Think Like A Game Designer - Travis George — From League of Legends to Vela Games: Prioritization, Leadership, and the Power of Constraints (#75)

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

About Travis GeorgeTravis George joins us on today’s episode, bringing over two decades of experience in the video game industry. Travis has held leadership roles at renowned companies like Activision and Riot Games, where he served as the product lead for League of Legends, helping to grow the game into a global phenomenon with over 117 million monthly players. He later co-founded Vela Games, where he continues to innovate as CEO, focusing on designing new player experiences in the cooperative gaming space.In this episode, Travis shares his journey from launching his first IT services company as a teenager to pursuing a formal education in game design and eventually playing a pivotal role in building one of the most successful live-service games in history. He offers critical insights into team building, the challenges of scaling a studio, and how to align your company around vision and priorities. Travis also discusses the lessons he learned from his successes and failures, including evaluating personal and professional growth, managing creative burnout, and pivoting when necessary. Whether you’re a novice designer or a seasoned creator, Travis’s experiences and philosophies provide a treasure trove of wisdom for navigating game development. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Travis George. Travis is a seasoned video game industry veteran with over 18 years of experience, having held prominent roles at major companies like Activision and Riot games. At Riot, he served as the product lead for League of Legends, helping to grow the game into a massive multiplayer success with over 117 million monthly players. He then also co-founded his own company and became CEO of Vela Games, and we talk about all of those

experiences in this episode. I discovered Travis at the Dice Conference earlier this year, and we broke into an incredible conversation where I learned a ton. He has a really great way of both sharing practical stories of his experiences and formulating them into real principles that you can use. So we talk about his prioritization, vision, and alignment formula for being able to get large teams to work together and he managed teams of hundreds of people at Riot. We talk about how he evaluates his own position in his companies and how he would choose to actually design away his own job at Riot by what kinds of questions he asked and what kinds of questions you should ask in the roles that you're in and how you can decide what to do next.

We talk about live service games and the challenges of making a live service game right now. We talk about fundraising, working with publishers. We talk about a lot of different ways about how you build well-functioning teams that are autonomous, that can collaborate together, lots of deep dives into the process of running major games like League of Legends, as well as the ups and downs of running a startup and the challenges that you have when you're trying to find product market fit and how you communicate with your audience. There is so much gold in this episode. I know you're going to love it. So without any further ado, here is,

Travis George. Hello and welcome. I am here with Travis George. Travis, man, it's great to finally get you on the podcast. Yeah, it's great since we talked class and I'm happy to be here. Yeah, you were one of those people. I mean, we just kind of met in the hallways at the Dice conference and just started chit-chatting. And it was like, I immediately got so much value out of our conversation and frankly had a lot of fun with it.

I knew I wanted to get you on the podcast and be able to both learn more from you myself and share some of your insights and fun stories with the audience. So this is going to be a great conversation. I know it. Yeah, it was really fun for me too. And Dice is one of those places where you just never know who you're going to meet. And yeah, we literally just sat out in what the hall after the roundtables and ended up having an hour-long conversation about all kinds of things. So yeah, super happy to be here and chat with you again. Yeah, so I usually start with people's origin stories, but let's use that meeting as a jumping off point. Because, you know, again, my background, you know, is primarily from the tabletop game space.

And we moved over to the digital game space. And so going to places like Dice was my effort to sort of, you know, connect more with the community, with both potential publishers and fundraisers and other creators and to be able to learn from. For people out there that are looking to break into an industry, is that the kind of thing that you recommend? Does it in, is it, is it a, you have to be at a certain stage in your process for that sort of thing to be useful? Is it, I know there's several people that go to Dice, but don't officially go to Dice. Just hang out at the lobby bar nearby. I've seen a lot of that. I've done that myself in my early days at GDC.

