The Art of Game Creation: Slim and Trevor of Valorant and Raid Base Live from LA Tech Week

we try to keep our team thin in the beginning when we are exploring design decisions a simple concept that most people can relate to is like the too many cooks in the kitchen kind of thing when you need to make a decision more people don't help in general unless you're missing like expertise or subject matter expertise in general but even then like you want to like glean from it a bit like just imagine trying to make a decision with two people in a room let alone five let alone ten let alone 60 people waiting in the wings for you to like come out of this room to like hey tell us what to make and you're like yeah dude like I don't know yet welcome to the gaming Founders podcast a show where we interview the founders that have shaped the gaming industry I'm Eden Chen the CEO of pragma a back-end game engine founded by engineering leaders that built the platforms for some of the largest live service games like League Legends fortnite Destiny 2 and plants vs zombies 2. pragma power services like accounts matchmaking and player data for the world's most

ambitious live service games and I'm Kevin Zane partner at upfront Ventures we're a venture capital firm based in LA and San Francisco I lead game Investments both in studios as well as the pick and shovel tools that power game developers and content creators to do their best work including pragma we interview Founders on their origin Stories the tactics that help them survive and thrive and key lessons for anyone interested in building the next generation of leading gaming companies learn more And subscribe today at pragma.gg gaming founders today's episode is a very special one our first with a live audience it was recorded live during La Tech week and features Steven Lim also known as Slim and Trevor romleski slim was a product designer and VP of r d at Riot it is known for always doing right by players also at Riot Trevor was a game designer and worked on League of Legends the duo co-founded valrin and then three years

ago started in a new studio called raid base we talked about how they got into games valorent and navigating the r d Gauntlet their stay small Approach at raid base and hiring and funding advice most notably we went super deep into the product development process and how they find the fun and figure out who they are building for thanks for listening and thanks again to slim and Trevor for sharing their wisdom please don't forget to subscribe and review the gaming Founders podcast and now on to the episode [Music] great um welcome everybody thanks for coming to the first live taping of the gaming Founders podcast uh I'm Kevin one of the co-hosts uh partner here at upfront Ventures uh we're an early stage investor been here since 96 and I lead the games investing practice because I play a lot of games uh and really this whole idea was actually my portfolio company Eden's uh Eden Chen's idea why

don't you share a little bit about yourself hey everybody I'm Eden one of the co-hosts and uh started a company called pragma we power live Services uh through a back end that does accounts matchmaking all the stuff that no one hopefully knows about unless something goes horribly wrong though uh but uh yeah just a huge fan of games my whole life and uh had spent a lot of time working with a lot of new Founders that are kind of starting new companies spinning at a riot and whatnot and thought why don't we create like a resource for people to actually be able to hear from uh more people and it's not just me having one-on-one conversations with people so yeah that's me so a real quick uh slim and Trevor uh I'll do a very very brief intro and then let them go into a more detail um slim and Trevor were kind of co-founding team of valorent uh and then so about three years ago now

yeah about three years ago started this uh awesome new studio called raid base and I'm excited to talk a lot more about what they're working on uh but yeah I guess why don't we just get going on on intros then and maybe just talking about uh how you guys got into games and what your sort of origin story is how to get into games um well how far do you want to go back so similarly we play a lot of games going up um I'm an 80s kid grew up in the sorry grew up in an era of Nintendo but I actually was denied one growing up in an immigrant Asian household um probably for the best uh but that that since I'm a pretty crafty kid I convinced my parents to get me a PC since that was an educational tool and um uh from then you know I've been um PC Centric as well say the other way to say it for a second but um PC Centric for a long time which then led to like early bbsing which meant a

lot of very early like multiplayer games um some muds then onto the blizzard train uh of games um throughout and that that never ended a lot of a lot a lot of Counter-Strike a lot of MMOs a lot of rts's um those are probably my top three things then this past decade has been uh a lot of sandbox PVP games um top two favorite games of the last 10 years are probably um rust and tarkov tarkov especially in the last few years uh the witch has particularly ruined me for every other game and now I don't feel anything in any other game sadly so um uh but but yeah it's uh that's where I'm kind of uh focused as a gamer and inevitably all these things have influenced me personally um and whatever I can reach and inevitably our new game has pulled in a lot of those elements I have like the same Asian origin story couldn't get any

consoles growing up uh and then had to get a PC console got really used to control escape and all tab when you when the parents are coming up the stairs take like three minutes for like the the thing to like minimize it like freezes up right when you hear the first footstep you're like no every Christmas it's not a stereotype for a reason yeah I so I started on uh Nintendo me and my two brothers we played you know Mario Party Super Smash Bros all this all these family feuds tons of fights started over who stole stars from each other in Mario Party um but uh you know when I was in elementary school near the um end of the school year uh there was a kid there there was uh the son of one of the teachers and they were playing Starcraft

I didn't know what it was looked super cool so I asked them all what game is that is that called Starcraft we didn't my dad had a computer and he played um Diablo one on it but I couldn't I couldn't watch it that my parents like oh you can't hold that yeah yeah um so I I managed the convention to buy Starcraft and that was kind of my first introduction to like a competitive PC game and that's really where I spent a lot of my time so Starcraft Warcraft Counter-Strike uh Team Fortress you know I I just loved competitive games that turned into DOTA uh wow rating eventually League of Legends things like that um and that that kind of got me into the game industry because I was we're just saying it's aspiring Pro for League of Legends uh way back in the day we were um competing as one of the top three teams and we were trying to qualify for World cyber games which back then was like you know a pretty pretty big tournament uh rest in peace at this point yeah um and there was like Newegg uh online Alienware Arena and you know at the time

I was really active on the legal Legends forums and I would kind of talk about balance and and changes I would recommend and got the attention of uh Tom Caldwell who um was heading heading up design there and he's like oh why don't you apply for an internship and I just never thought about a career in games or the idea of of that being something I could make a living on I don't know I just played them and took them very seriously I wanted to be like an Esports Pro but uh you know I was like well do I go down this Esports route or do I go down this this path of um video games making them and you know I I ended up doing an internship told my team at the time like hey guys I'm I'm gonna have to quit the team we were qualifying at the time so they found a ringer but and they all ended up doing really well like odd one from TSM it's special we're on our team at the time um but but yeah so I started as an intern and uh did live balance when I when I joined Riot the first thing they said to me is

