kissing and they reward networking um and so play that game and enjoy the game as best you can um and and make games yeah yeah there's definitely a pre-covered and post-covered uh for for networking right I mean maybe there are some cross-pollination that that still exists uh can you can uh go through over some

points that you notice like the differences that is more available less available now than before for all developers especially young developers yeah interesting question um there's a couple things so number one we don't have offices as much anymore um which is one of your key places um I don't know any actual stats but I'm willing to bet you know most relationships start in office um or at least most adult relationships uh willing to bet most like uh romantic relationships start an office they're willing to post Mentor relationships start in office um so we don't have that anymore or at least not many people do or less people do um but that said something interesting has happened so first of all there's a lot of opportunity with online networking and you can get a pretty good amount out of online networking actually and a lot of people are know this problem and so they're trying to figure out how to make it better um I actually think I don't know what they changed I actually think gdc's

attempted that this year really sucked um but in previous years I've met really important people to me just through like gdc's networking tab um well can you explain what they did this year that was so different for those videos so in previous years they had uh like a portal where you could reach out to people and say like hey you know I'm Willem um can I come on your cool podcast uh Brandon um and then you would talk about it um this year they had they used a new service and it was essentially the same but I got quite literally zero responses from anybody um so maybe it's me but it but it sure seemed like there it was just sort of crickets by comparison uh but regardless um there are people who are trying to make online networking work and what I would recommend you do is you go to online first um networking events meaning you don't trust GDC to do online networking because what they know how to do is

in-person stuff you instead find those organizations that are online only um because they just know how to make it better um you know iga's events we've focused so hard on making it feel like there's other people in the room and getting connected to them Etc um so online online networking is way more effective than you might think just Google online events go to like meetup.com that's great uh there are there's a website that I don't quite remember that's like a big old list of um online only game conventions uh maybe just search that online only at commissions but then the other thing that I want to call out here is that because there's been a loss of uh people like going to things because that has um tailed off so much I've actually found that it is more effective to go to things um I think everybody's craving it at least right this second and so because of that people are really hungry to meet you in person and talk to you and hear your story

um so I actually think that interestingly enough my advice is to find anywhere and everywhere meetup.com is a great Place many different conventions are great to meet people in person because they really want to right now um you know they're sick of people reaching out uh over email or whatever um and then I guess one last tip I'll give you is don't be scared to cold call as well which means reach out to people you don't know a lot of our professors the coolest people we work with we have like uh Victor Blanc who's an art director on Minecraft dungeons uh who teaches uh visual design for us like he was literally just me messaging somebody on LinkedIn um and I messaged like 100 people and got like two of them to come to get back to me so don't be scared to just put in a Little Grunt work too and reach out to strangers yeah we're in a weird time right now for sure like I think uh people are discovering that being in physical space with someone to network is actually pretty cool nice yeah like it's it's uh it's weird because I

want to smell the sweat you know yeah yeah but like you said I don't think there's ever going to be a real replacement yeah especially for game designers such as yours is playing exactly you guys talk all the time right to a brainstorm there hasn't really been all these scary tools are happening but like nothing replaces the person-to-person interaction of just feelings closer yeah feeling each other's energy I I equate to almost stand up right like try and listen to stand up through a zoom call which they try to do is not the same as being in the actual room he's gonna scroll through Reddit yeah seeing the performance right so like I think with the brainstorming creativity uh to Foster even more creative ideas you kind of feed off each other's energy um I mean all disciplines benefit from that but game developers uh game designers in particular I feel like I don't think there's a replacement for that um um I heard this concept and it's it kind of

ties into this like I think basic idea that I feel about particularly about games I really feel like you guys are like gonna be the architect of the future right I mean that's how the Matrix were created right okay I'll take that the Matrix is a game yeah metaverse right yeah that that you know the you know chat GPT created right but like we're not far from that we're just like real scary but I heard this concept of people calling basically the internet as the third place right they equate your home being the first place your workplace being the second place and how people congregate is the third place which is the inner interest now so they're definitely the the the the gap between the workplace home in third place is kind of converging because everyone's kind of doing it one place now and it's creating like a huge Paradigm Shift right but also a lot of

confusion of uh ownership but also individuality you know uh if anything these social spaces is becoming anti-social uh in a lot of ways people feel more separated and isolated than ever right I would like to kind of hear your your your you know maybe this is their first time hurting hearing about that but as a game designer I feel like this kind of ties into a lot of how you guys think like what what are your feelings about this description of what people are kind of generalizing this generation yeah uh great question I don't know if I have um you know we tend to fall back on answers we've come up with before that sound good um I don't know if I have one for this I think uh I think I think it's I think it's undoubtedly true that the internet has become an ingrained part of our Lives I love I haven't heard of that um description as the internet is the third place I love that as a description not

