The 2018 Failure Workshop

[Music] GBC 2018 it was excited yeah alright so I'm gonna get us started with a really uplifting talk about surviving failure so I actually this is my second time talking about this last year I gave a talk specifically on like the technical failures of brigid or my name is Kevon and by the way I made a game called purgatory while back and if you want to like nitty-gritty of all the poor decisions I made that's the last year's talk something like Brigid or failure is something I hadn't yet graduated to being able to add the surviving part of the title so that's what I look forward to giving this one I'm much more concerned here with just sort of the the post post partum depression kind of period of like when you have this thing happened how do you deal with it and so

as part of some research in preparation for my talk I figured I would look into what other people have already said you know because if I didn't want to just repeat what's already the combined wisdom on the internet so I actually decided to record some of the some real helpful nuggets that I found I read an entire article on how to become a growth hacker to to deal with failure I read the entire article and I still don't actually know what they meant another one is set yourself up to win no matter what I think that's just called cheating again not entirely clear on that one gamify your failure you know cuz a game that isn't enough of free to play grind as it is you want to make sure you get some real good nuggets in there and then

my absolute favorite was just remove absolute failure as an option if only I had known when I started this project that I can just not have failure as an option that would have made things so much easier but yeah so just what I found was a lot of platitudes and quick tips and no one really acknowledging how it can just really suck sometimes to fail and no one really acknowledged that or really talks about how to deal with that so here to talk about how things can really suck sometimes my name is to you again I started a company called stellar jockeys back in 2011 in the summer of 2016 we launched a game called Brigid or and that launch went so well we pretended it didn't happen and just tried it again a year later and I don't know how many of you

know me personally versus like the game versus a certain post I wrote one time some people described it as a meltdown I think that's maybe a little aggressive but yeah so the long story short is we had a launch in summer 2016 it went poorly and and that's fine like that happens but I was a lot more raw coming out of that then I really needed to be and that dramatically affected the next six months of my life and I also wrote some stuff on the internet which was maybe a little more spicy than it needed to be but now 210 thousand people have read it so that's kind of a little too late to put the genie back in the bottle but yeah so why did I feel so burned I did and I accidentally there

were just a lot of things it was my first time shipping a game and my first time really committing to an experience of that kind of magnitude I mean the only other thing really commenced for it's a game dev especially when you're young like I started we started working on brigid or when I was 23 was like going through college and there's other things to like help relax you on that so one of the biggest things is expectation versus reality and for me there was a huge gap between what I expected for the launch of brigid or and what the reality was its natural for though they're there to be a disparity there and one of the kind of frustrating ironies of being a more experienced developer is that you learn to better attune yourself to like tune those expectations to what is likely to happen but what ends up happening is that at

some point there's a moment of reckoning or maybe if you're lucky like a period of time in which those two things come together and if that happens very quickly like with a game launch when you have this kind of catastrophic realization that I've made a huge mistake then that can be very jarring ideally making that shift it should be either it's a small shift and it's gonna be a soft experience or you have enough time to gradually bridge the gap what happened to me in 2016 was more something like this so there's actually a great film called 500 days of summer and there's it's a great movie on the whole but there's also a segment as a few minutes long that I think very

succinctly just describes and illustrates not only the difference there but the impact that that can have now the the caveat here is that it's not that we shouldn't just lower our expectations I'm not telling anyone to do that but I think there's kind of a third step you can add which is aspiration versus expectation versus reality right we can aspire to be the best and you should like there's nothing wrong with with striving for that but you need that kind of middle-ground of okay what what what's actually going to happen because if you don't protect yourself with that then you can end up with this kind of whiplash that happens when you have to reconcile those things so the second thing that I did was that I because I put everything into the launch and I sort of just assumed that things were going to go well enough that I would be fine when it didn't I had

nothing left in the tank to help cope with the failure so I was just kind of stuck in this awkward situation afterwards and I wasn't I got into this cycle where anytime I was getting into any kind of recovery any energy that I was getting back and he's a lot of you was immediately spent on working on the game so as soon as I got got any of that back I would burn real hard for like a day or a week or a month or like however long that I had that juice going for and then I would put myself right back to where I was the day after that launch and the third thing is that I was you know we talked about you know burnout and then crunch a lot of these things it's different to be faced with that yourself and then to have to actually acknowledge that you know I'm not able