I would just kind of, you know, lurk with the right people. Do you have thoughts on that? Because I think that's kind of a little bit opaque to a lot of people that are getting started. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been in games now for over 20 years and I've had various relationships with all the different conferences. So when I started out, I would go mostly just as an individual contributor designer. I'd go to try to learn. I'd go to try to network and meet people. But then as my career's gone on, I'm now an entrepreneur. I feel like I have to go to all of them and do the same thing that you

were doing, which is like build not only kind of knowledge sharing connections, but business connections, et cetera. That was actually the time we met was my first dice as well. And I bought a pass. So I've been to all the others. But I think. think that there's just nothing that replaces meeting people in person, right? And we're such a small industry. You know, remote is great and enables so many things. I'm a big fan of it. But if you really just like want to make connections more that are deeper than you can online, you know, in person is great. And then also, like I said, our meeting would have never happened except for the hallway in Dice. And so I think it's one of those things where you have the opportunity

to really meet other people. And so it all depends on the conference you want to go to and kind of what your goal is because there's a conference for everything. But I do think that nothing really replaces, like getting out there and not only looking to try to intentionally meet people, but just putting yourself out there and finding out who you might meet because you never know.

You might meet somebody that you learn a lot from and build a relationship with. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's really well said. And it's advice I've given for a very long time to people in the tabletop industry. like you got to go to the tabletop conventions. Like the creators and certainly, I think this is probably more true for tabletop than for digital games,

but I think it's definitely true for both. It's like, you're here because you love it. Like you're here like, you know, there's no, everybody like is passionate about the industry, is passionate about the,

you know, making cool things and seeing other people make cool things. And so in general, it's a very supportive space. And it can be intimidating. I know there's a lot of people out there that, you know, maybe aren't,

don't feel like they're so good in social situations and they kind of have a little bit of trouble. but these events often have structures that help support that. Like I did a dice that was like a little speed dating, you know, speed networking kind of process, right, which is a little cheesy, but whatever it helps you, like force you to like interact or the little roundtables and different things.

There are ways to get to get out there. And not every conference is going to turn into something, you know, meaningful down the road, but it creates more opportunity space for luck and possibility and making that right connection. And that the relationships that you can build are, for the long term, right? You've been doing this for 20 years. I've been making living

in the games for 25 years now. It's like, this is not a short term, like, I'm going to, you know, quote-unquote network and make a deal. It's like, you know, it's a different philosophy. And the thing is, too, is that, I mean, if you don't go, you know exactly what the outcome will be because there's no chance for you to meet anybody. There's no chance for you to connect. If you go, like you said, it may not be your closing a deal tomorrow, but you have the opportunity to meet people. And like you said, too, like the number of times I've run into people five years later or 10 years later, and we catch up and it's like, oh, well, you know what? Now I work at so and so, and I can actually connect you with somebody else who might actually be able to help you

in your business, where you might be able to help them, which feels really good. And so it is a long-term relationship. It's such a small community on kind of the digital or card game side. And I'm an introvert, right? Like, I would, I'll stand. home and just play games and watch movies on Netflix the whole time. But going out into those shows and really putting yourself out there, I think, just paid so many dividends. And I really regret not doing it for quite a few years, kind of in the middle of my career. And so only in the last kind of third have I really gotten back out there. And I'm always exhausted afterwards. But is that introvert energy, you know, is all expended being an extrovert. But I always come back and generally,

them always feel like that was super worth it. Yeah, yeah. And it's also tough too. Like the more, you know, there's the version of this where you're, you're early on and you're broke and it feels like going to these conventions is a high cost in that sense and can be difficult for people. There's a version of this where you're like, you know, you're busy and you've got a company to run and you've got games to make it.

It's like you're taking yourself out of that for five days or a week or whatever for the conference. And then you've got your recovery period, which is at least a couple days to get back up track and get things going. So it can be very, there's a lot of resistance. I know I feel it. But every time I go like you, I felt like it's been valuable. And, you know, no good story ever started with.