necessarily because I think it's how it should be but I think it undoubtedly is how it is yeah um I think uh is so for at the indie game Academy for instance we we really do you know we have spent years now iterating how to make our um classes just compelling interesting fun um we use a service called gather dot town if anyone doesn't know what that is it's basically Zoom but worse uh you have little characters who can walk around and when you're close enough to each other a little 2D like 8-bit characters when you're close enough to each other you can see each other's um faces like it's Zoom so you can see actual cameras um and it's like uh it has been incredibly um it's been amazing to me it's surprising I guess how much of a difference that made because we started by teaching just on the zoom like everybody else um and just having an actual space a little virtual castle with little virtual common rooms that you can walk

around and that literally makes the experience worse as far as a ux perspective comes from like people get stuck in corners and their internet connection is bad and they can't move their Avatar where they need to move them but just having that physical space with a physical character even though it's virtual um I think just allows memories to form more strongly and allows connections to form more strongly um now that's what we're doing is as far as you know everybody else and approximating this in person I think I've thought before about books in general um how I I sort of suspect that books will never go out of style will always have books and we'll always have printed books as long as we have trees I guess or something to print them on um and uh and I've thought about this from from a design perspective and why is it that we want printed books despite the fact that it's way more efficient to like listen to them on tape or have a Kindle or something like that like why didn't Kindle kill books because it didn't it definitely changed how we

think of books um but it's because of that like kinetic like maybe genetic memory of having something physically and having something in the real world and I think like no matter how close you get to approximating if we have if we had a perfect simulation like literally I can smell you I can see your entire body down to the poor a perfect simulation I would argue or I would guess that that still won't be a replacement for real life because literally if nothing else knowing that it's not real doesn't make it as effective doesn't make it as enjoyable let's make it as a connective so I think we're in a really interesting place where we are rapidly accelerating our Tech but for the first time as a species we're like maybe we don't need to do that or don't want to do that um and I think we will keep rapidly creating Tech because you know money and stuff uh but I think ultimately we're I

think we're kind of bouncing back right now in a way that I actually think is really healthy um we're going you know it was nice to be remote for a while it was nice to be away from people and on my own and maybe I want some of that in my life but ultimately that that real human connection the IRL is is just too important to ever let go of I think yeah I I think uh you're right like not everyone is fully buying in to this like Internet only [Applause] um everyone's like the corporate you know the government everybody's kind of pushing towards this like hey digital only format right but even the boss of you know of these huge tech companies are like no let's get back in here you know we're seeing our profits going down you know uh for whatever reason it's not you know we're not doing as well as we thought we would uh because there's some pushback um from all fronts right not just employers but employees as well uh I do

want to talk about this you know in our emails back and forth you were mentioning you know friendship first metaverse I mean the metaverse was one of those terminology like many other things that kind of really boom during the pandemic right um I think honestly I still think fortnite is at the Forefront they're doing things like they own every pre pretty much every license right now has a character they're the closest they're actually a game company they're gonna find the most success out of it but uh as a game developer as a game designer like what are your thoughts about this space that feels like everyone's buying in but we haven't really seen any huge advancement really right as we yeah waiting for Ready Player one it's like isn't this an MMO it's like how come we can't create MMO it's like what's going on exactly though yeah yeah yeah I think you know I think metaverse is such a hilarious term because we've had

air quotes metaverses since like the 60s you know we had text-based multiplayer games I don't know if people know that we had text-based MMOs yeah we had we had uh you know you could type I head to the north and it says now you're in a library and it's text only it says now you're in a library and in here is air dog55 you know like we had that we had that for years and that's a metaverse um I think it's sort of you know there's people are aiming for a grander ideal of that I think the the interoperability the inner connectivity where you can travel from one metaverse to the other I think is a big part that's missing and that's supposedly the difference between a metaverse and just an MMO But ultimately we've had the entire Core Design principles of metaverses already ironed out via massively multiplayer online games um the only difference is we're trying to use them for other stuff we're trying to gamify now um so that friendship first metaverse that was uh I was working for a company called together labs they are most

