PlayJob Podcast #1: Jay Armstrong

[Music] okay so this is a fun little podcast where we talk to game industry legends and just people who really have have made a living inside of the game industry and I have with me J Armstrong and my name is Thomas brush and I'm the creator of pin stripe and once upon a coma if you guys have not played those games you can take a look at the links in the description below they're highly acclaimed games Time magazine had a really good time with it in Washington Post was another magazine that had a really good time with the game so that's just me trying to I guess provide a little bit of credibility to who I am and what this podcast is all about now J Armstrong is one of the one of the nicest guys I've ever met for one I've been thinking about having him on this podcast for like two years I've been thinking about this podcast for that long and I knew I

wanted J Armstrong on this podcast but J just released I guess it's your first commercial release correct J that's correct okay first commercial indie game and that is called adventure pals so J do you want to explain a little bit about adventure pals and who you are yeah sure so she said I'm J Armstrong I'm a co-founder of massive monster a small game development studio spread kind of across the world we've recently or we've just literally less than two months ago put out a game called the adventure paths which has also been doing really well it's it's our first commercial release super excited about it we're lucky enough for it to be on PC and Mac the Xbox Playstation and switch and we hit that all as a simultaneous release which was that's crazy yeah it was a lot of fun oh man yeah so dust is settling now but the game you play as a young boy on a quest to rescue his dad from being turned into a hot dog but fear not you have your best friend

sparkles the magical giraffe who lives in your backpack and your pet rock mr. rock and on it you're on this huge adventure to rescue him and it's kind of like a platforming game wrapped in a kind of RPG light experience and it's just full of like wacky characters and sense of humor and and just like a lot of bright cartoony graphics yeah it's it's super beautiful like I I first saw the game he was two years ago probably when you and I met when we were at where were we at PAX when we met at least yeah yeah we're yeah we were in Boston at PAX East and I saw the game and like my game was next year's because if we were both with the same publisher and I looked at your game and I honestly dude I was like why why why am I signed with this publisher because I'm next to this incredible game like it was it looked super beautiful and what really stuck out to me was like the game feel like everything was so poppy and snappy and then my game was

kind of you know it was it was like a super alpha build at that time so I don't know I was certainly jealous this is certainly jealous of what you didn't tell you to stop being so modest like we were stuck by yours going like oh my God look at that that is beautiful and like people would walk by and they'd be like okay yeah that looks like Adventure Time that looks kind of fun oh my goodness what is this game Pinstripe well we had a beautiful like camera effects that like kind of we hadn't we hadn't put our game into unity yet yeah very flat but you had all this kind of depth from blood edges and span it just looked like a living storybook which was also you know I've got like you you're very kind to me and your introduction and likewise I really respect you and I've kind of followed your work for such a long time so for me it's awesome to be able to UM I mean we do talk like a little peek behind the curtain you and I kind of chat quite a lot but it's nice to kind of sit down and have a conversation about indie game development and the industry and making things and hopefully we'll share a few secrets with each other and stuff like that so thanks Val you're on yeah dude absolutely so something that a tradition I want to

start with this podcast as we drink beer together because beer is fun and it makes you have better conversations at least if you have maybe one or two so I was wondering did you bring a beer to the show I did and you said to bring your favorite beer so yeah I'm currently in in Vancouver in Canada and it's a noun that loves its craft breweries and this is a place that I've visited it's a really cool place Called red truck brewery and this is their lager so this is red truck lager oh nice well I got with me Elysian space dust I don't know if they sell this anywhere Wow you were there it sounds like a kind of psychotic like it kind of looks like a psychotic beer like it it looks like a psychedelic drug but it's it's just it's a high-gravity beer at that very least you know it's a so if I can drink one beer I'm good you know I've got a nice little buzz going but that's that is my

favorite beer currently this week it's super hoppy and it's an IPA so dude do you want to crack them open I'm on the count of three I do let's do it all right let's do it three two one Oh beautiful beautiful sound yeah that'll wake you up it's funny my daughter she doesn't really wake up to anything like my dog will bark like crazy and she won't wake up but if I crack open a beer she wakes up immediately she's like stop having fun dad exactly I think she wants some anyway dude cheers Cheers all right all right all right that's good okay so let's talk dude I have so many questions for you that they've just been running through my head all day and I'm afraid we might talk for like three hours but and you know maybe we will but that is clear my schedule do you have a secretary named Janice in