I sat down at the computer and they're like just do anything you want like literally that was that was what they they told me and I was like well I'll just start doing balance for the game stuff that I've been wanting to do forever so I don't know onboarding no yeah I feel lucky if you have a computer actually yeah I was one of the fortunate ones that had a computer and I had to learn how to script like Lewis script and I had never done any of that before um and just went from there and had to learn and navigate and figure out how to be valuable for for the team and uh you know many years later met slim and and we started valorant and then now we're at raid base and I'm uh act as the game director for for raid base awesome just a quick so quick follow-up on that was I'm curious how Tomcat what was he just on the forums looking for yeah yeah so he did all these awesome things yeah one thing that was really cool about Riot especially back then was they were so active on the Forum so you had gone a forum and you'd see catwell and you'd

see feet Ginsu on the forums and and all these people and uh it made you feel like they're committed to making this game awesome like they're they're down in the trenches they're listening to players they're going to make the game great and I was playing Han at the time too and I was like okay you know which MOBA is gonna end up being more popular and just because of the engagement from uh the team at Riot that gave me the confidence to play league instead and and you know because Tom was active on the forums he like saw my posts and we actually started playing games together and just built a relationship that way what what did the like promotion like you were started as an intern how did you what did that look like as you started there yeah about the ranks yeah so I uh when when I started I was like totally messing around in school like I I was spending all my time trying to compete be a pro in League it was like ridiculous yeah thing and and uh you know three months into my internship they're like oh why don't you you apply for a full-time role and I was like oh

well should I finish school or and and I I talked to to Brandon back at the time and because they interviewed everybody that that joined the company um and he's like well if you're gonna stay in games and be a game developer you're probably going to learn way more here than anything in school but if you're not going to stay in games like you should go finish school and and I I loved it so much you know the three months I was there at the time so um I applied and unfortunately they uh started me as an associate game designer and and then you know went from there on League another thing my Asian parents sort of definitely freaked out at if I dropped out of school in the last um yeah so slim I think your story is a little bit different and you were already at your dream job at blizzard I think you were working on some predecessor version of OverWatch did Brandon you know what did the co-founders do jump ship uh it was a lot when looking back like man there's been so many minor Miracles that

hardly even recognized what they were at the time it was kind of like I would say the guiding guiding force was um finding your tribe finding my tribe basically so landing at blizzard I tried very hard to get into blizzard I mean it's growing up with blizzard games like so many people I I applied I think five times across six years for very different roles and every time was like oh like um your favorite external candidate when was original candidate I'll try again next it was like all that and the first time I got declined I was like well blizzard isn't happening so should I even be a game industry and should I just go back to Silicon Valley and like it was literally applying back to Silicon Valley after the first time I got rejected from blizzard it was just like Full Tilt and I don't think I get tilted very easily I was just like well if you can't work at budget then what's the point of all this so um thankfully I stuck with it and then um it was very close that I almost went back to Silicon Valley but um I'm really glad I didn't um but I um

I when I started a blizzard finally at that point I had played Counter-Strike uh I don't know seven some a thousand it was like the main thing I did during college basically um and then I also rated and wow for like seven years and so getting the chance to work on a shooter MMO like how often do you get that chance and then at blizzards I was like I'm freaking done I'm like gonna work on this for like the next 30 Years like without I'll sacrifice whatever to do this and uh so I went in with that mentality um so I was like completely committed completely focused on that um and this was also Peak blizzard too so it's like post you know uh wow like climb and although I was still climbing at that time and so I wasn't thinking anything but I was at the this is a sequence so Lee came out end of 2009 I started a blizzard January a couple of months after that um and then a couple months after that was GDC 2010 and I uh had a friend we had an invite to the

riot party there and it was really um uh it was really ghetto it was like uh you know dingy Warehouse uh drink tickets um it was just uh but but but uh so I remember standing on um this balcony uh looking at the general party um kind of like an introvert so I like but just observing on the side and uh one thing instantly stood out which was um League was being played on a couple tables on the floor and someone was shot casting it and um I'm pretty sure that was the first time in like five or six years I went to a GDC party that had a game at the party which seems quite odd for that to be true but I'm pretty sure that was true at that time so you know I already had like a great impression just because of that like I didn't need any like fancy like party or fancy drinks or anything like that so um I was already kind of like in an instant like oh what is this uh uh

instantly good mood and so talked with a bunch of people um within Riot and finally um met Brandon along in that and uh we basically became gaming buddies after that just nothing else it's like meeting someone meeting a gaming founder who actually plays games like sadly that's more rare than it should be and just because of that um we wanted to just play games and I was like oh it's interesting that I finally met a game leader that plays games like it's sad that that's rare but that was what kind of motivated me to keep in touch with them without having anything in mind for like working a ride or anything like that so just like who is this human being who is like this and um and you know when you talk I don't know how many of you guys know Brandon if you're lucky to have known him but like there's like a vortex effects of like it makes he can make you feel like anything um is possible with regard to making a difference in players lives specifically so it's not like oh anything is possible it's not that generic like

um uh thing it was specifically like if you're a gamer we can do something about helping other gamers so let's go and do it and not waste this opportunity and that specific thing really resonated with you know half this room here and like uh who or from Riot and it was a very precious thing and um after a couple years I got a kick in the butt from My Wife and we decided to apply to Riot and then um we were Off to the Races and I happened to sit close to Trevor early on in that and um yeah that that's one thing led to know if we're playing games really similar story to how I spend time with Brandon like we started doing that with everyone else we met and uh got to know a lot of great people I was wondering I was always wondering did Brent while you guys were playing games did he ever ask like you should come and work at Riot no you just played wow okay I mean the reality is like you know he's basically um trying to build a relationship right

um because Ryan's off the radar so even though League was doing well at the time I remember until the Forbes article started showing up like literally four or five years later after Riot like when we were recruiting between 2011 and 2014 the number one response I would get back from other professional devs that other storied developers was like oh is that League of Legends the game that the kids play at lunch and like they were just so out of it and were like uh yeah um and uh and they even if they were aware of League they weren't aware that Riot games makes league and so nobody wanted to work at riot at that time um other than people within like Brandon and Marx like Vortex and so um so we tried the I guess mimic or replicate that and just try to espouse the values kind of throughout the industry and once it was kind of self filtering I think the people where that message resonates like started to like poke into Riot I just I just kind of think about early team building and obviously you guys are running a new