famous for making in view IMVU um they were actually interestingly one of the first people doing a metaverse um same view is ancient Now by technology standards um and it essentially was just a avatar based chat room um so you could you know sit in a room with your cool sexy lady dressed up in cool outfits and talk to each other and they took a shot at uh at making what they called a friendship first metaverse I was a product called with me Unfortunately they shut it down uh during all these layoffs um but the core principle was can we create you know we we've all heard we've all seen the crazy toxicity that we experience online so can we create hey metaverse that's foundational philosophy is that it is safe inclusive um and is uh uh and and uses science to try to move people up a trust pyramid and actually create connections um and we had you know a reasonable amount of success with it we had a couple of really strong um uh we had a good uh base of real

super users that really loved it and we discovered some interesting things um but ultimately it shut down because it just didn't make enough money um and I think you know it's that's a good little mini case study um you know you can have the best of intentions with the metaverse you can say this is going to be friendship first um and you can design for it um but ultimately people need to have the innate desire for the thing for it to really like connect so I think maybe part of why Tech is falling apart so much right now um and just to uh Pat anybody on the back it might need it it'll come back it'll stabilize probably in like the next two years um but part of the reason it's falling apart is because I think we are questioning it so the innate human desire is not for 3D virtual space right now we're not like yeah I just I oh it would be so much better if only I had another virtual platform to hang out on um you know oof I just I needed a 13th

new chat message that I need to check on my phone um we don't want that right now what what we want as a species at least from my perspective is um is that real life connection um and and I think a disconnect from Tech I think we're all a little bit tired of tech there is definitely some tech fatigue going on on everything yes there is like a trending thing and it's probably one of my last questions I just want you to know your thoughts about it you know I've been kind of um uh kind of bitterly ranting about this like idea that game developers I mean the game industry is booming right on all fronts we're making more money than ever there's more products and uh accessibility right there's more Gamers than ever right I mean there's fortnite proper lies you know us right but as game developers I feel like we're still like the bastard child in the back seat on these Innovation you know the Oculus like killed it right they got bopping

Facebook but you know they're suffering right now because they took the tech and told the nerd to sit in the back and a lot of businessmen are making decisions on on like you were saying before like a lot of educators are not finding success gamifying right because they're not game designers first right if they're Educators and trying to use Game design principles uh to to apply to their lesson and it's not working or at least kind of working but not to full extent in the same way Tech you know they're taking the tools that we develop yeah on all these entertainment movies or using these crazy green screen virtual stages right using our Tech right but again it's like hey nerd go back there while we take it over we got it from here right there's just definitely a uh elitist attitude right when it comes to using our things and so the metaverse like you said yo we created this many times right successfully you know ever heard a wow you know but like again there's this stalemate of progress right when it was

hot it was like and I still love the idea of Ready Player one that encompasses everything right I love the best parts of Ready Player one yeah I love the best part and you know not the corporate ads and all this stuff but like the idea that you can jump in with friends and hang out and play all these different games I still think epic is the leading and probably maybe Roblox whoever like kind of like hidden hidden winners coming up but like there's definitely the conversation evolves around these Tech leaders who are not game designers who are making headlines and you know the biggest thing that's coming out from Apple this year is like oh they're coming out with an AR thing it's going to change everything it's like isn't that our it's like so I want to hear your thoughts like this constant feeling it is a feeling I can't confirm I don't have stats but there's a feeling that game developers are constantly put in the back seat of their Innovations and it I haven't seen take

away runaway success right where someone have taken our thing and just killed it right I think the closest thing is these virtual stages but you know at in truth like the really Innovative one they're game developers actually running the shows right they're not like you know visual effects artists suddenly learning unreal and they're like oh they're Kick-Ass more Kick-Ass that Tony your vet from unreal two on right so I know it's a loaded question but I want to hear your thoughts about this this is unfair you you hit me with the question we could spend the entire yeah yeah at the very end um man I don't know um I 100 get what you're feeling and feel it too and it's actually a pretty interesting point it's why what I haven't talked about too much um you know we are uh we're one of the so first of all um every form of New Media gets on by the previous forms of media so like when the radio came out there's all kinds of newspaper articles about how radio waves give you cancer

and stuff like that um and when movies you know when when when the Silver Screen or like gold screen whatever when movies started happening same deal um when CDs came out same deal um and it's just it's a it's a I think honestly I know I'm being kind of anti-capitalistic but it's a byproduct of capitalism I think um you know corporations have a um have a vested interest in protecting themselves from innovators who take their market share right right so uh and so it makes sense for the for them to to on the radio because it makes it so that the radio takes longer to be up be adopted so then the newspaper can like figure out a tactic to deal with this new form of media they can't handle so all of that I think um is part of what weighs against game design and game development and as part of why game developers are still not like rock stars yeah which they should be um you know they fundamentally change us on a daily basis there's I I work so

