Session: Quit Your Job… Then Join Duolingo? The Unexpected Journey Of An Indie Icon - Nicoll Hunt.

Nicole Hunt from Dualingo. Quit your job, then join Duolingo, the unexpected journey of an indie icon.
Welcome, Nicole. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi, folks. Did you know that when you do these talks, you can name it whatever you want? No one asks any questions. Um, hi. Thank you for being patient. Um, yeah. So, so I'm here. I'm going to give a quick disclaimer. Like I'm here as part of this indie insp. But um I'm going to be honest. I'm I'm

not indie. I I was but but I'm corporate now.
I know. I feel I used to feel the same way. Like I had a good run, but the past is the past. Like I used to be this super cool indie mega star. Those documentaries made about me and I traveled the world spreading the dream of the indies. Made loads of really cool games. But like I had a good run, but it's over. It's over. Like I'm I'm corporate now and that's all good. Yeah, the beard was cool, but it's the past. Let's move on. Move on. Come on. It's all good. Now I synergize. Maximum impact. It's what I've always aspired to do. And now look at me. I am on stage doing it. What a dream. Um I'm contractally obliged to mention that Jillingo is hiring. And that's that's good. That's why what I love hitting corporate messaging beats. I love um finding growth vectors and then then extrapolating to the moon, thinking outside the box. This is this

is Oh god, what what happened? I used to be so cool. I used I was a megaar. People used to speak about me in the same breath as the guys that made Super Meat Boy. Not a lot, but sometimes, oh god, look at me. I'm just a wreck. A shell of what I once was. A husk of a man on stage sucking on the teeth of an American corporation. What a disgrace. How did it get here? What What possible things could have transpired to lead to this? The only way we can find out, I guess, is if we go back back to the roots, back to when I was a cog. in the games industry. So you may not know but 20 years ago before this I used to work for the real games industry the AAA games industry making console games like Colum clear rally great games like Colorally and not great

games like APB and I wasn't I was I liked it but I wasn't happy. I wanted more. I wanted to be I wanted to not be a cog. I wanted to I wanted to do everything have more control make things I cared about that I felt passionately about. And so that's when I became indie. God, those were good days. Oh man, I started my own company, I Fight Bears, cuz you can just call companies whatever you want as well. There's no rules. I made games like Maximum Car. Do you remember Maximum Car? What game that was? Brew Town, the best craft beer brewery game ever made, I assume. And of course, Fist of Awesome. Who can forget Fist of Awesome? A time traveling lumberjack. You can make up genres when you've got your own company. Oh, those were good times. Indie for life, yo. And I I did stuff I cared about. I got to focus on game feel. I I did more with less. I wore so many hats. I was a designer. I was a programmer. I was an artist. I was a a PR guy.

It was so fun. I put all my heart and personality into the games. And I think I think it came through. And doing things like that gave me empathy. I had to have empathy with my audience cuz I wanted them to enjoy the games I was making. So, I had to understand them. I had to understand journalists cuz we have this weird symbiotic relationship where they need people to say mad and I wanted to say mad So, it kind of worked. And obviously other developers I I didn't know what I was doing. They didn't know what they were doing. We all were all just kind of figuring our way to this crazy world together. Oh, those were so good times. Do you remember? Do you remember? Oh, look at me. so young, full of hope, enthusiasm, spreading the gospel about how great this India life is. I remember that moment. I was never going to stop. That's what what a time. This is it. That was me 10 years ago on this very stage saying, "Quit your job. Come be an indie like me." That's and in that moment, I was cry. I knew I'm never going to stop. I'm indie

forever. This is it. This is me now. So, I decided to stop. Actually, you know, thinking about it, I decided maybe I should stop. And there's no one reason. There's no one reason you stop on your dreams. But running a company is hard. I'm sure a few of you have run companies or running companies just now. It is hard. Not just like filling in the right tax forms, but like organizing other people, keeping everything on track. There's a lot in business. I'm rubbish at business. I'm a I'm a creator. I'm a creative. I made terrible business decisions. signed terrible contracts. Um, I had a young family and they need they need money to survive and I I was trying to help provide that. We had a mortgage that's there for a long time. You have to keep paying into that like some financial stability that would that would be nice and I'm not getting that from indie games. So, so I I met this guy Simon Hay who is co-founder of a company called Space Ape along with John Ner who's in the audience there a