my head yeah yeah I wish I had it I wish I had an office assistant they could just answer emails for me because I was thinking about it I was actually meeting with one of my advisers yesterday about making some hires for the company because that's exciting yeah so like it's just me right now and I I don't know if that's the case for you right now so just yeah I mean very briefly we some massive monsters is myself Jim and we also work in association with Julian and Julian was the artist on the bench pals right right that's right yeah so like for me like I'm very picky with with artwork and art style and music and like um if anyone if you guys take a look at a pinstripe or once about coming you'll see that the styles are very consistent the music in the and artwork is all very cohesive I think that keeps people coming back like they know that I'm Thomas crush game your names like above the the name of the game and it's like yeah that's I know what this

experience will be and I want right yeah that's just cuz I'm an egomaniac but but really like it's hard for me because I've got to find like I've got to find some help but I don't know where to find that help and I think I think just filling up position of answering emails you know and social media management in having a Janus would would certainly be helpful I mean do you ever feel that way like you're actually not working on your game you're just working on your business yeah that's definitely a really tough thing to deal with we have had times where we've kind of had say people before they start their University course if they've got a free summer they've kind of come in and that's they've been really wonderful we've been lucky that they've been good people but they've also been so helpful to do things like oh good queue up queue up like little videos for Twitter every day or like a reset like if we're going to an event could you please find out who else is going and try and like give us some email collecting email addresses will do all the kind of emailing but if

you could just quickly do that for us that yeah that's really helpful just stuff all those stuff with the kind of the financials that's not sort of stuff that I would be keen to kind of share kind of give someone else but yeah it's a full-time yeah it's a full-time job running a business definitely and the fact that you're making music doing art and encoding and making the games and selling the games you don't know how you find time to to do all of that I find like having a business partner has been really good because a couple times when I've not been available they've been able to like gym like there's been an example where recently we had to do a lot taxes and it's a huge couple day job and a few things were going on we were trying to get a bench pal finish and he's like look I got this you just finished awesome yeah so that sort of thing is so helpful but on you go ahead no you go no I understand finding a partner and finding someone to work for you of very different things yeah it really is and my question for you is to get

back to the adventure pals you did a simultaneous launch now that means you launched on Nintendo switch Xbox ps4 PC and Mac and that steam and GOG I assume yes dude that's insane like that is and you've got such a small team I mean most most indie teams are small but yours is yours a small like what what what did that feel like what like emotionally like were you like freaking out yeah I think it wasn't just me it was I think everyone around us was freaking out as well yeah all they like you know ARMA games were fantastic there was definitely some close calls with some like without kind of just trying to be careful with what I say in terms of NDA's like we can't obviously we can't announce a release date until we are cleared through some processes with various platforms and things like that so trying to balance all of those

different platforms and then problems that might occur on one thing but not another so we might get through on one thing but not another one but would that hold back the release of the first one and just trying to balance all of that stuff was really crazy but also you know our game was like it didn't really kind of all come together as a cohesive unit until very very close like much too far at the end so that I was kind of handling that and then we had mapped ihu and I know you know very well doing I kind of the technical side and he was just kind of unflappable so he was really kind of I rock made out like he was just that he's amazing yeah he was delivering builds and just getting it done and optimising and across all these different platforms and so like I think for us I'm so glad we did do that because I know that you know trying to market one version having it everywhere at the same time kind of helps you know so if i've got on playstation then i tell my friend about it but he's only

got next he or she's only got an xbox they can then get it and there's no kind of like oh they gotta wait six months and then they'll forget about it kind of so I'm really glad we did it that way I know it was more stressful for some people than for others and I I hope we can do it again that way but I'm pretty sure some people will be less keen on us doing it that way yeah well what's your personality like dude are you the guy that stresses out and can't sleep at night or are you the guy who's got it all together and tells everybody to calm down I think I'm a bit of both I think like inner internally I'll be like kind of very stressed out and then there are other things that don't faze me and I kind of go oh my god I should be worrying about this I think there's like a part of my brain that isn't totally like moochmore in terms of some risks but other yeah me up at night yeah it's very difficult and I think it's really hard to maintain that like sense of strength which it is need like

I need someone when I talk to someone with a problem I need them to be strong for me and I then when they have a problem I need to be strong for them but if I'm if I'm flapping and panicked about the thing and they're not there for me I can't be there for them so it's it's really difficult but I think like overall it all went pretty pretty smoothly we had a long kind of window to get everything together and it was just kind of I think every launch of a game is probably madness in its own way well I think I think a lot of people don't fully understand why a launch is stressful especially if you're not involved like you're just like well just just patch it if it breaks right you know and like I had a lot of people close friends and family just say like this was like two years before I launched Pinstripe they were like just launched launch the game and I had been working on it three years at that point and I was like no no like it's not perfect like I can't launch it and they're like why can't you just launch it and patch it later and I said cuz