to work or you know to continue at this level of performance that I had been going on for a while because it's it's kind of a it's a frustrating thing to admit and I in that period afterward I was like I'm just gonna keep working the way I have been the last couple years and I couldn't accept that it's just so okay to have a hard time you need to have that kind of down period where if you go through an experience like a really bad launch that you've spent five years on there's there's gonna be like you need time for that fallout to settle and to give yourself a chance to recover when you go through an experience like that you have two jobs which is to get better and was what I described with don't like immediately burn yourself back out and also don't make things worse I got real close with that post that I showed earlier if that had been

tonally a little bit different or maybe you know under different circumstances that could have totally blown up you know in a bad way it was you know it worked out okay for me but you know don't this this kind of stuff feels real good but that that impulse is is you have to be very careful about the one time I think I did handle it much better was following our early access launch I was getting hassled by a customer not even a customer a person who was suggesting that our you know or informing me politely that our price should be down at $15 and it was it was one thing to like get a cup everyone gets comments and stuff but one becomes like a daily repeat and like genuinely confused like why didn't you listen to my advice that was when I you know responded with the whole price post with the Nickelback poster thing but that was

actually the second draft of the post that I had written the first response that I had written was a lot more inflammatory laughs it was a lot more obscenities and the if I had posted that the response would have been something a little bit more like this and I know people say that like any press is good press but I I think there's a line there so a final point is that this sort of relation of time to distance to understanding so one of the it wasn't until basically six months after our 1.0 launch in summer 2016 that I actually calmed down and got enough perspective on what had

happened to actually start doing something about it it starts addressing it properly both from a dev side and also from a personal side there's the the classic phrase seeing the forest for the trees this idea that you know I when you're in the middle of development you're right in the thick of it and you need to be able to back away a little bit and see the whole picture and like the only way that you can get that distance is with time and then that last little bit is that you have to get some understanding of your situation or to be able to assess it and once you have that opportunity to assess where you are whatever whatever has happened you know either game dev or personal experiences whatever that event in your life is you can then the the decision ultimately boils down to do you salvage whatever like spend more time and energy to salvage whatever thing you're in or do you step away and move on and so you

know happy ending in our particular case with Brigid or I realized that a lot of those mistakes were relatively small things that I could correct and so we dedicated another six months to actually fixing the game we relaunched it and have since actually made it to be a proper learning title so that that worked out okay and the there's a nice little quote from the director Christopher Nolan which is he just talks about how persistence is 90% of the battle then he goes on to say well it's actually 70% but 90% sounds much better but that something I had hoped to do with this talk and with other times that I've spoken either online or in person is just that we everyone wants to cultivate a culture of success and an aura of success around them it's the whole Facebook of syndrome

right no one wants to appear like they're having trouble and I think that's a natural impulse but at the same time that can be unhealthy for the community as a whole and I know for me personally it wasn't until I started reading about how other developers both in the games industry but also in film like you know other people who have started these big projects had profound issues either either failures or you know struggles and things and was able to start relating those to my own experience that I then was able to sort of pick up and move on but at the end of the day just comes down to this guy again meter now Magnum of the Royal Oasis the atomic

divinity DiMaggio to the world under all that the coal miners you don't develop see you got to let the government De Niro hit that you know Canada's macchiatos negative give up all right thank you very much [Applause] one moment oops nope that's you again hi hello oh hi yes thanks very much you that was really good and do you think that for yourself part of the issue is that because of social now a lot of what we do is accessible to all so you're watched constantly and did that have an effect as you were working on your game I mean yeah it's the definitely being

well I mean that's a decision you have to make right so we for a significant portion of development so I live in Champaign Illinois pollution is there but no one else and when we were just starting out I was too afraid to talk to anyone at volition so we functionally operated in like complete isolation for about three years and it wasn't until we started having something a show that I started actually branching out into social media probably started doing that a few years too late but okay so it sort of actually dressed your question yes I think having a presence on social media and having that observed effect or being observed has a huge effect on development but it also has to do with I think your ability to temper that as a developer so if you are someone for whom

like having you know the opinions of others like if that's a an important thing to you and especially I think with smaller teams you feel that more intensely that can be a great impact if you're getting positive response but you know on the negative side of that so I guess there's still the option of sealing yourself off and I think there are cases of giving a project kind of time in the incubator until you're ready to show but then that is an active decision of because like there's a lot of good and bad can come with that anyway sorry I hope that addressed your question but just thank you for your patience everyone so hi all right so we're gonna talk about the moon hunters mistake you might know me as the captain of Kitfox games moon hunters was our biggest projects

