VC & Games

I have friends who are VCs. VCs in games, even. So writing this, please understand that I’m not like “F all VCs under all circumstances.” There are some incredibly smart people who are motivated by the right things that are in the field doing the work, trying to give people opportunities.

But one thing that I really don’t think people think about enough is what the whole game really is. VCs are funding things with the expectation of *astonishing* returns or failure, because that’s essentially how the market works. You make a lot of money on massive successes. You lose money on everything else (even moderate successes).

So taking money from VCs sets you on a specific trajectory to either be a massive success or die. This then informs *literally everything you do*. It may not start out that way, but it will evolve into that over time. This has huge follow-on effects. It dictates what kinds of games are made. How games are marketed. Who they’re targeted at. How mechanics work. What monetization is like.

It’s not “Here’s money make your dream game.” And I worry that a lot of folks who are thinking about building companies are turning to VCs believing they can raise cash to build their dream. The moment you take VC money, you’re not building your dream. You’re building a product to maximize potential to make as much money as possible to return to their fund.

Some VCs will have a process for this that realizes that in games, the biggest successes are unlikely and weird and very personal that then explode in unexpected ways, and they will help you build something very close to your dream. 

So there’s a huge difference in aligning yourself with VCs that have deep, deep, deeeeeeep personal experience building games – leaders – the folks that build the business models, the core mechanics, the plans. They can be value-adds.

But I’d suggest this is not *most* VCs in games. It’s certainly not *most* VCs. And the best way to distinguish the two is to ask folks you know who have been funded by these orgs. And second best, ask folks who have experience building the plans and business models and who have achieved some sort of success, and have them look at the VC to see if the folks behind them know their shit.

This is your dream. This is probably one of the most important decisions you can make, because if you go with a team that doesn’t align with your values and experiences, it won’t be your dream anymore. 

It’ll be an unending nightmare.

How Not to Introduce Yourself

“I am looking for work and am a [role].”

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad approach this is to looking for work.

Let’s say you have an enormous network of folks who know you and your work, and would love to work with you again. Does this appeal to them? No – it puts the *work* on them of trying to figure out the details of what you want, or how to convince someone they know that you’d be interesting to work with.

Let’s say you don’t have a huge network of folks who have experience with you – what does this tell them? Almost nothing, other than “Yeah, you’re looking for a role that we’re hiring for. So?”

When you’re looking for a job, you have to make a case for why someone would want to work with you, and make it a no-effort, no-brainer, as much as you can.

“Hello! I’m a game designer who loves to build combat systems with a focus on strategic depth and visceral, immediate feedback. I recently worked on [game] that [had some particular thing that people who like combat systems will love], which [achieved some sort of critical/commercial success/accolade]. If you’re looking for someone who can make your game’s combat distinctive, memorable, and something players will love, [link to resume].”

The things you want to do are to be able to show you have a perspective on your job that comes from experience, that you’re a good fit for something that people are specifically looking for (even if it makes you *less* broadly appealing), and that you sound like a real human with unique skills.

Yes, this is more effort, and requires some introspection. But it also shows that you understand your job is to do the work, to make it easy for others to understand your value, and that not only can you solve the problem they’re looking to solve, you’re going to make the person looking to fill the position’s life easy.

DO NOT throw out random, generic, quick “I’m out of a job & looking for work – hire me!” statements. Doing so is putting your worst foot forward, and it makes a terrible first impression. Take a few moments and craft a statement that reflects who you are and what you’re looking for.

layoffs jobsearch resume

Recent Stuffs

Got a new bike for the first time in a long while. Decided to finally pull the trigger on an electric cargo bike, and got the Specialized Globe Haul ST with two front panniers and the passenger kit, which lets someone sit on the back. It’s great! I’ve been using my old Cannondale Super-V outfitted with a Superpedestrian Copenhagen wheel, but that’s been discontinued (so who knows about any support), and because everything is contained in the wheel, it’s both short on power and range.