it's like the Titanic like if you're if you're setting sail you better hope that there are no holes because this is your one shot and that's how important launch is you have to have a good launch week now things are I think things are a little bit different like then like maybe a little different than they were like a decade ago because you could you like if you launch that's for example like a PS what was ps2 or ps3 a decade ago I don't know or maybe even Playstation if you launched a PlayStation game you better make sure that it was perfect but now you can patch things but there still is that sense of wanting to make sure that it's absolutely perfect because you have to make a splash in the ocean of steam you know you've got like 7000 games released in a year I think that's what the number was so you better make sure that your game is perfect when you launch it cuz this is your one shot to make a splash I think that number has gone up pretty significantly now as well so I absolutely agree with you and you

know you see friends and their games come out and they get like a few bad reviews and that puts off so many people it does it really does mmm how did you kind of how did you find yours cuz you I mean you like your reviews are pretty universally positive as they should be but with did you were you kind of launching and then patching like every few hours cuz I would say that I kind of had our first patch up within a few hours yeah rolling out so this might sound like what narcissistic but I didn't patch any I didn't need to patch anything the reason was because I'm not like you dude like I'm really anxious like I get like I had like pretty bad anxiety for like three years this was this before Pinstripe launch for some reason I got it under control in the most stressful time of my life but that my anxiety would make me over-prepare so I would I did so much keyway out sourced a ton of QA so everything was like that we basically

had a soft launch with beta testers we had like a couple hundred beta testers test the game in every little glitch that that was showed up I fixed so when we launched the game I wasn't really nervous about glitches I was I did get a crash report and that freaked me out cuz when you get a crash report in beta testing you're like okay what percentage you know what percentage of the market is this crash is it all pcs or is all Macs what is it so I got a crash report but fortunately that didn't affect the launch so yeah like we launched everything was really solid but you're still like if you're still anxious because when you launch a game you you've been dreaming you know you've been dreaming about this moment for years right right and and you hit that launch button and you and you're not getting reviews in like you get you have like one review in you're like what the hell like is nobody playing my game and like by the end of the first week you

you only have like 20 reviews and that really freaked me out fortunately like I think I think pinstripe is performing better than most indie games it's not it's not like a Toby Fox game it's not undertale or anything but it's it's performing pretty good and it's got a 9 out of 10 which I noticed you have a 9 out of 10 as well on Steam which congratulations that's a huge achievement well thank you yeah so but yeah that first week is is that was the hardest week of my life the experience of launching and that roller coaster that you have a couple days after we launched and actually I'm sounding right down I'm really happy actually with the way a bunch of powers is doing and we can compare to that later but yeah you reached out to me just went hey man are you okay and I just like Unleashed like all this stuff that I've been holding like ah I feel this way and what was it like for you is this normal like what you know and that was really powerful of you to do and actually since then I've done that to a couple of other developers oh

yeah I know you had it's similar responses so it's like it's it's it's almost like a club like oh you've been through that too I know what you're about to go through yeah I know what you're gonna go through I'll be waiting and I'll have a shoulder for you to cry on kind of thing you know and I think I think it has to do with really setting expectations because some of the indie developers including myself they're there there's still for some reason they're riding high off of the indie game documentary you know and they're like this is gonna happen and this is gonna yeah you're still like like you said you're like that won't happen to me but deep down you're like that's gonna happen to me right right and and so you're just you're waiting and waiting and you don't know what to expect and I think it's important for any developers to know what to expect you should expect $100,000 in sales perhaps in a year and you're not gonna get all that and if you have a publisher they're gonna take some of it and that's that's that's kind of depressing because it's like well how on earth do you survive

and the way that you survive and that wasn't the case for me I'm just throwing out a random number but the way like you said the way that you survive is you keep making games right so like the shelf life of a game is I've heard it's like three years on Steam they can stay greener you know for longer but but I think three years is probably the shelf life of an indie game where it's giving you consistent like sales numbers that you can predict now if you can release a game every two years then eventually you're gonna stack up enough games right but if you release a game every three years you're only gonna have one game released every three years you know and that's not gonna work so the question is how on earth do you hire somebody and pay them a salary to help you release more games that's the conundrum I guess that's the conundrum for any business owners how do you afford to pay somebody like a legit salary like a game developer how do you afford to pay them a salary is that I

think you need to either put them on points or put them on like a project basis where it's like I'm gonna hire you for three months for this project yeah you know but like just a rolling salary I think once you're in a position to do that then you are you're doing you're doing pretty well you're up there we are chuckle fishes in the plays of this one which wouldn't that be wonderful oh yeah but so you're saying so you're saying the work that you've hired out for adventure pals it was contracted yeah absolutely so so yeah so we would say like oh we need help getting these backgrounds done in time we know just a person to go to or we look for people and then we get in touch with like this is the work we'd like to do we'd like to pay you this much and they come usually come back like yeah that's great and then they do it and it's just like hiring like musicians to write this theme - but we've we've um we've done that with like a lot of a lot of the kind of animation and the sorry background artwork and a lot of the