probably in press so far but we also released a shot at i/o last year and we just announced boyfriend dungeon woo and I'm Co editing textbooks on the side but it seems like most Indies that get press and attention appear to air to like on the side of waiting too long to release their games extending their launch date again and again for years and years and then if that's right for you that's fine and we're all different people some people have that flaw my flaw is the other side of the coin and I know that I need to worry about not launching too early because that's what we did luckily now I know the warning signs that I'm ready to share with you and this was 100% my call to make I want to emphasize that my team was incredible and they gave me all the power to make this decision and I made it badly so here I am I called it wrong back into early 2016 we were getting ready to launch our biggest game moon hunters was

very exciting for us we've been working on it for only a little over two years so it was it was ripe and ready and we've done a lot of promotion throughout the years in Montreal at events on packs and online with weekly live streams we basically felt like we were living in this giant hot spotlight and we had it had a successful Kickstarter one hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars isn't like breaking any records but for a first major game and a new IP from a new studio I mean four hundred percent and six thousand backers was very exciting and something to be proud of and I mean we didn't even have a mid campaign slump it seemed like it had its own word-of-mouth power it was somehow organically grow out there on the internet and in the years following I gave lots of talks about how to run a successful Kickstarter and I mean all this coverage and word-of-mouth it seemed like it was paying off we'd got into showcases we want award they were on the covers of magazines I mean we were bombarded with

publishing offers which we discarded and so I mean we we got a little bit cocky it was reasonable to think that it was a good sign of sales to come everyone that I talked to told me we had a hit on our hands we actually launched with months of cash in the bank and a contract that was ready to sign we had no financial pressure to launch at all and yet we still launched early in fact we had so much visibility and so much good fortune that our launch moment was filmed by a crew from PBS for a TV series on tech and culture which will come back in a moment the launch was bad I I don't know if you've gotten that from what I've said so far but we disappointed our fans I mean you can't please everyone of course but we did have to admit to ourselves that we'd launched with a lot of bugs and maybe I will definitely worse a few core systems that we felt needed serious changes so we ended up

with a mixed steam review user rating and the in the half like on and off in the launch month which kind of tanks our whole visibility Metacritic was not much better and I think honestly the hardest thing was seeing other devs especially acquaintances kind of treat me a little bit differently than they had back when they thought that I had a hit and now that I didn't it was different and to make matters worse a mainstream audiences were already set up to doubt the game's integrity I mean of course some of these people would never have bought the game they weren't our audience but it's still kind of like was not fun to know that our technical problems would prove the indie skeptics right in calling us low-rent garbage like that's not a good feeling either and there were measurable consequences to this problem this mistake cost us a lot this is how you tell it's a healthy launch week by the way our next launch went much better in terms of how the launch week went so you can see even if that peak is not as high

the fact that it's it's fatter throughout the days this is just the first three days of the launch week it means people who are buying it are telling their friends that's a good launch week looking unlike moon hunters which launched and the hype train hit this big wall so you can see which one is going to have a better next four days for example I mean launch dates don't determine everything about your revenue but it did determine a lot of the coverage and apparent success of the game for the next six months to a year I can't help but think if that we'd waited to launch the game until it was actually ready then our Metacritic and user reviews might have been much higher and all of that would have led to even higher spikes down the road which would have amounted to it additional hundreds of thousands of dollars this is what PBS had to say sales weren't great thanks BBS but that's what happens when you gain release a game that isn't ready and despite our launch day being better than a lot of Indies I'm very grateful for

what luck we did have I we could tell that this coming year we might not have enough money to stay in the studio at the size and the comfort level that we were getting used to and even aside from the money I mean I prepared myself emotionally for bad sales that's why I had signed this other contract beforehand but I hadn't really considered seriously that we might disappoint people and make what could be called a bad game we were heartbroken it felt like we'd wasted years of our lives making something that wasn't really worth all that time and energy it made me feel like I'd peaked and that I was old and tired and in hindsight we totally should have known better one youtuber went so far as to write me a heartfelt letter during the beta pleading with me delay the launch but I ignored that and all the other warning signs because hindsight's so great so why did we launch too early if we set aside the hindsight bias and think about the moment I'm gonna lay bare all of my personal flaws for you so that you can

see if any of this sounds familiar you might have a similar problem Indies often go around saying you should double or triple all your estimates and then double again and it makes me want to scream because production is actually a skill and it's worth practicing and so I get a little bit defiant when people start telling me you're gonna keep delaying your game hahaha your launch date isn't real in fact I got really like like you defiance and it is totally possible to release your game on schedule I promise but don't give up everything and obsess on that maybe and so it came to pass that each delay that we added to the game even like a week of delay felt like a personal attack on me and my production skill and I felt started feeling kind of fraudulent and so I irrationally had decided we couldn't delay again we just couldn't it was a law of the universe now which was incorrect and the team were always