studio now like what are there any kind of like principles or things that you learned from Mark and Brandon on how to build team obviously there's so many amazing people that have been hired that have gone on to now start other Studios and whatnot but what are what are some of the things that you got you guys have kind of had a small team for longer than most I would say so what would that what how did you guys do you guys have principles that you decided on before you hired your first 10 people yeah we're we're not so far away from Riot um I think many X ride Studios and there are many um unsurprisingly want to make games that are social want to do right by players um we're not too distant from that we I think without necessarily trying to be different We Stand we picked a couple things we wanted to stand for and we try to make it known through conversations like this we've chosen our words on our website very very carefully and surgically um

uh we I think are pretty particular maybe some see us as extreme in are serviced to a particular like uh people use different words I would say like a connoisseur audience like people who are like Discerning smart judgmental hard to win over but also very engaged in the games that they play some people that's not the audience for them because they're like they're seen as like narrow or hard to win over they are those things but we are also those people and so we try to find that tribe with them and we try to put it out there on our website and try to attract people who want to sign up for that or are that as well and it's just kind of again self-filtering um best way I could put is like stand for something and then be more specific about it like the vast majority of websites out there is like we are from the makers of blah blah blah blah and everyone's watched by look the same and we're all going to make we're gonna do rapper players and we train people to save like we're you know blizzard train

people to say or gameplay first Riot train players you know players first and people repeat that at nauseum and it's lost as meaning I think so um but I think with us um we are pretty specific and dedicated to that so then maybe jumping on Riot has had a lot of r d games famously canceled including even after many years of work how are you guys able to get valorent through the gauntlet like what was that ideation like getting it through you know many years of building it I mean obviously many years of just persevering through uh a lot of difficult times I mean there's a lot of stories of moments where the game could have ended you know off of this single decision uh there was a lot not being dramatic there what really like people were about to quit that day in that moment exit the room like 10 times I'm not exaggerating about more than 10 times yeah and I think at the time it was kind of a ambiguous scenario for for

what it means to like get a game through the process at Riot and like when do you know a game's ready there there was no like Gates or anything to Define uh what you need to do we had to find that and kind of show the company that what we were doing was special or there was there was some promise in that and all of that was you know on us to figure that out and Define what that looks like and uh you know the fundamental thing that I think Always Rings true for us is focusing on the product and finding something fun and building something that we think the audience were interested in would find special and really appreciate and we spent many years just getting even to that point um and then we had to figure out how do we buy in the rest of the company how do we show that we we think we have something that players might be interested in but that was not defined for us you know we had to figure that out we had to figure out what play test formats make sense uh what kind of audience can we bring in that represents the players that uh we think would be excited about this kind of game and then we also had to

establish some fundamentals around who the game's for what the game is ultimately about and what are the you know the pillars of it because all this feedback is coming in all these concerns all these considerations and to be able to use a razor to understand what makes sense and what doesn't even when it might feel wrong or you're up Against All Odds of everybody else criticizing it that was imperative for us to continue to pierce through and ultimately make something but it was very difficult of course although along the way the entire time and we learned so much during during those phases everything from the product to team building to managing the external stakeholders and you know I think it we're still pretty amazed ultimately it came through and became something yes so for that first maybe major decision to even get to a tactical shooter like how long did that take what what led to that yeah okay um so when we started uh we didn't

exactly know at first we actually didn't even know what we were going to make a competitive shooter we thought uh you know we have competitive backgrounds we feel like we understand that audience better than maybe any other space for ourselves by the time we started League was um establishing as a competitive esport yeah and it was kind of like standing by itself not that I was the first but that at that time Counter-Strike was you know in just Grassroots small events and Starcraft was like not really a thing anymore except in Korea like so it was kind of like just alone for a while yeah yeah and so we we thought there was an opportunity especially at Riot to build another competitive game and you know through talking about it and where the opportunities are we thought uh a shooter could be a nice compliment to the portfolio of Riot especially on the competitive side and it you know at the time when we started uh competitive shooters were non-existent on PC like a lot of people had written off Shooters on PC entirely and thought Oh it's they're only going to be on Console you

know it's it's too hard to say that sentence out loud like with that console was dominant at that time really was like yeah you know no one could figure out antichi things like that and console did it a little bit better at the time um so you know we we went through that process uh you know so well I'm curious if you guys have sort of a product development process in terms of how you uh both at obviously at right but also at raid base how did you guys come up with who your persona was what kind of oh yeah you know how did you just like how big is the mark do you guys have those questions like what what kind of process would other people use it's like someone's starting a new studio today how do you figure out what what do I build so connecting with your last question about um like the process of getting kind of uh momentum and approval and Gates and stuff what we went through was um ambiguous because it was not defined at Riot the broader context set right was that um 99

of companies oriented around League there is no machine set up for other games so there weren't and rice not trying to be a publisher there weren't like defined Gates or anything like that but what we had to show was very similar to what all of us are beholden to show to investors or any type really ultimately to our own teams and also to our own players is that what we decide and what we design and what we build is actually relevant and resonant with the audience so if you follow that train back to the root we try very hard to Define who our player is which I think is not anything mind-blowing like you want to picture who your audience is we're building for we are just very relatively extreme about it and we try to be again specific about who our audience is um many we think it's a mistake not that there's a right way of making games or making a product um but we think it it's it's pretty

rough to start building because it's exciting to build you see like all this progressing oh we have a thing uh and certainly some huge products start by that kind of exploration for sure but um there's hundreds of decisions to make around a product and I think if you don't have someone you're picturing to help you make those decisions that are very subjective with nobody to tell you if you're right or wrong in any one decision um at the end of the day they're going to take this thing they're going to engage with it or not and then when you ask why most people don't practice the uh articulation of why they don't like a thing so they'll just say it sucks or they say it's awesome and then they walk away like any of those things happen so it's our jobs to you know preemptively make some of those decisions we think picturing a specific person and more importantly uh sometimes super prison a a type of profile of a person and articulating their wants and

needs so for us a thesis um being who is it for why do they care is critical for navigating that and we think too many people starting off their Adventure skip this part or assume something and just stick with it relatively arbitrarily without continuing to revisit it we're just basically obsessive about revisiting it and make sure it's still valid and even till today we're two and a half three years in and we're still like paranoid like it's still a thing of still think all the time so we're relatively extreme about that but it's really to help us navigate that Myriad of decisions you know 10 a day 100 a month like a thousand a year kind of thing and it's just craziness yeah yeah that was refining over what we learned on on ballot like when we started we had some ideas of opportunities experiences we had growing up on some of these games and uh where we could potentially like build it build a product that people would be excited about but also like the market changed a lot while we were developing the game like when we started