elements to the pocket very good we haven't actually done any kind of like you know we'll give you 5% if you do X why's that because I think that is quite hard particularly with indie games like I think you could either it's almost a bit irresponsible because you might lead people to believe oh this is going to make five million dollars and they're like what five percent of five million okay great so I think I think it's that is kind of a dangerous thing but all they well they've been there and they've seen it and they're like five percent of nothing there Thanks so I was I was building out a sorry to interrupt you I was I was building out a business plan this week on Monday I just spent five five or six hours writing out a business plan and I was following a like a template that you that business owners should be using and one of the one of the sections was like projections and the problem with the indie game market in projections or just the video game industry itself in projections is it's so hard to predict

yes it's it's changing constantly it's always changing yep so like something I did before Pinstripe launched I was like okay if I can get jacksepticeye to play pinstripe which he did and I'm like if he gets a million views or like four million views you know cuz sometimes he gets four million views then if I can get 1% of that I'll be sitting pretty or 2% of those views to buy the game I'll be sitting pretty so I'd calculate those numbers and I'd tell my wife and I like look babe we're gonna be okay for the next year they look how much money we're gonna make and it didn't pan out that way yeah I don't know why like jacksepticeye played the game game grumps played the game matpat I believe I think he played the game with he played your game to you right map map pack I think that's his name yeah okay yes yeah he he played he played pinch trip as well so I had all these youtubers playing the game and they didn't they didn't translate to

sales like I have no idea why so my point there is that any sort of projections or predictions about how your games gonna do yeah they just don't really work and like you're like okay I'm gonna get a PC gamer article because I had confirmation that PC gamer was gonna do a feature I don't Lee I have never seen those do that much like they give it credibility but they don't really translate to sales I found that most of our print articles were before the game like significantly before the game launched and then after the game I think it's so much more exciting to be like oh look at this game that's coming out it's gonna be amazing and then once it's out they kind of like oh look at the next game it's gonna be even better and so I think but we we've recently had down TDM like as of last week or the week before do start a video series on the adventure pass but we've seen huge away yeah we've seen a huge pickup from that Oh douches rats thank you which has been like not yea which

has been amazing which is what which is kind of like just not to kind of go like oh you didn't you know oh look at us we got results from it but right it just goes to the unpredictability of it because we're lucky that he did do it and we haven't had all the guys that you've had do it but for some reason he did and fit with his audience and it's three videos so far hopefully he keeps doing it it's been a it's been a huge boost with yes astok but Wow but like we couldn't have predicted that we didn't know if he was gonna do it we didn't know how many people would do it and maybe maybe after we record we finished recording I can like we can work out the transition the conversion rate for his views yeah and and but I'm not sure if I can say that one on the podcast but right I am yeah it's been really good and it's just so hard to know and the other things are there's so many other variables like how long the game's going to take right the platform this is something that's really interesting for that I've seen like

going into it blind not knowing the different platforms that well like I don't have an Xbox or Playstation I only bought a switch because the game was coming out and switch and I was like ah he's so cool to download the game on launch day kind of thing and but it's interesting our game is like so cartoony so family-friendly that our Metacritic on PC is much lower than it is say on the switch because on the switch people you know they're starved for games like it's yeah it's also co-op so you can use the physical makeup of this which is useful because you can just pop them off and two people can play but where's PC market they kind of want serious stuff and deeper kind of things like kind of more RPG kind of type of games darker as well so seeing the different platforms is really interesting and seeing like which ones have done better than others um is also something that you you can't write a business plan for that Mike when he started the adventure pals the switch wasn't even a glimmer in someone's eye

like it didn't exist and it was and I think they're probably working on it in secret but we we never could have known that so yeah it's you just caught it's just so difficult and it makes it so hard when you're talking with family or with my wife about like well what do you think it's going to do you know how's it going to do like you have this conversation at Christmas before launch yeah and I was like there's a reason I've got a few gray hairs like no it's stressful I don't know don't ask me it's coming out so you'll figure it out when it comes most people most people in there you know and their jobs they're like okay I'm gonna make $55,000 this year like if you're if you're right out of college or something fifty five thousand dollars this year and I have potential to get a 10% raise next year so that's that they're like internal projection but for people like you and me it's like I could make $10,000 this year or ten million you know yeah you have no like it's so polarized you have no idea how much you're gonna make and that stresses you out like and I have