I decided to stay home and rest. Unless it was right after you just got back from a conference. Yeah, that's right. It was like, I decided to stay home and rest instead of going out again. Okay. So let's take this to the way back machine because I really want to get, I want to get the full arc of your journey, because you have gotten to experience a variety of different aspects of the industry

and have worked for the biggest companies in the industry. You've launched major products for them, including ones that are very close to my heart and teams I know very well. And then you've now also created your own company and had the, you know, kind of more indie experience and growth there. And you've made a lot of interesting choices along the way. So I want to have a chance to pick them all apart. But I want to start, again, at the early days.

I think, you know, you actually went to school for, game design. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. So I grew up in the Midwest and I really just love technology and obviously part of that was game. So when I was actually 17, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life. So I got me and my four best friends and we started like a, what would be now like an IT services company. It was basically like, can I work with my friends on computers and make money and that sounds amazing. It turns out after about a year and a half of doing that and actually being relatively successful. The company still exists today. One of my co-founders actually runs it today and it's like his career. But I realized like I just didn't have any passion

for IT services and like enterprise software. So I was like, you know what? I love video games and somebody's got to be able, somebody's got to get paid to make these things. So why not me? And at the time I was like, well, you know, there's not really, how can I learn this? And it was get into the industry. And the only way you could kind of get into the industry was like you knew somebody in the industry, right? Like, I mean, it's such a tiny industry now, let alone back then. And so I was like, well, can I just get an experience working? And, you know, I found the full sale. I went there in 2002. Three months after I even learned about the program, I was enrolled, moved across the country to Florida and starting. And so I just went for it. And I learned a lot. You know,

I would never say anybody has to go that route. I think there's a lot of viable routes into the industry. For me, what I really wanted out of it was just the knowledge to be able to put myself forward and work. And I knew I wanted to be a game designer, but really back then, game designers tended to be from an artist or programming background. It wasn't necessarily something you could step into right away. And I was rubbish at art.

So I was like, you know what? C++ it is. And so I just learned C++. I learned vector math and all that stuff that you need to kind of program core games. And I had a really important revelation during my school. So it was about two years. And it was that I hated programming. I really did not enjoy it one bit.

And so I don't know if I should say that, but I broke the rules a little bit at school. So we had a big final project, which was part of our grade. And everyone was supposed to code on it. Because it was primarily it was a coding course, right, with game design elements, but it was more of a science course as opposed to kind of the game design course. Well, I actually just decided I was going to be a full-time game designer on our core project. And so I wrote very little code for that. But we ended up making one of the most fun games that anybody had put out

because we really focused on making the experience fun and scoping it really, like, properly for what was essentially a three-month-long student project, right? So we didn't have any ambitions that we were going to go recreate Final Fantasy 7 or, you know, like, you know, Doom 2. You know, we made a very, very simple, tight, top-down helicopter shooter game. And it was great for what it was, right? And that taught me a lot. And that ultimately was kind of my opening into the industry.

But, yeah, it was a crazy experience. and really opened the doors in terms of what I thought I, what I was able to do to add to the industry as opposed to not really knowing anything at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. It's like actually not a lot of the people that I talk to go, you know, kind of get a formal education in game design. And especially, again, as you mentioned, a lot of these universities, they really teach programming and graphic design and not, you know,

game design is kind of a little add-on. the side quest, which is a, you know, where there's plenty of that material out there. But I think it's great. You know, what feels like it's the most important thing to me is that like actually doing the thing, right? iterate, try and build a thing, learn from that, get feedback, do that again. And, you know, that's the process where learning happens the fastest. And so a university structure that forces that function is great if it's what's needed.

I, I want to back up a little bit because this, I'm just fascinated by this. this IT company that you founded when you're 17. That is a bit more unusual. I didn't get that in my research. So I'm curious what made you like, how did you decide to do that and what was like, how are you finding customers? Like what's like,

you know, you've got some entrepreneurial spirit clearly from early on that's not, doesn't come back into your journey till much later. So I'm curious what was, what was the traits that sparked that and what kind of took that off? Just a, you know, a little bit more color to that part of the story. I was just fascinated with technology.