handsome fellow. And um I had had a few chats with Simon and he seemed he seemed really cool and he he told me like all about Space A and he he showed me a vision and I bought into it. Space was a midsize company and midsize is apparently around 110 people. Um they were a mobile only company and they were part of the Supercell family. They'd been invested by Supercell and that meant they wanted to make things the Supercell way which these small teams and with autonomy. It was almost like like a group of indies in one big company and um and that's what I wanted. I I wanted to keep the India Rio dream alive but like with a little bit of stability over my head and they had huge ambition. Space A wanted to make billion dollar games and I I just wanted to be paid and make games that I cared about. So it was it was perfect. And so I joined Space Ape and I'm now a creative engineer. What's that? Great question. Um either Simon or John came up with the concept um I think but um but it was me it was what someone who's great at game feel and that's what I want to do

comfortable with vague ideas and concepts and and making them real by like doing bits of the art bits of the design working with other people having empathy with other disciplines. It's it's be like being indie but but more more stable. Um we would initiative at tooling to do more with less. All these things I'd learned from Indie was still paying off and being hilarious at dinner parties. That wasn't technical in the job description, but I felt it was important. And Space made Beat Star. I don't know if you've played Beat Star. It's the best mobile action rhythm game I've ever played. Um, and it was Spacer's first big swing post the Supercell Investment. It's one of my favorite games of all time. I personally had nothing to do with it. I think technically I made this the pause screen maybe, but you can't really count that. Um, but I loved Beat Star and I was one of the top 2% of players in the company. There's no proof of that, but I maintain it and I'm claiming as one of my my kind of um greatest achievements so far in the industry. And but what I did have to deal with was Crown Valley Customs,

which was a match three game mixed with car restoration. And that was part of the original core team, those those four of us. And we grew that team to 80 people. What a huge amount of people. And we we we mired the words of car restoration and match TV to be gameplay and we tried lots of ideas but that worked. It really worked and we released it to the public after six months. We did a first like live tech and from then we we iterated. We made it better and better and we launched it after two years and it was second basically second big swing. We're flying. We've had two massive swings, two great games. And so I'm not indie but I'm I'm midsize. I'm in this this happy middle ground where I'm making really cool tech decisions. I'm still making code that I care about and doing really fun stuff. I work with incredible people. My god, some of whom I can see in the audience and I love all of you so much. I learned so much from everyone at Spaceship. And God, this is perfect. Thankfully, I found somewhere that just works. And as long as nothing at all changes, we're going to be okay.

Oh, so things happened. Um, basically Crown Valley Customs, we had an amazing launch, but as you probably all know, it's really hard to make it in this mobile games industry. Um, and we even though we had a great launch and a great game, scaling it to the levels we wanted to reach was just so hard. Um, and very very expensive and we tried our best, but it just it just didn't quite make it. And BeatStar similarly had a massive launch, hugely well- reggarded game, but it didn't reach the supercell levels of like the billion dollar hit. And so something had to change. And the thing that changed was Space Ape. Spacape was going to become Supercell London. Okay. So I went to Supercell. I didn't actually join Supercell. Well, maybe spoilers, but I went to visit them. Um, so Space was going to come Supercell London. The teams were going to dissolve and they were going to feed into existing Supercell teams. And so I went to Finland. I met I met the Supercell folks and everyone's lovely. And like

what what a great way for Spaceship to to bow out and become part of this even like bigger empire. But I don't know if you're aware, I'm I'm just not built for corporate. I'm I'm indie. I like being small. I want to be the underdog. But thankfully something else happened which gave me gave me another option. This guy Simon Hay, you may remember him from earlier. He said he was going to spin out Beat Star into its own company and Country Star, like the the country music version of Beat Star, and I'm going to start an entire company based around music games. And I was like, "That sounds that sounds like something I really want to do for many reasons. I don't know if you remember. It's one of my favorite games of all time." I said, "Oh, I'd love to do more stuff with Beat Star or anything really with Beat Star." Um, and not just that though, not just cuz I love the Beat Star games. My granddad was a musician up in Scotland in in the 1970s and he recorded his own albums and he was like borderline famous in Scotland for being a musician and I really he was my idol growing up and I