the same conversations with my wife like fortunately it sounds like your wife is similar to mine where she's she's encouraging and and we'll just say like Mike my wife is like I don't care how much it makes like I'm just happy that you're following your dream and that that feels amazing I mean she was pregnant last year yeah and I was like we weren't making that much money off pinstripe and I was like I don't know how we're gonna do next year I don't know if we're gonna be able to make it especially with a kid and she was the one talking me down you know I didn't I wasn't the one who had to tell her to calm down or something it was me who needed to calm down thanks for example that is so valuable to have her believe in you yeah it's it's an amazing feeling and it's weird once once my daughter Liv was born like for some reason all the stress went away I don't I don't know why I think once you once you bear enough responsibility on your shoulders like a certain weight

of responsibility on your shoulders if everything suddenly goes void you just you you don't care anymore like least that's the way it is for me I'm not as stressed as I used to be even though things are a lot more stressful now and there's a lot more responsibilities now why is that is that just because you know who you're doing it for and you're doing it to live or what is it now I don't know I think I think it might be instinctual so people probably hate me for this but I listen to Jordan Peterson he's this like he's as weird like psychologist guy and some people think he's too far right and her some people think he's crazy but basically his concept is that evolutionarily I don't know if that's a word evolutionarily or instinctually when men and women have responsibility put on their shoulders suddenly they're joyful about it when when you're like like that like the sense of being like having someone look

yeah having a purpose or having someone rely on you suddenly the anxieties gone I've noticed that I've been way more anxious in my life when I don't really feel a purpose and when people aren't relying on me when I'm comfortable and relaxed and everything's going great and I'm drinking beer and I have as much food as I want or as much money as I want and things are going great suddenly I'm anxious and I can't sleep but when things are tight and I have a daughter relying on me and now my wife is relying on me because she she's only working part-time now instead of full-time she's like working a day a week as a nurse suddenly I'm not anxious it's because I just I don't know I feel responsible it's cuz you have them yeah you have a goal we have a purpose and you have a mission and you're going to achieve that mission no matter what it takes like right I often see like people see like my wife just finished a PhD and she had my and we've come over to to stay in Vancouver for a little while and so she finished her PhD and looking for a job here and you know

she's got a PhD she's gonna get a job it's totally fine and like we worked we had a budget and we were gonna be totally fine she could take her take as long as she needed but she found it very stressful and I think it's and then you know I think it's like not having a purpose so it's like yeah she you know she just done something which was so stressful but it was so fulfilling and made her so happy because she was doing something amazing and she was achieving it and she did it and then it's like you've got free time and in your head when you're working all hours you're like I'd love to just kick back and watch like ten episodes of my favorite boss set but if you do that you're just like Oh guilty I shouldn't be doing this I should be doing something in my life so I think maybe thought that's what it could be it probably is you know and there's a person in my life who I won't mention who it is and this this individual has everything that they want and they're comfortable and they spend most of their time just at home alone and when I say they have what they want I think they think they do and they're

always stressed about the dumbest things like the laundry or like what they're gonna eat for dinner like those things for some reason those things stress you out way more I've got this and then like money when when things are tight with money I don't know why it's like the it's like this sick American condition I think maybe it's just like a Western condition because my brother and I talk about this a lot and we kind of say like your problems are always relative to like the size of your your world so if if you're sad at home all day and all you have to decide on is what you're having for dinner that's pretty that's pretty stressful that's the only thing that's pretty that's the one decision you've got to make yeah and like things like where the tasks fill like the time you have allotted so even if you've got like three days it's gonna take you three days it's got an hour you're gonna do in an hour kind of thing so you're in a setting where like you're you're you're world really like if you've got you know you've got your wife and your

daughter and you need to provide for them by this amazing business that you started and you you know succeeding in that's like that's purpose that's Drive and you're doing something in your you're achieving it and so little things you don't have time to worry about what's for dance I don't care I make sandwich whatever it's not important yeah this is what's important exactly I mean it did you before you were married you were running you were running massive monster correct yes how did but did you have a like a shift in mentality when you got married like did did did the purpose of massive monster or the point of your career shift at all I'm not saying it should I just I don't know no it's it's a good question so Fiona and I have been together just over ten years and we've been now out for a little lesson too so I was living with her for two years okay but I think like as I mentioned she was sort of doing a PhD so a lot of stuff that kind of she had to travel to