So, again, being an introvert, a lot of my time growing up, because I grew up in Kansas, I grew up in a small town, a lot of my Friday and Saturday nights were trying to get some two PCs that me and my friends found to talk to each other so we could play StarCraft or playing Nintendo 64 together. And I love technology. And I was just fascinated with kind of the early, late 90s, early 2000s, like enterprise boom.

So I actually, right after we started the company, I actually flew out to Las Vegas to go to Comdex, which was the big consumer trade show. And so I went around and looked at a bunch of like the Oracle booth and like the Sun microsystems booth. And so I was just fascinated by it. And I just knew that technology was changing the world so fast. I was one of the only kids to be interested in getting on the internet at school when we first got our connection.

And so it really just like there was nowhere for me to work in that. And so really the drive became because I wanted to learn more at work in that environment. And there was no place for me to do it. So I thought, let's start our own. And we were all kind of nerdy, tech savvy, you know, kind of high school kids. And so we got together and, you know, wrangled that up together. I wasn't even legally old. Only one of us was actually legally old enough to start the business.

So he was really cool, actually. And like, when we all turned 18, we turned it into a partnership as opposed to just a sole proprietorship. But like, we drove to the state capital and registered our business. And then, you know, we really like, okay, what are we actually going to do? So I just literally hit the street and went to talk to local businesses, like, you know, churches. And I think the crowning achievement. was we actually won a contract to outfit our high school with a new graphic design computer lab. So we actually built all these custom PCs. We ran all the networking for it. We also want a contract for a local

hotel to install internet in every room, which at the time was a big deal. And it was all just born because I wanted to work in this industry and had no other way to do it than just try to create our own. And fundamentally, I did that for a year and a half and just realized that it wasn't really my thing and I was just limited. And so that was where the Pivot to Game Design came in. But yeah, it's still a company still going in my hometown now. And it's actually an internet services company now. They run rural, like fiber internet now. And they're kind of all over the state.

That's amazing. I mean, just that kind of like hustle at that early and age to just really go door to door and make the sales and figure. it out and craft the business around it is fat is i mean you know that's a common trade i see in a lot of successful entrepreneurs it's something you clearly had early but then there was also this self-awareness to be able to pivot which is really interesting because a lot of people when they start you know people get stuck in a career path that they hate and took me quite a while to realize even after you know my magic career i still went to law school and was miserable for a year before i realized that that was a terrible idea but like to be able to realize that that hey i've created my

own business and I've got my own path, but this is still not right for me and I need to make the ship. Was there like a specific moment where that happened? Was it just kind of this gnawing thing that came to fruition? How did you decide that no, you know what? I'm going to ship gears. I'm going to go become a game designer. This is my path. Yeah. I don't think there was a particular moment, but there was kind of an underlying sense for a while that I was literally working in this job that I had made for myself, right? I was the CEO of this small company. We were doing a pretty kick-ass job for a bunch of five, for five like high school kids, you know.

And I was working with literally some of my best friends in the world. Like it was just like me and my friends. And I was like, I can't imagine myself doing this for another 10 years, right? And it was just that age where I really started thinking about like, what do I want to do? And my parents had always encouraged me to find something that was really passionate about and then find a way to make money off of it, you know,

and I'll quote unquote never work a day in the life. You know, thanks mom and dad. But I think it was just that underlying sense of kind of the last few months of this is actually going pretty well. I work with some of my best friends and I kind of made this job for myself, but I really can't imagine doing it for much more. And so I think that was the impetus to what would I really just love to do? And again, I had no concept of what it took to be a game designer or a program,

And so, you know, it really was just that intensive three months of like, this is what I think I want to do. Again, my parents were super supportive of it. And I was off to, off to learn how to program for games. Yeah. I think so there's another maybe an interesting lesson detour to take here on when you design your own trap, right? Like this is something that I have noticed, you know, and we don't have to stay in this part of your timeline. But like I've noticed as even in my own company, right? I've been running it for 15 years now.