While the Haul is still limited by “class 3 ebike” regulations (28mph pedal assist, 20mph throttle), the extra torque makes a HUGE difference going up hills.

I’ve been picking up and dropping off the kids at school, and getting to either school is trivial. I can make it take effort, I can make it take almost no effort. It’s great. So trading a car ride + no exercise for a bike ride + some exercise is a win. It’s also been weighing on me more that even though the Tesla doesn’t take any gas, it *does* take a lot of energy, since it’s a big heavy car, and an eBike is going to be monstrously more efficient. And in the week and some that I’ve had the bike, every time I’ve taken it out it’s replaced a car ride. So that’s been more than half of the excursions out of the house. It’s basically, “Am I going to be carrying something I absolutely cannot carry on the eBike? Then I’ll take the car.” So winging, picking up large foamboards for J’s presentation at school – stuff like that.

But yeah. Good stuff.

Been playing Halo Infinite and Fortnite almost exclusively these days – Halo’s gameplay is great, but holy cats the progression system sucks. They’ve made big improvements since launch, but it’s kind of unbelievable that their live ops team is moving this slowly. I can only imagine the announcement of a move to Unreal must be brought on by how outdated their internal engine must be, and how hard it is to keep pace with stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite, on the other hand, has a genuinely amazing progression system, but the gameplay’s starting to get a little boring. I assume that’s one of the drives that Epic’s making for Unreal Engine for Fortnite – being able to take advantage of the player base and tech to build something different is pretty tempting, and knowing that they’re going to pay folks who make content… I’m looking into it.

Otherwise, mostly smaller games – Citizen Sleeper is excellent, Pizza Tower is insane. Picked up a handful of 3DS games before the eShop shut down – Metroid: Samus Returns (which feels surprisingly like Dread, though I shouldn’t be surprised – same dev), Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice (the only one we didn’t have AFAIK), the “other content” for Fire Emblem: Fates, and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team – a series I’ve always liked but never gotten particularly deep into.

The 3DS is an odd duck. The 3D is really quite good, and it makes games on the platform feel really unique. I probably wouldn’t have picked up rando games at the closing of most other shops, because remakes will eventually make most good games accessible again. But the 3DS… it’s so reliant on the hardware that once those games are gone, they’re never going to feel the same again.

So yeah. We’ve got a couple trips coming up that I’m super excited about. Heading back to Maui in a bit, and then this summer, finally going back to Korea & Japan for the first time in 20+ years. Been learning both Korean & refreshing Japanese via Duolingo, which is pretty damn good. Progress is slow, but it’ll be way better than nothing. 😀

Friends Are Terrible Co-Founders

With all the layoffs, there are going to be a lot of folks who decide that this is their chance to take a swing at being an #entrepreneur and forming a #startup. If that’s you, fantastic. Here’s the single most important piece of advice I can give you:

When you look for a #cofounder (and you should), you want to find someone whose skills *complement* yours that you HAVE WORKED WITH in STRESSFUL SITUATIONS before.

It’s tempting to start a company with people you like. I get it. But here’s the catch: if you haven’t worked with your friend & potential co-founder before, you don’t actually know what they’re like when stuff goes crazy at work. And in startups, things will be crazy all the time.

I founded a company with someone I’d lived with for a few years before. I knew them as someone who was smart, considerate, gentle, empathic, and reliable. What I discovered was instead that they were self-centered, egotistic, a terrible, borderline abusive manager, and so catastrophically flaky they any time something exploded and got genuinely difficult, the only thing I could rely on them for was to not be there when we should have been working on things together.

Starting a company with someone isn’t like being friends. It’s like being the ne plus ultra of coworkers – a comparison I like a lot more than the common “it’s like being married”. It’s not like being married. It’s like being tied together hanging off a bridge with anvils around both of your ankles. You need to work together under intense and constant pressure or you’re both screwed.