Africa a lot for that so a lot of the kind of more risks would kind of went on while she was kind of away like we kind of took on various works and things and I kind of gotten done before so that it wouldn't kind of you know I don't know if that's if that's a good answer but I would say I am yeah so I would think that maybe if we tweak it I think that will definitely like crystallize a lot of things right exactly and for me like the this thought process of thinking my identity would be lost when I got married or my identity would be lost when I had a kid this is what gave me is like this massive sense of urgency when I was younger because I like I knew I wanted to be a like I own a video game company like that was my dream and I knew I wanted to do that but the moment I got married and think the moment I had a kid I was like that was all wrong like I was wrong in thinking that I would change because that's just

who I am I'm a game developer deep down I like to tell stories you maybe maybe you met the right person who would never fought you in what you did you might have maybe you met someone who's like no time to you know become a doctor now by the way you know that right exactly and that's that's what kind of makes me think like it really is important who you surround yourself with as a notch um death I I've I've been really intentional lately about like I met this guy he's like this really successful restaurant owner he owns a bunch of pizza places in my city and he's like super successful and I met him at the pool and I and I was like I want to get to know this guy so I I just texted him I got his number from a friend and I texted was like I want you to tell me how you made money and like my whole thought process there is it doesn't matter what business they're running whether it's an indie game studio or a pizza company like you you need to make

sure that you're spending time surrounding yourself with people who are successful because mainly because how you grade yourself is relevant to who they are and they're great so like let's say this guy is like I would give this guy an A+ because he's he's really successful he's running these businesses and he's not stressed out he has a family like he's a successful guy if I didn't know this guy I would grade myself as an A+ but now I'm in a you know or an a-minus and that's important because I want to grow and I want to I want to become an a-plus and I think that's why it's important to spend time with people is especially with people like you to grow from them you know what I mean yeah they say you're the some of the four people or the five people you hang out with the most and if you if you know if you're listening to this think of the four or five people you hang out with the most and you know you that is absolutely true absolutely 100% true yeah and it's great that you can do this

sort of podcast and you know get people on who have had experiences and doing things that you know not including myself but like people who are much more successful and kind of find out their secrets and just kind of you know get to know them and and yeah like you say grade yourself against them and that that's a really good kind of way to push yourself I was fine like you hope you have a problem the best thing to do is find someone smarter than you and ask them to help you and that exactly is so simple like just just do that yeah now is that is there anyone it J is there anyone that you reached out to prior to adventure pals like an indie game developer or a studio of some kind to help you know how to launch your game yes well more just like general just like I kind of similarly to you like I kind of try to make a rule of finding successful game developers and trying to have a beer with them or a cup of coffee

or lunch or something whatever I can do so I didn't I've met and I was I was kind of saving this to the the cheat codes but at the end you know I've met like a bunch of developers through events but also whenever I moved to an area the first thing I do is like find out who's in the area making games and then send them an email and um you know the really cool thing is that if they're not too busy they will we'll get back to you so they really will they want to help you successful people want to help people I don't know why because you you would you'd think really successful wealthy people aren't like but they they want to help you which is crazy sure and I think they probably remember what it was like or they had someone else do that mentor role I think you like you know you've made it when someone asks you to be their mentor oh so yeah so I mean like reached out to a bunch of people um I had lunch with Jamie from from clay and he was just

fantastic i as i said i'm currently in vancouver i I sent him an email he just like go back to me straightaway and was like sure let's have lunch wait who is this Jamie Jamie Chang from clay so I see that my listeners probably know who that is I don't know who that is sorry who is that yes sorry I'm just I was just like so like excited about it I didn't think too that no one knows so Jamie Chang started clay with a with one or two other people I believe they they put out don't starve along dude you met that guy yeah along with mugs a ninja invisible ink a whole bunch of stuff and that that like that that's awesome is like my like that would be that's where I want massive wants it to be like that it they are fantastic they have great things like no crunch they put out amazing content that's interesting and always no they wouldn't you know just put out another platform or another top-down road like they they like they're always creating something

interesting and compelling and like speaking with him that is one of the things that they do they have they have tons of ideas that they'll just chuck out because it's not interesting it's not innovative one of the most important ways to get noticed is to do something interesting yeah but yeah there any things are there any things when you met with with wasn't him Jamie when you met with Jamie did you leave the lunch or whatever like like thinking I'm doing it all wrong like I'm totally missing the boat yeah I mean yeah that's good you know totally like I learnt more from him in an hour and a half now I did like three years of running my own business like really like he like I think pretty quickly he realized I wasn't some like Big Shot game developer but I was planning on my way out kind of thing I think that maybe the email id sent him was a little like a little bit like upping myself yeah but if he was brilliant like he was so much fun and I'm like so grateful he took the time out but I learnt so much about how to run a game development business and

literally like an hour and a half and he really told me a few things that made me understand a few things about the way we've been doing things about the kind of numbers we've been thinking of and budgets and things like that and kind of really gave me kind of a serious grounding although obviously he's in a huge like much much bigger lis but I you know he's such a great guy turned out we went to rival schools so like that no way yeah in back in Hong Kong he went to I went to West Island school and he went to Island school dude 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 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 there was kind of a lot more out there that I