And there have been windows where I felt like I painted myself into a corner and I built a company that I wasn't even doing the thing I loved anymore. I wasn't happy with where we were. And it ended up costing quite a bit to realize, you know, both financially and, you know, in my soul to make a reshift back over, be like, okay, wait, hold on. What's the world I want to build now? Do you have any thoughts around that, especially in relation to your current company now, what you've been running for what, six, six years, seven years, something like that.

Something like that, yeah. And how do you think about structuring that and building it so that you don't end up in that kind of a trap or making it so that it is a culture and an environment and a work, you know, goals that you're aligned with? Yeah. I think if there's actually one common thread through my entire career, it's that I've always tried to really be aware of what I was doing, what, value was I adding and how much was I enjoying it?

And so, you know, I've actually not worked at very many places, but inside even those stints of more than a couple years here and there, I've always done that. Like I worked at Riot Games for nine years. I had no less than four or five major roles at the company, you know, completely different. And when we kind of bring forward, fast forward a little bit to Vela Games, you know, that since really 2017 when I started filling out paperwork. But 2018 is when it became kind of myself and my two co-founder's full-time jobs. You know, as yourself, like you've got various phases of a startup.

And I still refer to ourselves as a startup, even though we're in like phase. We're really kind of in our second age of the company. And even in the first age, you know, I kind of think of there's four distinct roles that I've had. And now in this second age. And by the way, Vela Games is a Vela is named after a constellation. It's actually in the southern hemisphere, so I can't see it. But what happens to constellations over time is that as the stars in relation to the Earth move, you get into the life cycle of constellations, and they actually change position and changed shape.

Those are called the ages. So when I refer to the second age of Vela Games, I refer to kind of this idea of quite a different world that we live in. now because our perspective is shifted, right? But I think there's a common thread. So even though I've had worked at four or five companies, I've probably had 10 or 15 major different roles. And I think the common denominator there is just always asking myself, even if I can't see myself doing this for another five years,

how long can I see myself doing this and what would make me keep doing it? or what would make me kind of want to stop doing it. And I think having those really clear lines of demarcation along the way have really helped me know when to stay and keep going and know when to kind of take the exit ramp and do something else. Because when you do that, when you do leave and when you do exit, you want to make sure that your decisions are negatively impacting somebody else or some obligation that you care about

or, you know, team members or, you know, investors or your boss, or your mentor or mentee or whatever, whoever it is. There's usually consequences because we work in such a team-oriented environment. So things are just really asking yourself, like, why will I stay doing this? And what are my kind of criteria for leaving? And then being able to craft that narrative, right? I've got a couple pretty good examples along the way of those. But that's the general principle, I think.

Okay, great. Well, I'm definitely, I'm eager to hear the examples and add stories to it as we go through. but I think that's really great. And what resonates with me is I have found that with every project that I take on, it's really important that I set out my kind of definitions for success and my definitions for, you know, kind of pivot time, failure. You know, this is not working up front, right? Because once you're in it and you're like kind of far along, you're going to face these,

what I call the dark forest, right, where there's struggle, there's challenge, you're not really sure. and the tendencies, depending upon the type of person you are, could be to run before it's to before you should and like leave the challenge. Or if you're like me, I'm like tenacious to a fall. Stay in too long. And I will like, I will like go down with the ship and like bleeding down to the end. It's like, well, okay, that's not that's not right.

And so setting it early when you're like, okay, I'm calm. I'm not like too emotionally invested. I'm not too emotionally distraught. I can say here's what my parameters are. And so three months, six months a year from now, if I'm not at criteria X, then I need to change something. If I'm at criteria Y, then we're okay. And I found to be a really helpful frame for making sure that I don't, you know,

let my natural tendencies and emotional charge make bad decisions for me. Yeah. So I think that's very wise. I've definitely not done that in several cases. But I have a really strong principle about kind of game design, life, product management, entrepreneurship is like always make a decision. but I think it's really important for me at least that that decision can be I'm going to defer this decision until X, right? Like you can consciously choose that you are going to wait to make a decision, but in my mind it's never okay to not make any decision, right?