CS go had come out and was pretty much dead like I said there was no other Shooters on the PC market and all of a sudden like CS gets better rainbow succeeds uh comes online OverWatch came out so all these things had us you know second guess or challenge why we're making the thing we're making and and I think we've got more intentional over time ultimately to the point where we could really understand why this game specifically makes sense uh that we're building relative to all the other things we could be doing or other games out there on the market and so for raid base the first thing we did was like why why should we make this game that was the first question we wanted to be able to answer and then who's it for and like slim said um the the motivations is the way we see it so we don't we don't really look at it like um like based on genre or like age platform all the traditional demographics those are useful but not what we go by yeah and and one example um as a learning for us is a lot of

people are surprised that there is overlap between League of Legends players and valorant players uh because it's a completely different genre a different camera angle everything um and for us it wasn't surprising because if you look at the core motivation of competition uh it satisfies that motivation in very different ways so it's actually pretty interesting to play something that satisfies that motivation in a completely different perspective different skill set different uh set of knowledge and mechanics um so we really think that way and we think players will come to whatever genre whatever camera angle if it satisfies their motivations and that is the razor for how we make all our decisions so even when we finally get to Features as the last part it's like does this feature make sense for one of these motivations and how does it help deliver on the thesis that we've defined and I guess who's it for is there any consideration is there I guess what are the exercises that you're doing there outside of like I'm this type of player

um how are you broadening that out to make sure that it applies to enough people like what what's that process even look like are you just talking to a lot of people or like what's that process look like the player motivations are relatively classic and stable from what we've seen and there's like eight or nine different kinds of profiles um out of those but we chose a subset of three of them for valorent and five of them per current game because it's a broader thing just by being a Sandbox um and Trevor can walk you through some of these examples um but we found that they're relatively classic like looking at starting with anecdotal like um friends like we're picturing so and so picture so and so um one thing that was interesting in this exercise is developing the definition of these profiles is we're actually combinations of different motivations why you do there's multiple reasons why you do certain things or engage with certain things and when we're going through specific people we're like dude we could do this forever

we could Define 300 people and like we'll never hit the end of this but then we realize along the way that each person is actually a combination a blend of different motivations so when we trace the root a bit there was only like 800 9 or 10 of these okay and yet to some point it's it's like a spectrum and you'll you'll see that when you play games like one night you might feel really competitive and then the next night you're playing with someone that's better than you and you just want to be social and play with them and that might change you from like playing you know ADC on on bot Lane and League to playing support or something like that and I think that's the recognition that everyone isn't just set on one motivation and that's all they ever do in any game but we want to be able to build a game where at least within that spectrum of motivations that experience is satisfying those activities whatever they Blend or waiting they choose to do within the experience moving on to another topic you guys I think in both cases at well raid base and I think even at Valerian your teams were pretty constrained by from a number

standpoint was maybe that's not true for Valerie but I know for rape base that was do you have any advice on how you think about team size are you looking for an inflection point before you yeah expanding um uh there's this is one of those one of many topics that like don't have a specific right answer but we can tell you why we do what we do we try to keep our team thin in the beginning um when we are exploring design decisions a simple concept that most people can relate to is like the too many cooks in the kitchen kind of thing when you need to make a decision more people don't help in general unless you're missing like expertise or subject matter expertise in general but even then like you want to like uh glean from it a bit like just imagine trying to make a decision with two people in a room let alone five let alone ten let alone 60 people waiting in the wings for you to like come out of this room to like hey tell us what to make and you're like yeah dude like I don't know yet you know

so we just tanked that so much that we've learned at much pain and I've done this like three or four times number one this will be the smallest team I make and then like and it's just yeah too big already too fast and so with full control and raid base uh as much as we can maximize control at raid base um I would say we grew in proportion to our design confidence and for our space the sandbox space is probably one of the most complex spaces because of and pretty much any feature can be in a Sandbox game so normally you're choosing between like you know like if they had our competitor game X has the feature set y has like matchmaking so we shot matchmaking um and it's already hard enough to navigate like three to five to ten moving Parts our game has like 80 moving Parts it's literally over 80. um and so instantly we're just like I remember the first week we were talking about this word like dude like both of us neither of us can fit the game in our head

and if we can't good luck to the rest of our future team of like so how do I know it's right between red green or blue sweet salty or sour it's like it's and no one will it's just really cascading lack of confidence actually so before we had the exercise discipline to only grow if absolutely necessary when um uh when when we were sure that the foundation was starting to get more and more solid to support um so many things even if we we want to everyone says like we want to empower our teams it's like a popular thing to say right now but left to your own devices if you don't have context if you don't understand what is a high quality decision or low quality decision in this context in this game in this team then those people will just start to try their best and then when you're there and you put yourself in a position as a leader to say no that's not right no that's not it how many times you're gonna say no to

someone before they're just like okay fine to just tell me what you do then and that happens time at a time again and so um you know when you have to look at those people time and time and again just disappointed in the games point and you it's just like we should we should be better able to articulate why we made certain decisions not to say this is the right way yeah but enough so that they can get in the ballpark or enough that we can Define constraints when I say constraints it's not like a type it's all a matter of treatment you can define a direction as like a pinpoint or a field we tend to go towards a field because the people we tend to like to hire um are more aligned and we lean on them more to make decisions so we give them more playground to run in but we have to define something so that your cool idea my cool idea let's say we're just talking about your cool idea we love your idea we we love like Harry's very strawberries we will talk about that and eat that all day

um uh and then in a different conversation we love like you know certain chocolate from certain chocolatier from this region in France or whatever like we love that and we like put those two things together and sometimes it's magic it's like oh it's chocolate covered strawberries it's awesome yeah but if Trevor really likes like tomatoes from the West slope of like Mount Vesuvius and whatever they're growing at a certain Farm in Italy like that's great but you've probably put um tomatoes and strawberries together you're kind of like uh like it's very different and so I I'd like to think game features are kind of like that so if you don't Define why is chocolate not good for this situation or this meal or this experience then um you're setting yourself up for these like arguments and these circular conversations and those things tend to devolve into um uh basically like a a an argument that is unresolvable and then this the warning signs are somebody has a pull rank somebody has to yell louder or it's an attrition game where everyone