So look around. That person who was there with you when you had an impossible deadline to meet? The one who you always turn to when you have problems? The quiet person that folks often overlook who does all the actual hard shit? These are the kinds of people you want to be thinking about, not the office entertainer/fun person that everyone thinks is hilarious.

Your co-founders should come from the strongest, most effective of your work relationships. Most startups fail. And they fail for all kinds of reasons. But the most common reason I’ve seen is that co-founder relationships fall apart. Friends become bitter enemies. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to a lot of people I know. The co-founder relationships that are most likely to succeed are the ones forged under the shared pressure of having worked together in difficult circumstances.

One Great Idea, Steal Everything Else

There’s gonna be a lot of #startups in the wake of all the recent #layoffs. The most valuable advice I can give is around really understanding that people want what you are trying to build. And that’s a long, complicated discussion. The tl;dr there is you need to validate with real users that there is actual demand for your product. Nothing else you do is more important than that, and everything you do is meaningless if you get that wrong.

BUT. That’s a long discussion. Here’s a shorter one, and it’s the 2nd-most valuable piece of advice I have.

Keep your product focused around one simple idea, and rip off everything else you can directly from other products.

Yeah, I know – this sounds like I’m telling you to just blatantly copy everything other than your core idea from other folks.

I am.

No, I’m not telling you to *ship* something that’s ripped off entirely from other sources.

Here’s the thing – you want to minimize the number of variables that you’re working with. Everything you don’t know explodes your risk exponentially. So there’s some part of your product that you can’t know – that’s the brand new thing you’re doing. Almost everything else you can likely crib from something that’s already established. And rather than innovate on it, I’m telling you to just ape it directly.

Why?

Because it minimizes risk. Let’s say you want to have a character in a side-scrolling platformer jump. Make them jump exactly like Mario. Same height, same timing, same forward distance, same air control, etc. etc. etc. Because that becomes 20 variables that you don’t need to worry about, and more importantly, you know it will feel right to your audience, because it is familiar.

Now, as you focus on your one really new idea, you’ll find that it naturally bleeds out into other things. Maybe your “new idea” is to have a game where a character can dash. That dash will affect the jump. When can it happen? How far does it travel? How does it change animations? Level layouts?

Because it interacts with jumping, it will change jumping. And as you tweak the new thing, you’ll find that you will likely also tweak the “stolen” bits. And you’ll do that enough that the starting point (Mario) will be totally unrecognizable by the end.

But if you had to tweak all the elements of dashing with all the elements of jumping and it was all unknown, you’d have a problem with hundreds of variables, none of which were set in stone when you started. This huge complexity with no constraints leads to chaos.

So start by eliminating all the variables you can by taking things that already exist and doing exactly that. Then as your new stuff comes online, experiment and evolve all the systems that you ripped off, and they’ll evolve into something new, but starting from a point where the results are known, and feel good to the end user.

By the end, you’ll have spent all your time focusing on the new thing, and by limiting complexity, you’ll actually be able to finish & ship.

Arrival

Arrival – Films sur Google Play

How it’s taken me this long to finally watch Arrival I’ll never know. I’m a huge fan of Ted Chiang’s writing, and Denis Villeneuve’s work (Dune 1&2 + BR2049).

I thought the movie was brilliant. Took a really neat story, and for me, many of the decisions they made improved things. Not that they’re necessarily better than the OG, just that they’re better for the medium than a more literal translation of the book. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I don’t want to write much more just because I don’t want to spoil it – but man, the end (even though I recalled it from the story a while before the revelation) was just one of those things that sat with me for hours afterwards.