hard and and try to do the best things possible and heal people and make the world better and I do that because video games propagandize me too but like like in a way that I consented to that I loved um and I and I think essentially we're just still despite the fact that we are getting a little bit older now we're still the New Kids on the Block and so there's just simply less respect for it um as far as us innovating things that that people keep stealing and then taking away from the game developers I love that perspective I hadn't thought about that um I I don't I can see exactly what you're talking about I think I think the thing is like um you know games are a product that people don't have to do like we were talking about earlier um but because of that we've actually become really effective designers yeah um you know we've figured out we can't lean on oh boy do you feel fat like take

this this pill it'll get rid of your fat um we we simply can't you know nobody is like you're going to be so much cooler if you play this video game like we can't really lean on the traditional product design levers so we instead have to lean entirely on creating something that's compelling just because it's interesting um just because I want to pick it up and play with it um and I think I think essentially you know you said I fully expect designers to be the ones designed in the future I think that's true too and I came down here so I'm biased but like we essentially are the ones who who have figured out and on a daily basis practice creating things that are compelling for their own sake and their own sake only um yeah so yeah I don't know how we stop business people from stealing our ideas and then ruining them uh I think maybe that's just part of the natural ecosystem yeah um and uh otherwise all we can really do is keep building awesome stuff and and

do our best to support the right people uh instead of supporting those bigwigs yeah just to kind of tag on to that you know you hear this over and over again with Silicon Valley Engineers right they're first taken to engineering and making code was through games they wanted to code a game for their friends and themselves and that's how they got into it and like you talked and listened to the biggest influencers that changed you know tech industry that that their roots are from games it's just you know it's a fun way to get into things um I don't know if it'll change if it wouldn't you know if we're gonna get more credited I mean I'm seeing like even movies are getting better from Game Source yeah last of us is killing it right Super Mario Brothers is amazing but like there still doesn't I mean there are certain conversations where like I play this you know so every saying that and they're not completely shamed right but they're this definitely is like a distinction and disengagement

with you know it's not popular guys to say I play games you know or make games for a living it's kind of still look down maybe they gotta age out maybe I don't know right it's made tremendous progress like yes you know when I liked games when I was a kid I was just I was an outcast now that I like games I'm normal um you're uh what do you call it uh uh your your uh not respected but like more you're you're tolerated we're tolerated at this point yeah hey that's good actually that's progress we're like yeah on the progression of Gamers we're not we're not rock stars yet but at least we're tolerated exactly well William I mean I hopefully that was a painless hour but we are at the hour mark it was a great conversation this is the part of the time where I actually shut up hand over the mics for you to talk to the good people out there how to find you uh give attention to anything that you want to talk to them about sure

awesome man thank you um yeah it's been a pleasure to be here hopefully you enjoyed uh listening to all this so like I said my name is Willem dalvinthal I'm a game designer and a business founder um my students affectionately call me The Wizard Of Joy uh I I talk about Gandalf as my idol and I think that's why um and I uh focus a lot on uh gamification trying to bring sort of magic that we've discovered in games to other systems in the business world in in many different aspects of life and I really want to see a bit of a Renaissance in games I want to see more people building games and I want to see that in general too you know I if you have a passion for I don't know twirling pens I want I want you to be able to make a career in twirling pens um so I really try to be like I said tactically optimistic as much as I can if you want some of that tactical optimism hear about game design other stuff like that the best place to follow me is actually LinkedIn you can find me just by searching my name Willem delventhal w-i-l-l-e-m-d-e-l-v-e-n-t-h-a-l

um follow me there um and I'm around on a couple other social platforms but I'm much less engaged there my company is called the indie game Academy we are a gamified online school for game developers we actually tend to work with adult Learners a lot of people are switching careers so our average age is probably like 26. um and uh yeah we just make the most fun game development boot camps in the world like hands down I can't prove that with numbers but like just come and join one and you'll find out um you can find that at indicate academy.com and yeah that's about it great man thanks again for coming on I always love talking to games a fellow Cloud gaster it's just an easier conversation I just can sit back and I know I talk too much on this one but if anything I couldn't restrain my excitement you know there's so many uh rants that I've been kind of holding in uh that I just wanted to kind of feel your thoughts out there uh but thank you for coming on man as always all the

links that uh Define really yeah will be provided uh yeah check out the indie game lunch hour I forgot about that one there you go podcast yeah but uh yeah man thanks for keeping in touch I'll uh be talking to you and everyone else soon okay see you guys next time