gives up until one person wins out and if you think about all of those scenarios it's super arbitrary what you landed on so how are we all like surprise Pikachu faces like by the time you get to this build it didn't land it didn't work and you're like oh what happened we like made this high quality art and we implemented my system and everyone did the best they could in their little domain but it didn't add up to something and we think that happens way too much in an industry and just leads all the second frustration and wasted effort and all that so pulling all that back is why I like yes it's hard to recruit yes recruiting shows progress in a way until it doesn't where you have this thing you don't and it doesn't add up to something you don't know what to do with it and meanwhile there's 50 people yelling at you like what do we do next you're watching a burn rate go down it's just like your brain go up sorry and then your your bank account and like all that is now try to make the decision with all that so then it's just super tilty and super arbitrary yeah

going back earlier was saying there were many steps along the way at Valerian where things could have gone horribly and the whole thing could have shut down like maybe at those time points you know how did you guys ultimately make those decisions and then I'd be curious how did you maybe change your decision making process now at Ray base any specific examples would be great here too yeah um okay so one of the first ones I can remember early in the process was um we started um working on our concept and we had a Merry Little band of like four or five people in a corner of Riot um 2013 end of 2013 or so um then Brandon Beck and some of you may know like Thomas Vu um uh came up with their own pitch for a Sandbox scheme actually um uh over Christmas break so they came back just so we're just a few months in um building momentum for a competitive shooter and uh they came back like really excited to like pitch us and test their pitch against us because they knew we played like rust at that time and

everything so we're like oh and so that conversation pretty quickly went towards like should we just merge teams like if you guys are already interested in this and um and then we met and um the game director um Joe Ziegler his uh his living room and he happened to live in the house right next to usido and Sawtelle so in that living room in that little yellow house was the first time valent almost died so we were in that living room and uh does the five of us and uh we're like we kept calling that other project the train because it's Brandon's baby like who'd be dumb enough to not hop on that train right yeah we kept calling it the train or like all the trains coming the train's like Gonna Roll us over and uh and all that we're like like circumstantially like and we were excited about the project too so we're like do we want to do that instead and uh the the room was like pretty quickly already slammed on that side like oh we should just like go join them and merge um and who knows what would have

happened from from there um but but in that moment I just like want to double check I was like Hey guys like do we think what we're on to has any validity are we still excited about our thing and the the like immediate reaction was pretty strong it's like yeah yeah of course then I'm kind of like what the are we doing then like why are we so willing to to give up like this easily on this um and then incidentally that kind of swung the room back I wasn't trying to swing the room I was like asking a question because I'm like I'll go either way on the side do love both directions and we have plenty of life to make either game but in that moment because he's got a Sandbox game now yeah right like we we we do we want to make that game as well um but we did see that that and so I guess the short answer to your question Kevin is like my tool set was much more limited back then and I relied personally on conviction um but it wasn't baseless conviction I think uh it was based off of a lot of

these principles that we're talking about around this thesis like um those were like rougher back then but conceptually similar to the practice that we have now we're like better tools that better practices of getting there now that's a little bit more reliable but in the same vein back then yeah so that maybe for raid like how did you guys how do the two of you guys divide up duties and actually Whittle down you know whatever 100 plus elements probably when you were starting to to where you are currently and then you know making each of those increments especially that first year I'm just curious how you guys actually get to that sandbox you know decisions the first thing we did from what I remember is we did that practice like let's look at the um competitor games set X and then their feature set why and we started assembling this and it just added up to like 80 things we're talking like crafting like so first of all there's a lot of them but one of those lines is like crafting that's like 30 50 100 games right one's like combat so this

list is wide and deep so we're just all sitting on like like just kind of paralyzed and um and then like we I was doing already on the semblance of like the thesis but I didn't have the full words for it um I I initially said some version of like people who want to matter in in the sandbox games like uh when I think back on like ultimate stories from Ultima Online and Eve and uh some of the big YouTube channels for rust people tell stories about like I did this crazy thing and then everyone was chasing me or everyone was out to get me or or or um I made this deal happen or I made this partnership happen I brought these two warring Clans together like it was a lot of like reputation and Association but I was hovering in that concept for a while but didn't have the statement and have the words and then kind of using that rough sense I forget the first form of it but we use that started that thesis to kind of like slice and dice our way through these features lists so now if you look at can someone make a can someone build a reputation based on

um combat well yeah there's like many many kinds of games where that's more intuitive Lee Yes can someone build a reputation for clearing bosses like well okay we can look at wow World firsts and like a number of games Monster Hunter and whatnot speedrunners can someone build a reputation on Crafting and now we can look at maybe like real world economies like I can go to Kevin for the highest quality metal on our server I can go to I can go to Trevor for uh the best armored trucks on the server at like a specialization in an economy so we're like that could be a thing too um so but but there's other things where the answer was murkier or and also we started considering other things like we know this thing is both murkier and very expensive to make like boss spot fights basically um and so that started to stratify this list so it made it a little bit easier to navigate like okay like the top third we'll focus there for the next month like and so that's why that process for

us I'm not saying everyone should do it exactly like this or to this extent but it took us six months just to work through this list of 80 things um and we were just 95 in conversations and that bubbled up what we called existential questions which is like do these features make sense in the game uh are we going to Define what this could be or what the opportunity is within the game and that's helps with prioritizing what you should do during prototype because you know you're always working with opportunity costs and what you spend time on during prototype and uh you need to always be working on the thing that's going to help you give the most answers that then enables you to skill the team move further to towards pre-production and production eventually so having a list like that understanding how important each of them were relative to one another and then assessing our confidence and the ability to execute on each of those things gave us eventual stack rank list of well what makes sense to focus on First and try to resolve and clear the ambiguity around this feature