wanted to see it's a big world you know um I'm 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 there 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 explainer 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 there's a huge indie game scene in Vancouver it's it's amazing I know I was gonna talk about that right right right so we can get onto that in a sec sure 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 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 move along again soon and obviously our families has been faces still in the UK and massive months is still based in the 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 their studios are there funded by the government I think that's right a lot of ways yes what's that all about it depends which state or province you're in currently which one it is but some of them offer things like up to 50 percent of your employees salaries back in tax credits it's 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 don't starve it here also map Thorsen's here who made tower 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's here I can definitely recommend you can go like I went along kind of by myself so 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 adventure pals and everyone kind of flocked 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 No you know is this guy for real or not like is he 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 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 the North America Europe and then you grew up in Asia that's wild

then I 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 a different place now like when I was there it was kind of honored 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 as I was a toddler in Tibet and I had like I had blonde hair and all her clothes would like touch my hair this is white guy yeah exactly what is this crazy he's like it is heard but he's a baby what why is he got like yeah 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 I 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 was 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 in 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 it's very safe like there's great transport so you go off have beach parties and sneak into bars and do all

sorts of fun you know stuff and I just kind of tinkered and tinkered than tink it and I decided like wouldn't it be fun if I could make a game nothing more than that and I made a game and I discovered while I was making it that you could auction these games on a website called FTL which is still around but you would put your game out there and people would bid on it and it was very exciting because it was real money and and the bids would go up and there'd be a bidding war and I don't like know about this I did not do not know about this oh my no FTL after that was just into new grounds all day oh well I guess where I was launching my stuff what's what you still launch but this is how you found a sponsor oh my goodness I was such a neat dude I'm always I'm always way behind back in like 2011 or something like that so it might have been like something I can't know when koma was but it might have been August 2000 2009 but the thing is that the sponsors flooded in regardless

you know when I wrote when I launched on Newgrounds like I remember it was the best feeling in the world I got an email from I think it was armor games and they were in which they published pinstripe and they also published adventure barrels I think they email me and they're like we'll pay you a thousand bucks to do an exclusive sponsorship like I know it was I think it was a non-exclusive and I was like I was like yes right away yes and so they paid me and I went to the pool with my friends and I got I was like I was 18 I was like guys I just got a thousand bucks for selling a game and they thought it was like the coolest thing ever and I think that's best a moment for me when I was like this is what I want to do because what's correct this is what's crazy is like I was in a band and I got the same sort of rush of being on stage playing for people yeah when I got that check yeah I was like this I'm kind of a rock star like I'm a rock star like an indie I'm an indie

artist but in a different way right is that how you felt I feel like it's exactly the same thing and like can running or not running because obviously we're partners but like doing the company it feels like it's still the band like it's it's it's a continuation from managing the band and like trying to get shows and get things organized and having creative people who inspire you and so yeah I mean it's 100% the same thing I see it's like a direct continuation yeah from that so it was it was in your teenage years when you realized you wanted to be a game developer no it was very early 20s I think like basically where I did okay want to be a game developer when I made that first game and then I made money out of it and I was like okay well I'm gonna still carry on like pursuing what I'm gonna do and I didn't like asset banner don't really have a clear direction I kind of thought right right I did a degree in government politics like maybe I could be some kind of think-tank or so I was pursuing a PhD

and I got funding for that and then I sold another game and at that point I deferred my place and cancelled it I was like right this is me I'm gonna do this but there was a moment when I was having dinner with Fiona and so she has become my wife since and she just kind of said to me like what why don't you just do this why don't you just do the games and this like intense feeling of like stress came over me and I think it was just me going yeah why don't I do this I could just like yeah like why I'm such an idiot why didn't I think of this like obviously this is what I should do it's crazy how that happens dude like for me so many missed opportunities or at least opportunities that were right in front of my face it took me like two years to actually pursue them and like the fact that I missed out on this FGL thing just baffles me what I mean but to be fair to you it was a good way to meet sponsors so I think I did one game on

that and then after my second game I just went directly to the sponsors and said like this is the game and I think one of them said like put it on FGL and will bid it and the other one was like I'll just give you an offer right now and I was like that offer will do thank you very much well Jay explain explain what a sponsor is for the listeners who don't know that era yes so the flash gaming ecosystem was kind of full of like people who just kind of had access to a program called flash where they could kind of very easily make games with like and learn their craft as they went and I think this has been so valuable to developers like me and you as well and a lot of the people who are now making indie games but what would happen is you'd create this game and a company such as just trying to think almond mama games obviously we should mention them because they are publishers for our new grounds and ion games right congregate sure those guys would then pay you a certain amount of money to put