So I've gone into a couple rules before and I'm like, I have no idea what I expect out of this. I have no idea what's going to be. And that tends to be when I'm doing something new. Or like at Riot, there were a couple examples of where no one had done this job before. No one had done this role. So we didn't really know what it was going to be. And I said, okay, within three months, I am then going to say, okay, here's my success. Here's my off ramp, et cetera, right?

But it's kind of like build out what the lay of the land looks like. And I think there's a couple times when I haven't done any of that. And it's probably the times I regret most. Yeah. Yeah, always make a decision, but you can decide not to decide as an interesting distinction. You can decide to do, you can decide to make the final decision later, right? I see. Right.

Do you have to, when you say that, does it have to come with a specific timeline or just like, I'll revisit this in three months? Yeah, you always have to set a time, right? Like it can't, it can't be indefinite deferral, right? But I think that's the way to say it is you can defer a decision under certain criteria, right? imagine you were working on a prototype for a game, right? And you timebox it and you actually end up and you're like, you know what, we didn't actually get to this vision over here,

but we actually have something that we're really excited about. We can defer that decision. We can push that decision. It has to be under very tight circumstances. It would be very specific and say, we're going to give ourselves more time to explore this path because it might actually be better than what we were doing. doing before. I think it would be kind of a shame in some situations that we have in our careers

and life to kind of stick to a decision no matter what, right? And just like kill something or not give something the space it needs or not give yourself the time to really process things. Like I think as I've gotten older, I look back at a lot of decisions I made when I was younger and I was very, you know, all the time deciding what to do and just realizing like give my myself the grace to take things in and really process how I feel about it, how I'm reacting to it, what's really going on. I think that for me is what feels like wisdom. But, you know, I think that you can, in my mind, you can, you can defer things, but it has to be specific, right? You know, it has to be for a reason on a timeline.

You know, and it's probably, it may be okay to do it again, right? But at least you're doing it consciously and you're not letting the decision or the weight of not deciding, you know, put that weight on you. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to dig into this more. And maybe there'll be some of the examples you mentioned there's some at Riot while you're working on League of Legends that came to mind. But like, I think this is the real skill of entrepreneurship, right?

Like, I mean, your job as a CEO is just generally making hard decisions, right? Is most of what you have to do, right? You have to take in imperfect amounts of information. You're having to make some judgment calls here and there. There's a lot of consequences on the line. And you're, how do you decide when you make those calls? I mean, we're wrestling with this stuff right now. We're building out our 2025 kind of release calendar for products and crowd funds and

different things that we're doing. And there's some of them that I'm like, okay, we know for sure we're going to do this kind of product. Our extensions are main line. It's our 15 year anniversary. We're definitely doing an essential thing next year. But then we've got like, okay, this is. like five new potential projects we can incubate and try.

I can make a good argument for any one of them. At some point, I got to make a decision. And then how do you kind of decide that, especially when you've got, you know, you only get to take a couple swings a year maybe or a couple, you know, an increase of digital games oftentimes, it's, you know, maybe a swing every couple of years.

How can you walk me through a process like that, where you've had to make those tough calls or what that felt like either in riot or in Vela or wherever makes sense? Yeah, I'll kind of talk through a little bit of the framework and then I can give maybe two different examples. So some tough decisions along the way. But generally, when I think about great game designers, you know, you have a long history of doing awesome stuff. I've been fortunate to work on some great projects. I still remind people I've worked on more canceled and failed projects than successful ones,

which I think is probably true for most of us. But we don't talk about that as much. But I think that having that vision is obviously step one of like, what am I trying to achieve? Maybe it's just art. Maybe it's a specific market need. But you can't start anywhere unless you have at least a clear picture of an outcome. And that doesn't mean you have to have everything decided and figured out. That's not the way it works, as we all know.