or this opportunity we have and we kind of think of them all as player problems or player opportunities that every feature provides and then we can go through prototyping to figure that out and because the power of engines today you don't need a lot of people to prototype basically any anything literally made by five people so yeah and so really even with five people we were able to answer a bunch of those questions up front um and and get gain that that Clarity and clear the fog of War um as we better understand the feature set and where we're confident when we're not there's another side effect if I may um of this whole exercise which I didn't fully anticipate um which was when we first started off with our hopes and dreams and all exciting and joining a new startup and you're kind of like caught up in the honeymoon of that um one thing that is nefariously invisible is we're all picturing different things you can use the same word of Samos game or competitive game whatever and we're

like picturing typically whatever game we came through and whatever we're referencing and through this whole exercise we started picturing something more and more similar so essentially in a lining process as a side effect in addition to the prioritization um and uh think about how many fights future fights that helps to mitigate or prevent and so we paid this huge upfront tax that for us we feel a lot of conviction that was very worth it um at the cost of apparent progress so you can imagine how we had to spend our valuing points to keep people like oh like can we see the build like we see the picture of them we know how to do a dog and pony show I can just Farm out some pretty images and build some assets and investors like oh you guys are making so much progress that's a real thing and many of you will have to do this and there's a balance of strike but a lot of it we know is false progress like

today practice commodity but what is invisible is design decision progress and Alignment progress which will totally bite you if you don't invest that later you'll have a you'll be in situations where there's disagreements that are unresolvable and uh or very difficult I don't want to say difficult to resolve because they are subjective calls like how much more of this feature do we make when do we stop this feature over this feature and it's not like 100 zero it's like 35 65 it's like super soft yeah and so this is our way of preemptively mitigating those things and again we we find it really worth it and he had mentioned one question how do you split your your uh duties I guess like because did you decide that pretty early up up front and um okay I mean I'd say we also like the first thing we had to figure out for the company but I guess the way we've we've simply put it is I go really deep on problems and slim goes very wide so he's

thinking always at the highest level of you know where the product might go next what ultimately we're looking to build for the company I'd say like that that very high level vision and then I'm thinking of well how do we make that happen in the game or the experience we're creating and what do we have to build what's the team have to create to make that happen to bring this opportunity that certain players might have out in the market um and that's worked pretty well for us um you know he'll go out and explore a bunch of areas and come back to me like what do you think about this thing of like ah it seems kind of not so great or like actually that's really exciting and we try to keep our our tabs on all the new technologies you know for a while is web3 and blockchain Tech and now it's generative Ai and like we don't want to be like dinosaurs and miss out on potential opportunities to to build better games but we have to balance out with the focus of the gargantuan task of just making a fun game in the first place and you know I think Slim's always making sure to that we're kind of coming

up for air and understanding what's around us and what opportunities exist uh there's a lot of cognitive load for all of us we're all busy we're all tired of the end of the day from making so many decisions in a day so we have to be very judicious and careful about what you entertain and again this I think there's a balancing strike here where you don't make assumptions you don't hold on to assumptions from like 10 years ago there's like a too far and many of our peers we call dinosaurs we are constantly afraid of being dinosaurs ourselves that's like mostly me yelling at myself basically not not picking anyone else um uh but also just like constantly flippantly like being whipped around whiplashed around is also not productive both can be destructive to making progress towards your thesis can I ask you a question around maybe going back to team I mean this is probably not as popular a topic like I assume you fired people before right like how do you guys measure sort of team performance and especially you know

maybe obviously riots different a lot of people now very small team but maybe there's commonalities how you think about that philosophy and how you how we actually do that I would say um you have you should have a sense and articulation of what you value on your team almost everyone um only goes so far as to put raw discipline capability on that list so typically someone will get fired for um not being a good enough engineer or an art style that's not applicable or something like that because it's a little bit more objective and tangible but really think back on all the people you've worked with and all the people you wish you could have fired if you had the position or the influence to do so and it's almost always something else like a lack of alignment a lack of soft skills a lack of empathy or something like that so those things might be more important than capability

and everyone has their different weightings of that value of course capability matters also but we explicitly call out um judgment um empathy and a few other things emotional intelligence yeah that's in our empathy thing but like on that ownership yeah oh yeah ownership which is like basically um the drive and a push in the self uh self-motivation there and so we call out that out as qualities that we want to see in candidates so I think that's the same set of things that we would use to part ways with someone and it doesn't mean that someone's like necessarily a bad artist or a bad at their craft or anything like that it's just like you want to do X we want to do y you should go do X we're gonna keep doing why and then that's fine that's like all day every day and while I all help people to get

to another job like there's no like but I think if you come to the if you come to a head where you're like already like at each other so it's like it's like you you you like should have said nothing about a way a long time ago but usually it's like some kind of like a misalignment or something like that way before that we could keep going for a super super long time a question about um your your personal I've always been blown away by how much you play games and how I think that's a compliment I I I I I I I I I only kind of not cringe but like I was like do I play enough like I actually don't think I do okay well maybe it's less now I guess how do you all balance uh like what kind of routines or schedule or what what's your how do you think about balance as you start a new company as it pertains to work play games even like personal families all just all the different things how do you balance those things again I guess it's what you value and

what you need both as a company as a person yeah our our aspiration is to make a game that is a long-running game service and are very far aspiration is is to have a game that we can work on um forever and we're very specific about that that's like not a generic desire for us like Trevor and I check in on this kind of every few months like if this game works out and we're 10 years in we're 20 years in like do we want to be a multi-game Studio do we want to like what other things do we want to accomplish here and our more frequent conversation is if this thing works out we would rather expand this thing and I would I look at like Hilmar as as kind of like aspirationally as CCP sccp um he is so sharp and knows his product inside and out like 20 years in and I'm like dude I'd love to be like that I'm like I so that's what kind of like my kind of like north star-ish um so according to that then yeah um

we're describing a very long interaction and Arc so it's a it's more than a marathon um it's actually a limitless like Marathon so we need pacing as an example of that so we have to be very selective on when we push as individuals and as a team and so um that is one major consideration it's just by default like database is I would say dense per hour but we don't pull a lot of hours like we do like 89 hours because it's not useful to us to do these like artificial pushes and then like by the time people get there like their judgment is all degraded they're all tilted like it doesn't help with what we're trying to do if we were making a game where we're like um pushing for like this you know gold disc by September for the holiday season for like a box game maybe it's not a coincidence that so many teams are oriented around push hum hell or high water for that Mark and