Two Steps to Building Better Products

Had a fun conversation with a friend this morning, and it was sort of weirdly illuminating for me. My #productdevelopment process basically breaks down into two pretty simple concepts that are *incredibly* difficult to actually execute:

1.) Know what you’re trying to do. That is, you have to be super specific and use very precise language to articulate the one big idea that you’re building your product around. Every entrepreneur can describe their product *generally*, but I find very, very few who can do it with exacting precision. Who is your market? What problem is this solving? What is the benefit to the user? If you can do this in one crisp sentence, you’re way, way ahead of the game. But the funny thing? It’s actually less about knowing what you’re doing – most people can understand that. It’s almost entirely so you can understand what you are *not* doing, which is a boundary that a lot of entrepreneurs actually never quite figure out. Which leads to scope creep, bloat, and eventual death.

2.) In traditional product development, you might do some testing, but basically, you’re going to bundle up a bunch of stuff, release it at some point, and then either succeed or fail. For me, the goal of everything I do is “How do I disassemble that one giant ball of risk, and try to mitigate every individual piece of it as early and cheaply as possible?”

That’s it. If you want to reverse engineer almost anything I’d say about product development, it’s “Do you understand what you are trying to do, and how to make good decisions about whether or not to do something?” and “How do I make this less risky and learn earlier?”

Now, while they’re simple concepts, doing them in effective, meaningful ways is an incredibly complicated, nuanced, and product/context-specific challenge that’s new and difficult and surprising every single time.

Gamification is Bullshit

A lot of people have been trying to sell the idea of gamification as a way of using the power of games to get people to do things.

This is not a good approach.

People will sell you on their consulting services that promise higher engagement/effectiveness by adding points and badges and other “game-like” things to your product. They will work for a very small percentage of your users for a short amount of time. And that’s it.

If you want to harness what make games powerful, it’s not points and badges and achievements.

Games are about playing. Trying things out in a high-feedback, low-risk, no-stakes environment. By “high-feedback”, I mean that in games, you can wildly amplify the reward you give someone for any kind of success, or make it very, very clear when someone does something you don’t want. That’s the sort of 1st level of properly using the mechanics of games.

The higher level is that you can “re-skin” experiences in transformative ways that create new meaning. I worked on a therapy game where players had to move objects from one place to another. In traditional therapy, they’d move boxes on tables. This activity, and its difficulty, was a constant reminder to the player that they were now disabled, and simple things they’d done forever were now impossible or difficult.

We built the *same* interactions, but instead of moving boxes, you picked up little birds and put them in their nests. They’d animate, and sing, and it was a magical, Disney princess kind of moment that everyone (even gruff German doctors) found incredibly enjoyable.

It didn’t remind patients of their disability. They had fun, and they worked *much* harder, because they wanted to make the birds happy.

Games are tremendously powerful, and utilizing that power can make otherwise intensely boring or difficult experiences enjoyable and engaging. But it has almost nothing to do with points and badges. It’s not simple, it’s not fast, and it’s not cheap.

It is, however, totally worth it when you do it right. But doing it right means bringing folks on with deep, deep experience from DAY ONE in the process. This is not something you can “slap on” later, and it’s not something that some snake-oil “gamification” expert can do at all.

If you want to engage the power of games, you have to build a game development *team* from the ground up, right from the start, and it has to be a foundational part of your product.

And if you ever hear some “expert” telling you how they can give you that power fast and cheap, walk away. Don’t even wait for them to finish talking. They are *lying to you*.

Oh, and an additional thought:

Game design is a field where expertise and experience matter. A lot.

Being able to understand how to incentivize behavior, how to balance risk and reward, how to properly communicate ideas to a player, when & how to provide feedback, how to manage possibility space without exploding into unmanageable complexity… all that, on top of how to get a team of people with wildly diverse creative disciplines to all understand the core idea and work together to build it…

Yes, it’s a fun job. But it’s a complex one that has a LOT of moving parts.

A lot of entrepreneurs (and I’m speaking here from direct experience, having worked with quite a few game-related startups) think that their understanding of games, because they’ve played games, is equivalent to an experienced designer/game director.

It is not.

And most of the game-based (product) companies I’ve seen only reach out for expert help when it’s FAR too late.