getting a little bit low and I'm a cheerleader type personality so we weren't crunching particularly we were working pretty hard and finishing projects is exhausting even if you only work 40 hours a week you're multitasking you're prioritizing you're you're compromising and just finishing a game is is really difficult so I was looking at the team and we'd already delayed by a few weeks and I thought well you know I want I want them to be happy again let's release the game but really seeing a bad game does not make anyone happy it turns out and I also worried about launching next to a couple of other indie games and during other game events like GDC and packs and things and in the greater scheme of things I think there are actually much bigger things to worry about the quality of your game is much more important than probably any other indie game to be completely honest and this might be my very moonhunter specific but due to various factors we

undervalued the online multiplayer and we launched with it in a beta mode which we thought was fine we marked it beta still most of the down thumbs were bad online multiplayer related and they would never revise those no matter how we pleaded with them after we fixed the bugs and yeah we thought it would be okay if the online multiplayer took a little while that was incorrect and I as I mentioned we lined up this contract that was starting very soon afterwards and I'd already delayed that by a few weeks and so I let this external factor kind of influence me and make me think that we absolutely had to stop working on the game and it's true that at that point because I had scheduled this contract to start if I had delayed again it was theoretically possible that the game would then sell zero copies and that contract would be null and void and then Kitfox would closed so it felt like the right thing at the time to prioritize this other external factor and we did eventually do

okay kickbox survived moon hunters actually did pretty well over time some of it is my personal excellent luck I'm a very lucky person and I try to stay grateful for that but we also did work really hard at it we spent a lot of time fixing bugs and apologizing and answering emails we also spent about six months making a free dlc afterwards called eternal echoes and that did the core systems revising that I mentioned before and so that gave us kind of another attempt at attracting press and it gave us more of a peace of mind as well to leave the game in a better State that we were proud of so even if it hadn't resulted in a sales boost we still would have been glad that we did it and also making this would have been so much faster before launch if you have something you want to add to the game and you can afford to delay it just like put it in the game first because live ops is horrendously distracting and the reviews did trend in mostly upwards afterwards after we made all those improvements I think we actually were

able to harvest the goodwill that we'd built up from the Kickstarter update so that we were constantly making and maybe our community is more forgiving than the average team player I guess we'll never know one thing that I do want to emphasize is the importance of our launch party actually my team and I definitely felt like we received first aid from the Montreal community itself by hosting our launch party three days later there's nothing that can replace the feeling of people who genuinely are happy for you and and being proud of you and cited for you everyone on the team kind of wanted to cancel the launch party but we did it anyway and we were all really everybody on the team was also grateful that we did afterwards there were sad tears and then happy tears so if you're thinking about canceling your lunch party or making it hinge on the success of the game do not do that even if you have to make it BYOB that's okay but take your moment to celebrate that you did something and personally I was

actually healed by coming to GDC the week after launching I thought it would be massively humiliating and instead it was comforting even though a few professional acquaintances did treat me a little bit differently I did actually find out who my friends were I'm on the community who could share with me their experiences from around the world and cuz whenever I told someone about my disappointment more experienced Indies with llenan and nod sagely and tell me a horror story that was way worse which I never heard of like we only talked about success I mean all I say in public is moon hunters totally successful yeah it was great but for those of you who are in the audience right now please understand the games go off the tracks all the time it's okay you're not uniquely humiliated it's kind of part of it so that's part of why I volunteered to be here today because I not only want to combat survivorship bias but generally improve our culture and help us understand that that failure is part

of craftsmanship and all that visibility that we've created before didn't vaporize we I was able to do some hustling and get an indie box in the works and thank you jamie tucker for including us and you're cool steam Kross promo that was great and then after we ported the game to all three major consoles here's us porting it to ps4 when the the actual porting programmers in Japan at the time which was a little bit funny oh I wanted to mention that the halo effect is is totally real at least it was from moon hunters that every time we would release on a new platform our steam sales would get a boost and I think that if we had simultaneously launched all of the games on all the platforms which is the conventional wisdom we couldn't have done that physically anyway we were incapable but even if we had I think the halo effect would have been kind of negated by the fact that our Steam score was so low so it was really good that we were able to put the best version on the platform after we had kind of salvaged that and most importantly to the future