aspired to be him and so like there was something about music that's always been in my soul in my bones. I've tried really hard to kind of like emulate that same success in music industry my granddad had, but I've never really got past putting up uh real on Instagram with me trying to play songs. But still the dream was there and there was this opportunity to take the world of music and games and do something I really cared about deeply. And so I'm now a founding engineer. Oh my god, how good is this? I'm I'm back to back to my roots, back to being scrappy. Simon and um everyone else, we joined um next beat. So there was like a bit 25 of us and we had a logo. Look at the logo. What a logo. It was so cool. My god, it was an exciting time. Um, Simon was largely bootstrapping the company, so he refused to get us a nice office. He tried to get, I think, the cheapest office space in London, which was the basement of a jewelry store in Hatton Garden. Um, it was a little sketchy, a little dangerous. Like, there was gas

leaks. Um, there was water leaks. Someone almost lost a thumb. It was it was a time, but it was fun. We were alive. We were doing all of these things. We were taking over Beat Star and Country Star. We were like adding new features. We're rebranding this this one line server backend and live ops pipeline. It sounds so small. It was a huge part of my life when we were trying to like extract ourselves from space and supercell technology and forge our own path forward. And we're designing new things as well. We weren't just like holding on to the past. We started making rock and metal versions of Beat Star, music trivia games, even education apps. What a concept. And so look at us. We were alive. We were living. We were cool. We had musicians come and play in our little moldy basement. What a time we were making. Oh my god. We were actually We had such a stride that Simon begrudgingly got us an even nicer office. One with windows and light. We're on Denmark Street in the center of London where the music industry was

born, where the soul of music lives. It was so fun. We had windows. We had light. Everyone was pulling together. We're we're throwing ideas around. We're trying new things. It was a great time full of hope and enthusiasm and energy. We started making my dream game, this rock and metal version of Beat Star. I'm not entirely sure I'm allowed to show this, but I'm doing it anyway cuz I don't play by the rules and we were smashing it. It's a small team doing big things. It's everything I wanted. We were in talks with huge iris. If you can think of any huge iris in your brain, we were speaking to them. there were chances we were going to work with all of them. That said, the music industry in general little bit challenging. Um, like they want their pound of flesh and and and I get it though. I we want everyone's their pound of flesh. No one wants to be left holding the bag. But it was challenging, but but we got we got this. We've got this. We've definitely got this.

Oh, some something's come along that we didn't expect. So, I don't know if you guys are aware of a company called Duolingo. They're a learning app company. Um, you've probably heard, surely you've heard of them. Everyone's got blank faces. Surely they're massive. They're a huge company. They've got the Green Owl mascot. It's a little bit psychotic, but in a playful way. Um, it's what it's one of the most successful apps of all time. 50 million DAU. And 20% of those 20 50 million DAU have a greater than oneear streak. So that's like 10 million people every day have come back to that same app for a year. And this is a no way statistic that I've been told I have to include. I'm doing this off my own back. I promise. Um they've got this crazy unhinge marketing thing. It's like full of like hiring personality. There's like look there's a butt duo. There's there's a there's a owl coming out of another owl's butt. That's wild. Um but yeah, like Golingo came and spoke to us. They were like, "Hey, we have

this music course. It's got issues and this weird next beat had this weird skill set and this weird kind of like positioning in the industry where like we were perfectly placed to help them with their music course like the words of games and music and learning. Oh, it's it's a really weird coincidence how perfect it was. But if we were to join Dolingo, that means we'd be giving up on our dreams. We'd be giving up these dreams of new music games. We'd be giving up on Beat Star and Country Sound. They'd have to be sunset and we just extracted them from space. Like, can we really be bought that easily? Are we really that shallow? Yes. 120%. Not a problem. Easiest decision ever. Um, and so Dillingo came along. They gave us the spiel. They told us all about the company, and we were like, "This is it. We're we're we're all in. Let's do it." Um, it wasn't quite that simple. Um, I did have to interview for my job. Everyone had to interview for