If you don’t bring in game-centric expertise for a game-based product from day 1, you are dooming your product to fail. I’m serious. This is a fatal mistake, and I’ve seen company after company make it, then ask for help when they realize they’ve done it wrong, but have no money or time to make any changes. By that point, it’s *incredibly* difficult to turn things around, if it’s possible at all.

Game development is an expertise, with value. It is distinct from “playing a lot of games” and your expertise in whatever other field you’re bringing to the table. It’s often strange and counterintuitive, and while yeah, some people can figure it out, I keep seeing teams on death’s doorstep because they believed they could do it based on no experience and found out it was harder than they expected.

“This Team is Great!”

Whenever I’m on a team, I think, “Man, this team is *great*. So many wonderful world-class people!” Even when there are problem folks. No team is perfect, but I’ve had a lot of really deeply pleasurable working experiences, and at almost every job, I’ve ended up making a few lasting friends.

And while I’m normally not a super outgoingly optimistic guy, I think whenever I hear, “This team is the best I’ve ever worked with!” or “This is the best team in the world!” there’s part of me that thinks, “Look, not every team is the best, how good could this one be? It’s clearly not the best in the world,” but a much bigger part of me is really happy for them.

Because a lot of teams are great. A lot of *people* are great to work with. And when you find them, they’re so joyous and uplifting and pleasurable and energizing to be around that yeah, it feels like you really can’t get any better than that.

But that comes with a downside – if this team is this good, will I ever have an experience like this again? Sometimes that can trap you in a situation that is no longer the right one for you. But the answer is, “look around”. Look at all the folks touting how wonderful their teams are. They’re *right*. They’re *all* right.

So when your team, or your circumstance, *isn’t* right for you, it’s okay to move on. It’s okay to leave a great team of (probably mostly) great people in search of the next thing for you. And you’re *probably* going to love the team you move to, and will one day think, “This is the best team I’ve ever worked with.”

New can be scary. For those of us who are socially a bit on the reserved side, it can be a really big challenge. But I think if you look out there among your peers, you’ll find a lot of people have found jobs with *wonderful* teams and excellent coworkers.

When one day you decide you need to make the leap, you almost certainly will, too.

Pressure and Meta

One of the things I find incredibly challenging as a parent is knowing how hard to “push” my kids. As the child of a fairly traditional “Asian Mom”, who was under immense pressure throughout my childhood to “excel”, I hated everything about it. I hated music, I hated most sports, I hated school. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties when I realized that I didn’t hate all those things, I hated the pressure I felt, and the constant criticism and pummeling of my self-esteem that it all meant.

So with the kids, this is something I genuinely struggle with.

This morning, something came up, and I responded in a way that felt more like “my parents” and not “what I want to do”, and I struggled with that internally for a while, and then just talked to my older son specifically about *why* I responded the way I did, the specific pressure and difficulty of trying to walk this fine line of “push so that you butt up against your comfort zone and learn new things,” and “let you discover things that you love and build skill on your own”.

It was one of the first times that I’ve had this “meta” conversation about parenting with J – that it wasn’t the conversation about the actual thing, but the conversation about the pressure I felt as a parent and how difficult it was to navigate. And then we talked about what *he* wanted, and what his motivations were, and we reached a genuinely great conclusion.

And it reminded me of a time when our game, Fleck, was really struggling to stand on its own. At the time, I didn’t know whether to put on a brave face and power through it with positivity, or whether to have the frank discussion about the state of the game & the business side of things. The same kind of “meta” conversation about the game with the team.

I was shocked. People *wanted* that insight – they wanted to contribute at that level, and they responded incredibly well to an honest, open talk about vulnerability, the struggles we faced, etc. Everyone *knew* things weren’t peachy-keen, but I’d been told that the leader needs to be positive, help folks get through obstacles, etc.

I think the lesson I take from this is that in general, folks don’t mind the meta conversation. You don’t have to “play the game” and hope to get the right results with all the mechanics hidden away behind the scenes. If folks know how the machine works, you can all play the game together.