their logo at the beginning of the game and what that meant is that your your game was essentially an advertisement for their website so it would drive traffic to their website and because this was kind of at the very either before mobile gaming really took off or like at the very beginning of it people to play games would go to these websites and they would sit and like when they should be an IT class whatever like playing as little games I want to hear in the comments whoever's if any of you were it was the student like the high school student who would play games in the library before class started like I did please let me know in the comments because it was just it was such a nostalgic time like for me like I would get to school early and I think you're a little bit older than me but like I would get to school early you know when you'd play a flash game where like you you shoot Osama bin Laden and then and then you hang out in the library and read manga or something like that was like what every teenager did or at least you know the nerdy teenagers like like I was you'd get on addicting

Gamescom and or tea Gamescom was super fun I don't know if you ever went to tea games games tea games was like this super like their brand was so distinct it wasn't like going to indie game or addicting games.com and seeing like this plat of like random crap tea games was like 1 or 2 developers and they made these skateboard games like you could skateboard they also made a bicycle game pool was kind of like a trials game but they had a brand that looked very I don't know how to describe it but I think it was it was like a European company like they were based in in like London or Scotland or something and they it looked very medieval I don't know how to explain it but it was just really classy looking and their colors were always green and brown and gray what happened though was they were like the one website where everything was consistent and it was like it was like a

badge of honor for flash games like these guys make flash games and they're very very good what happened is they I think they sold out just like you and I sold out in a way you know we they were like they got money waved in front of their face and they sold i think they sold to a company and then immediately like a week later after they sold sold sold out to a company it basically turned into a congregate or an addicting games where it's just a bunch of games would appear on the site just crap games you know the majority of addicting games games were pretty crappy but that was like that was like a huge high point in my life I was in middle school at the time actually and just being able to play those games for free with your friends sort of sitting over your shoulders on these clunky computers was a special feeling you know yeah absolutely I know each and there was so many ideas as well so many cool ideas and it's so good that like so many of the people who were making those things

are now now kind of making console stuff like that it kind of says something that you know you're you KOMO is you know started its life as a flash game adventure path started its life as a super super adventure pals never give up salads life as a give up give up to as a flash game and like take for example on the switch snip eclipse that's that's made by Tom bond and his brother and they were the super flash brothers and they started out in flash games you know and it's it's really cool that this this kind of has kind of gone on to be indie games kind of as we and yeah and the amazing thing about it as well as you you get to make a game every two or three months from start to finish and you learn so much from that you learn so much and you know I'm sure if you go back and you look at your early games you like oh my god what was they thinking and I mean we're kind of lucky to have that like learning cycle where it's like okay I'm making this now I'm gonna make this okay well that didn't work next game you know and you within a year you put out four or five games and they'd all like you know you'd

be learning from that and that kind of informs the games that we make today and I think I was trying to start now going from nothing from zero to console games that did a huge like educational gap and exactly well in what school and then we can move on to cheat codes what's cool is is flash games are like the perfect prototype yeah they don't take a long time like maybe three months to work on for me I think it took me six months to make coma but I was like while I was in school you know like you know you release this game and then you can get a feeling of whether it's a viral if it has a virality to it you know you could figure out if it's actually being enjoyed the problem with with pinstripe for example which was not a flash game it was just a game that I wanted to make I spent five years on it and it was a huge risk because I had there was no prototype there was no I wasn't converting a flash game into us into a steam game or a console game so the risk

I was lucky because it was actually successful but it was a super risky move to make but I mean I see so much of what you did in in comer and yeah I'm black so I'm blanking though there was another one skinny skinny yeah in pinstripe like I see I see what you've learned and you put it into pinstripe definitely I mean like there wouldn't be a pinstripe if there wasn't comer and skinny that's true that's true there is a distinct style I guess that I did learn when I was doing flash games that's true so that's this portion of the podcast now for those of you who are listening and you want to listen to the remaining portion of the podcast and that portion is called cheat codes head on over to the my patreon page I mean click the link in the description head on over to the patreon page and subscribe there's a tear I think it's probably I haven't even launched the patreon page as I'm recording this but it's probably gonna be a $10 or a $15 here if you subscribe as a patreon supporter you can actually listen to the

remaining portion of this podcast and this is a huge part of the podcast and this is called cheat codes and cheat codes are basically three cheats that Jay is going to give to you about what he has learned in the indie game industry these are things they that a lot of us don't actually know about but once you figure them out they actually give you a leg up in the industry so thank you guys for listening so much please click the like button subscribe button and feel free to comment in this in the comments below and Jay and I will answer as many questions as we can [Music]