their job. Apparently, Dualingo did do this thing called due process. I've never heard of it before. I'm not sure I'm entirely a fan, but we did it. I I I learned leak coding. I'd learned Python. And thankfully, the Green bestowed us with jobs. So, now I am a staff software engineer at Dualingo. What does that mean? I don't know. I'll get back to you at some point in the future. work in progress. Um, but now I'm working on this music course in Dualingo and like we're we're trying to we're trying to take what they have and make it better. Try and think of new ideas, new game mechanics, take our knowledge from the games industry and make make this course better. Um, Jul is kind of different um to what I'm used to in the games industry though. And if you don't know what these words mean, what Swift and UI kit is and what Cotlin and Jetack composes, if you don't know what that means, don't worry. I don't know what that means either. You'd think that would be a problem. um because they do things very very differently to the way I'm used to doing it. Everything's very codeheavy. Like

there's no like cool tools where you just drag and drop stuff. Um it's just it's a very different way of working. They come from an app background. We come from a games background. You think they're the same thing. Apparently they can be wildly different. But it's okay. Surely I can work this out. How difficult can it possibly be? Apparently incredibly difficult. Um I certainly personally struggled immensely at this point. Um, we were trying to do things. We were trying trying to prototype new features, trying to prototype new mechanics, but everything was so slow and difficult. Um, everything had to be implemented through code. We're so used to working handinhand with artists and designers and product managers and doing everything together, the same space. And we couldn't we we just didn't have a a bad a bad craftsman would blame his tools. I think I'm a bad craftsman cuz I blamed my tools relentlessly. Um, though the existing teams at Dualingo were doing this for years, though, no problem. Am I just bad at this? I think

I'm bad at this. Why? If only Maybe there's another way. What if we just took what we're good at? And I know what you're thinking. It's crazy, but I can see in your eyes. What if we took games technology and tried to use that instead? And so even though there's no way this can work long term, what if short term we just ignore how things work in the real world and we just we take it upon ourselves to just prototype using games technology. And that's what we did. We took games technology and we wildly recklessly started prototyping together doing everything the way we knew how to do it. Everyone working together, artists and programmers and designers. We'll worry about how to do it properly later. And so I'm not here to shell for unity. I'm here to shelter for you lingo. But my god, when I opened up Unity for the first time in about 3 months, I felt like Thanos getting the sixth Infinity

Gem in my hand, coarse with energy and power, and it was a revelation. Suddenly, we could focus on game feel. We were doing more with less. We were cranking our builds every single day. Juling had never seen speed like this before, never seen iteration like this before. We're making huge progress and we were we're endlessly playing the game and getting feedback and incorporating. It was it was the dream. We were doing it so well, but we were back. But but for now, like we're just truly delaying the inevitable and the inevitable point where we'd hit a wall and have to admit defeat. But what if what if we could do this for real? And I see this in your eyes. I see the hope. What if we did this crazy thing? What if we took game technology and really used it in a real live huge multi-billion dollar app? I mean, we could do it. There is this way of taking Unity and incorporating inside existing applications, but it would be difficult. We'd have to get people to sign off on that. There's hundreds of people at Dualingo. 950 people work there. Do you know how many people would have to sign off to let us do something so insane, so wild, it's probably not

even worth trying it, but we we tried it and it seems so it seems so unlikely. There was no way this was going to happen. No way it's going to work. But our progress was undeniable. an existing team. They they helped in they they they took our um Unity prototype and they made it work in the existing app. Senior leadership were excited. We got to go ahead to continue and there's so much work to be done. There's so much more challenges to be solved. But we're doing it. We're doing it. I I'd love to show you what that it is. But I can't cuz as reckless as I am, even I am not that foolish. But I can show you these things. It's all these game experiences in Dualingo. If you can imagine how games technology could improve these, make them be done faster, airate upon faster. I mean, the future is bright. And so, I'm corporate now, but it's okay. I'm making fun stuff with awesome game feel. I'm working on a product with heart and personality. I'm working with

people that I adore, who I've worked with for years, and I am financially stable. And it's all because that I was, am, and will always be Indie. Thank you. And we're hiring.