of the studio we've incorporated all of these lessons into our workflows going forward so our production and valuations from milestones are now less about specific dates and much more about what the deliveries themselves are and whether they are up to par so we're more willing to add some time to the schedule as assuming that everything is up to optic quality and survival the studio is definitely number one still in my mind Kitfox is not allowed to close but in the past we failed to prioritize beyond that so my own personal production neuroses would come through and kind of efficiency became more important than quality and that that was by accident because we didn't really examine it so now we're very clearly officially quality is more important than efficiency so assuming that you're not going to close the studio with your little you know Flair's here and there then take your time and make it the best you can because it's true what they say you do only launch once delaying your game isn't nearly as bad as launching a

bad game and reality is probably more important than your pride your team's morale will be better when they believe in the game and feel good about what they've made so if you're like me and you're prone to rushing ahead and you're an impatient person just take a breath recheck your calculations bring in fresh eyes double-check all of your assumptions we're applying all of this to development of boyfriend engine which is our next game so wish us luck with that we should have a milestone next week so we'll see and hopefully we're learning from our mistakes and making better and better games thank you so yeah we have plenty of time for questions for either speaker and just make sure to yeah go to one of the microphones please let's start the interrogation and don't forget to do your evaluations seriously though any questions are cool

actual questions not I have a comment maybe hello hi how's it going it's excellent this question is for you primarily I've had the experience where I've had friends who have like metaphorically grabbed me by the shoulders and shake and me and saying like you need to finish like finishing is super important and don't just stay in development forever and almost yell at me to you know move forward do you have like a risk like outside of like actual financial pressure like you're gonna close if you don't start releasing something like how would you respond to that I would say I am probably unusual it does seem to me that I am an outlier and that most people err on the other side like I said at the beginning I think most Indies tend towards just working in a cave forever on there perfect a dream whereas I am much more of a flurry of like let's just do it if and so you have to look inside yourself to see what is your nature and how do

you prevent that from calcifying because on both ends of the spectrum there are problems and I guess my I feel like my side of the spectrum isn't talked about as much its just seen as obvious whereas sitting in a room and working on it for way too long is less obvious somehow but yeah I I don't I can't answer for you in particular only you can know your heart but I would say that finishing is important maybe maybe look up production practices I think if we all started being more hygienic about how we estimate our tasks and think about how long things actually take us and calculate that and check our assumptions on our timelines then we'll all be happier if I could chip in on that sure the one of the biggest changes that we've seen in the industry in the last 20 years is the fact that I think the vast majority of us in this room when we're shipping a game we're shipping purely digitally right and that the environment for shipping a game has

totally changed right so you've got options for early access you can just get on Steam for hundred bucks now you can also do various forms of closed beta or closed alpha look at spy party look at saltzman's Overland what was the VIN G's current game Overland there's a lot of different ways that you can basically get the kind of feedback you need from a player base and like keep it to only the diehards to figure out are we ready to ship or not because if you've got a bunch of people like the people who would love you screaming then it's like okay maybe we should delay it but otherwise if everyone's like thumbs up then yeah that you can get a degree of external evaluation from people who don't have you know an influence on that one thing I'll mention is actually there are part-time producers that you can hire out there Felix Kramer is incredible there's a bunch of a bunch of part-time producers that you should totally think about throwing a couple

hundred dollars on because it's probably worth it to get a real professional to look at your timeline and tell you and look at your game and give you an expert assessment of whether or not you're ready to ship thank you both hi my name is Blake thank you my question is for Hugh you said you relaunched like six months after your first one a year so our first launch so early access was October 2015 1.0 was June 2016 up-armored our relaunch was June 2017 so year to the day it sound like the second relaunch was better or more successful so the week of our relaunch was our highest-grossing sales of all time and we we sort of defied the trend in that for most people your first year is basically like the majority of what you're going to make I know Jake Burkett is here in the

audience somewhere he gave some lovely talks about assessing sort of first week in first year sales and things like that for us our second year of sales is actually significantly higher than our first year actually ours was - yeah so my question is after your first lunch what made you think you could relaunch and then what decisions are like what did you kind of what do you think contributed most to kind of changing that trajectory and how to be successful yeah so a couple things one is just that there were some very discrete decisions that became very apparent were wrong after our launch so the biggest one is our control scheme so we launched brigid or with tank controls turns out no one plays tank controls anymore and in my mind so it's it's possible to be right and wrong at the same time so to me I was right in that yes tank