then the half the team leaves after and then fine it's fine like perfect then because now we have a smaller team to prototype the next thing it's like it's like the cycle it's been like for 20 years but that's not what we're trying to do so we super I like to think we're purposeful and like we're not just generically trying to not um to have like a generic work-life balance of course that's also important but for us it's very purposeful um I don't know if I'm the right guy to ask about a daily balance because I try to play about four to eight hours a night and I'm self-conscious that it's not enough and when I say play too I'm paraphrasing a bit yeah sure playing for me is literally playing but it's also interviewing players I'm hanging on Discord every day I'm taking notes I'm parsing YouTube videos that all of that I'm bucking it into that a study it basically I'm studying basically and that studying is like a long time habit as like trying you know a terrible student but I'm pretty good at studying games and so like I I love because I

love it and so um all of that is to in an effort to constantly hone my judgment which by default is a constantly degrading thing so I'm really hard on my peers that allow themselves to lapse on judgment when they're in the position to take everyone else along the ride with them along a bad train of judgment and I really want anyone in a leadership position which is any founder here you take nothing else away from this please take that responsibility very seriously and if you are not in a position to make that judgment call please hand it to someone else who is or can I'll get on my soapbox now yeah I guess this might be uh so that we ask this question every uh for all of our podcast which is kind of if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice could be it could be a riot could be um you know raid-based a few years ago um maybe that's maybe you just answered that question so maybe throw it over to

Trevor what's kind of one piece of advice that you would give uh Founders if you could kind of go back yeah I mean uh I you know we kind of covered it as we talked about it but I think it's always being very thoughtful upfront and intentional about what you're trying to do take a step back and look at the high level of why you're doing the thing you're doing and making sure you avoid end up going down this spiral or ending up in this circular pattern where you're not actually learning every day like I think you want to incrementally learn it's okay to fail as long as you're learning and taking the steps forward so um being able to remind yourself and you know step up and and take a breath of fresh air and understand where you're at while you're there uh who you're building the game for I think is really critical because it's very easy to Blink and all of a sudden three months later and you haven't made any progress and that's because you got obsessed over like some small detail that actually doesn't matter in the long run

um I I've seen that many times as a reason and we experience it multiple times on Valerian as well where you're just not being very effective with your time and it's easy to get lost or get in debates or arguments over some small detail But ultimately it's some high level misalignment and misunderstanding that so um I think that's always a critical thing you need to be keeping track of at all times awesome awesome well since we're doing a live show uh now is the Q a portion for the audience we got a roaming mic around so don't be shy guys uh thank you guys for my pandemic played Valerie oh awesome I never played a tactical shooter before but became friends of these guys in Canada who I still don't even know their real names and uh I spent the first day playing dollar and I was like oh my God this looks so cool all the streamers were talking about it I couldn't kill anyone and then uh I killed somebody because I can't and the sound went off and I'm curious like when

did the sound of killing combatants and agents develop and how are you thinking about sound because I think that's the thing that hooked me yeah I mean we always took the idea of uh recognizing and responding to when you do some you pull something awesome off so like the most satisfying moment we try to craze when you headshot someone it's like everything went right your cursor is in the right position you're you're not moving the player walked right into it to where you were at and and you got the head shot and you won the fight so we wanted to make sure that is uh you know communicated back to you immediately and that you had that impact and what we also did is as you got multiple kills during the round the sound would escalate um and the importance there is even if you're not paying attention to like the scoreboard you can kind of subconsciously track how many kills you've gotten and then you can subtract that from the remainder of players in the round and then use that as

information so we try to provide some gameplay information while also providing the the impact and satisfaction of getting that kill because you know I think that's probably what a lot of people play for is that desire to like hit all the headshots and reliably be able to do that so even thinking through animation and the way that the body responds immediately To The Head and the location of it like so much of Shooters is that visceral response in in actions and I think that's a big part of being in first person and the immersion of it uh we took that whole sequence very seriously and made it all sync up on the same frames and timed it all and you know you get those visual badges that pop up um all towards that effort another thing I'll mention is as you know in any competitive game valorent um being one of them just like it's a very high stress environment and in a high strength environment people go blind to different things um and they we have many tools as developers to tell them things and if you from UI to VFX to the animation to

the audio and it's almost like there's like a parallel track to process audio where you know like you might say oh like we put it up on the UI and we highlighted them and ran and like someone's like you did and they didn't even notice and audio is a thing you can lean on to to ding like the right thing to do I mean like this goes all the way back to like we were talking about last night with like Nintendo I think started off as a um uh slot machine yeah yeah and uh and so maybe it's not an accident that like you're collecting like coins and Mario and like you know gems and Zelda it's like it's it's a thing you know it's like we're just at some it's a parallel track basically it's not that it's more effective or less effective it's like another tool in your feedback to the player so thanks guys for really thoughtful comments I wish I was an ambassador in your company um I was just really curious to go back to the taxonomy of um player motivations that you talked about like the eight or

nine motivations I was wondering if you could just briefly go into like what those were and how you arrived at them yeah sure um so just give you a couple examples so uh and and I think uh I can't remember who asked but there's also the concept of like how do you even get to these motivations and slim mentioned their classic but I think it's a combination of what we intuitively developed over all the years of playing games multiple Decades of seeing other people play why they play developing that understanding with friends and and acquaintances and then also there's a lot of data there's a lot of companies that spend a lot of time asking players and sourcing what their motivations are why they play games I think everybody interprets it differently and has their own perspective on it um but for example one of the motivations that we've used in valorin and were is one of them for raid bases this idea of competition right so you're you're you're you're driven by uh being competitive and people get this in sports there's lots of you know businesses competing between businesses

so the idea that you put time and effort in and that time and effort is rewarded by your ability to beat somebody else or or dominate them or show how much more skillful you are is the super satisfying Loop and to be able to play the game and put hours in and get better and see that in the game when you play it is going to continue to motivate them as long as that Loop continues and one of the the challenges competitive games run into is well when you plateau in skill and you're not feeling yourself getting any better well that's like a huge turn moment because it's like I've lost the motivation of of why I play this game um and then another example is uh like exploring uh finding information being like a scout or getting knowledge and information that other players don't have and just generally wanting to go around explore the world and within the world finding things that is valuable is appreciable um for us when we think about that specific motivation and tying it back to our thesis like some mentioned with reputation it's like well what can I do