controls are the best control scheme for this game because we designed it for that I was wrong in that no one wants to learn tank controls so once we added added in a twin stick style we actually had a working variant of that before original launch and I cut it because I was like I am more intelligent than these gamers once we put that back in as part of the relaunch and a bunch of other you know there were there were very discrete decisions that I could clearly say these are wrong and looking at those in aggregate plus localizing and a few other things it was like you know I I think this is worth it and it I talked to a lot of people who were like this is and your launch sucked way worse than it should have so it was kind of like an aggregate decision also the fact that I was emotionally incapable of just stopping there so it kind of like wasn't really a decision but anyway thank you yeah I mean hit me up if you want to

talk later yeah I'm Chris my questions actually have a similar vein and it just really goes to both of you as to I know a lot of people when they have a launch that doesn't go well like their their concerns are that they spend more energy more time it's just gonna be spinning the tires in the mud and they're not sure like should they cut their losses and just you know was their timing wrong and they got to take their bed in the next can you talk us time surely there's at least some consideration as to that kind of like before you decide really double down on that effort kind of what goes into that sort of thinking as to whether or not here comes the next project as opposed to like sinking that you know all those resources back into it but that could be an hour on a phone I guess my my core advice there would be to to treat every game differently it's not that you can look at any given game and say oh this game did it that way I'm gonna do it that way every game has its own problems and triumphs so it is worthwhile to see if there are others

who have tried exactly what you're going to try and have failed to do so it's very hard to find failures but they are out there and I think you also need to ask yourself whether the costs emotionally and financially are worth the risk because we knew that we were going into this with maybe getting nothing out of it and we were okay with that but part of that might have been because we weren't completely bitter and burnt out at that point yet so it's different for every game but I would I would say about that is I think a lot of that has to do with like what is your intention as an indie developer like is this a one and done or are you a lifer because in my case we so my brother and I co-founded the studio together and it's we're in the kind of like indie games or Die kind of mentality where are our creations are so precious to us that

like we're gonna stick with it regardless and as much as he occasionally accuses me of George Lucas in the game I think you know cuz games have really long tails and I hopefully like I still play the original XCOM and people like that that game still has a living community and I mean should be so lucky but at the same time it's like if someone plays Brigid or in ten years I wanted to make sure that that's still like a rock-solid experience and I realized that they were changes that we needed to make to do that and we were fortunate in that in our case we're working on a second game that uses the same engine so a lot of the additions and changes that we made to the engine to fix brigid or it's like pluses we're just doing pre-production for game 2 so it worked out awesome thanks oh hi my name is Aubrey Scott I'm actually wondering because you both talked about the stories of other game

developers kind of failing being a really healing experience for you to need to hear and kind of commiserate together I'm wondering what you feel like would have to happen to make that a more normal part of the culture to kind of cultivate that and have those stories out there and for it to be more normal to that's what we're doing right now I mean I'm entirely serious we're like that was I mean I'm gonna be honest I didn't it wasn't my intent when I first like started yelling on the internet about how everything sucks my mind wasn't like I'm going to help the indie community I'm glad that happened and i-i've kind of embraced that but at the end of the day it's just part of it's just building your community right and like finding people who are in similar situations and commiserating I mean like it's you there's it helps to just talk to other devs in in all states of life

and again like I I have had a really wonderful experience with the with game development community both Indiana triple-a where I've reached I've cold emailed the weirdest people where there's like you know you're a technical director at this place I'm an independent game designer like please read this two-page long email and I've had people actually not only humor me but I actually give very thoughtful responses and I think just it starts with just reaching out to people and when you are going through a situation I mean I cuz we talk a lot we've like as in developers I've had a lot of private communications with with other developers who are having a hard time and other things like that it's not always necessary or even a good thing to publicize some of these things some of your your stressors but also like you know if you can talk to people about it or if you do have an experience that you think other people are going to have and could be shared or you know

someone else is in that similar situation I think if you contribute to that sort of body of knowledge and that experience that that can make a difference I'd like to add I'm in my hobbies I'm also the co-organizer of a feminist organization and I can tell you that any cultural change is very slow and it starts personally so anytime you in your life can notice when you are over valuing someone because they have this aura of success or when you catch you and your friends like admiring someone because only they've kind of perfected this Sheen just question that and really think about that and think about who your heroes are and what are the kind of values that you want to broadcast to other people and I think will make the world better thank you we have to call it there and I think that is a perfect note to end on thank you so much it was brilliantly articulate