exploring this world and finding things that's going to build a reputation for me like do I know knowledge about where a boss is that nobody else has or do I know how to craft this item that no one else on the server understands how to create now someone might recognize me or value me for that information that I have so we always tie things back to the thesis and for us the motivations that we choose to support is basically the scope of our game because we have to have a feature set and they have to work together in a way where anybody in that motivation set is going to be satisfied when they play in that ladder profile um are you familiar with Game of Thrones you're familiar with uh John Wick okay so in each of these there's an example of this so various in Game of Thrones um as far as I don't remember like never had to pick up a weapon and fight but was he one of the most influential people in the whole universe yes because he had info that everyone else needed and wanted um same thing in John Wick where there's um the uh the the I think they literally

hope it's not like a bathroom but I think they literally call it the hobo Clan basically the the homeless people in there and they were like the whisper Network they were like the eyes and ears on the ground and you would think like it's not inspirational uh on that description alone but they rendered it like really powerful they're really influential they were the secret Network like throughout and so um those inspired us to like oh those are like very practical recent examples of of this but this motivation we've seen for 20 years of playing games like someone's a scout they're like exploring out there and coming back home like okay there's a titanium to spawn on the mountain like weeks ago lock this down before anyone else gets out to us so uh I mean you literally see this in real life economies like people go out and Scout things before other people and yeah like all investors aren't investor Scouts right yeah this is you guys this is right this is like I've always aspired to own a lot of pigeons that's what I really wanted do you need to uh you know explore where other other investors aren't yeah maybe you do need

a vision Network it's also a really good alignment tool to be able to tell a story in your game about this profile and say oh what's an example of their experience in the game and let's walk through a journey of what they do that they'd be able to tell a story about and would be memorable and then the team's able to kind of imagine and understand how that might manifest why are all these features important and critical to making that happen other questions hey I'm pimo at scope William product and I wonder if I could invite you guys to talk a little bit about creators and community and how you've been thinking about that weather rate base or valorent in the past and by the way I played Valerian for the first time two weeks ago hey I'm K-Town PC Cafe under sheer force of my younger brother awesome it was incredibly anxiety inducing and I think it killed all of my self-esteem so thank you don't worry that's where it starts so that you have this all this climb ahead of you it's glorious future ahead it's like

that's what it's that's what's all you can feel that contrast right um uh okay so we have barely thought about this but we've been paying attention as much as we can the landscape of influencers and even what's included as an influencer is seems to be changing all the time um we've seen a lot of counterproductive behaviors where uh we were just talking to an influencer today about this where if you does it still work to pay an influencer to play your game I think there are many examples where you know you see a game pop off on Twitch for the few hours that everyone's getting paid to do it and by the end of the night let alone by tomorrow no one can recall like what was that game again no one cares basically about it and what I think now players and viewers can smell when their favorite influencers are forced to or paid to play the game and that can even not only be not helpful but maybe even counterproductive toward that end and so

what is what does that mean for influencers now like is there a whole ref stream denied to them like I think there's a whole conversation of Exploration with them so how do we integrate with them as our strategy for promoting our game if any at all and so these are just we're far from Shipping a beta so these are all questions that the kinds of questions we ask ourselves along the way and we're very like oh we like to think we're open-minded and very flexible to any kind of combination of this we feel like there's definitely something there um that that influencers can um Point their audiences to but there's also a lot of nuance to this like do people follow that influencer because of that personality do they care at all about what they're trying what what product they're using and there's varying levels of that being yes or no or applicable to our game so like if you're trying to let's say we we don't know what our business model is yet if we sell our game for an amount of money a premium game there are some people who in that

situation or that business model would love to pump their game because a pump leads to a sale and then you got your money you accomplish your goal but given what we described earlier where we hope our game is long a long service whether or not we charge for at any given point we rely we think we rely on an audience that stays sticks around so a pump is can be even counterproductive because if it pumps and they and our game isn't ready and they don't stay everyone will watch it drop and so instantly with our audience it's like quite jaded they'll be like oh Dead game then game man it's like it can be actually quite counterproductive for us so these are all just you know um musings and observations that we don't know quite fully what to do with yet but we are trying our best to pay attention one last question I think that's what they're saying right one more okay we got one more question because uh this is on behalf of uh some of the investors in the room and probably also relevant to Founders or

you know thinking about starting a new Studios how did you guys think about kind of getting the initial financing in place and the right Partners to work with um you know ideating with working with a VC strategic and you know obviously at different stages there's different types of value so could you talk a little bit about how you guys thought about that yeah so our path was very unusual I think in a few ways we [Music] hopefully for the better hopefully not for the worse um consistently optimized towards long relationships of trust and alignment and as you can hopefully tell like we're trying to be consistent about this everywhere from our product to our team the recruiting um we're trying to reduce friction in general because the business of the choices that we're trying to make or design a game is way hard enough already so we do this at the cost of we have done this consistently at the cost of

valuation and other things that you're supposed to optimize for as Founders it's not that we are trying to fly in the face of that it is you know those traditional things from valuation and dilution all that and amount raised of course are critical and important they're on deck to consider we just prioritize trust and Alignment more whenever we can muster the choice to do so and thankfully we've had that choice so far and we can demonstrate that we paid for it in our seed round we ended up deliberately taking a set of investors that at half the valuation of most of the offers that we got and that has side effects and other costs like not the least of which as a pragmatic matter at our series a we have monster Pro rata that I had to manage and I then you have all these people who want to put in and support you and

you're like you have to say hey I need you to come in like way lower here for the pro rata and there's like these are small things I didn't know it was going to be a side effect and who in the world would pick a lower valuation like this is idiot um but but for whatever it's worth um we have not regretted that decision in the slightest um it worked out so far again we're only two three years in so maybe we're not fully tested yet but so far um uh it has paid off the way we hope to where our investors are the most um sorry the least maintenance the most drop everything a drop of a hat to support us when svb um happened we had every single one of our investors offered to cover payroll without me even having to ask they hit me up they're like hey are you guys okay can we like um pay your next payroll are you guys okay on that and so

I don't know how much is that worth like in in a way in one way I try to rationalize it to myself is we pay twice as much for something Priceless basically um I don't know hopefully that stays true um so yeah awesome well let's give these guys a round of applause thank you guys great thank you all for coming obviously drinks bar and everything's open um and excited to over here food is over there great questions yeah yeah thank you everybody