But you have to have that vision. And then I think the secret for me has always been really the power of prioritization. And this is really the act of determining not just what's important, but it forces you to decide what's most important. And I think that was a really great lesson that I got hammered into me from the co-founder's riot is like, we never had anything that we were contemplating doing that wasn't important or a good idea. It was what's most important, right? And what's most valuable and what's most in line with our objectives, right? And so that prioritization forces constraints.

And I think then it really is like a secret lens you can look through and understand, you know, why would I even do this, right? If I can't articulate the most important aspect here. And then once you have what's most important, then you can go and build alignment, right? And I'm a big believer in alignment. And alignment for me is essentially, sharing the vision so that others can embrace it and be a part of it, right? It's different than explaining something to someone.

It's bringing them along on the journey. And I really believe that you pay these costs like in a project with a team, even if you're a solo project, right? I've never done a solo project, but I would imagine that doing this process is valuable for a solo project as well. I'm a really big believer that you pay all of these costs at some point in the project. And the later you do it, the more chance that you're going to actually have to undo work that you've already done, and thus time, money, effort, resource, whatever is valuable to you that you're expending to get to this point.

And so I really, really think that, like, that's the framework that I try to make a lot of decisions and guide people through, which is just vision prioritization alignment, right? And it's easy to say. It's hard to do. And there's no one way to do that. But I think if you skip any of those steps, you're fundamentally missing out on a major, major portion of that kind of decision-making process, right?

Yeah. Yeah, no, that, I mean, that all, I'm aligned with all that. I think that it reminds me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It reminds me of Seth Godin uses the term thrash. And when he talks about creative work, there's going to be some thrash in any creative project. And you want to do the thrashing early when it's cheap as opposed to late when it's expensive.

Like you don't know what you're doing. You don't have a clear vision when you're starting. You don't know what's important. You don't know how to get all the thoughts there. And so the more you can get that out of the way early, and you can't get all of it out of the way. But as much of it is you can get out of the way. you can get out of the way early, the better and smoother the whole process is going to be.

And if you just defer those kinds of decisions and those kinds of tough discussions and testing, then you're going to pay that price at some point down the road. So it sounds like there's some similarities there. I think of it a lot. I tried to actually create a formula one time for how I think about making great things. And I think where I got to was a really simplified version of it, which was the process, and tools and kind of methods that you use are kind of a speed function, right? They allow you to go faster, right?

Whereas the talent and the creative energy and the juice or the mojo or whatever you want to call it, the vibes that you have on kind of the creative side and the talent and the people side are what will increase your accuracy, right? So you will, with the right team, with the right chemistry, with the right creative, vision, you will take fewer swings, and then the processes and tools that you use will allow you to iterate faster. And thus ultimately, the more, like you were saying at the beginning, the more iterations that you can turn through a higher chance of success that you had. Right. And so I think sometimes we kind of ignore one side or the other of that, right? Like, oh, tools and processes and we'll

fix everything. But the input is people and creativity and vision, right? And those things that, you know, a process is just a guide for, right? It's the, it's the, the fuel, you know, in the engine, right? So that's what I know. I've tried to think about that as well, but I love the, I love thrash and that's a very elegant way of like,

just get the thrash out of the way early as much as possible, right? Yeah, okay. So we've, there's a, I love, I love how you think about the stuff. Again, we geeked out on this the first time we met, but I like, I think, you know, this is where I came from, right? Because I came from this as an analytical game,

player and I had to learn how to become a game designer. And so I tried to break down all these fuzzy terms like fun and collaboration and whatever into something that's like, okay, step one, step two, step three. Like how do I align these things? But I think it, one thing I've learned from my analytical mind and from when I wrote my book to when I actually, what resonates with people is stories in real example. So you've referenced a few of those. So let's leave the theory phase a little bit.

Let's get to the ground level and some stories about how you've applied this or misapplied this, right? Because lessons learned from mistakes are at least as valuable. So let's talk about a couple stories and then maybe we'll zoom back out to the principles. Yeah, great. So I think there's really two things that come to mind when I think about this. And one is one is really

like more of a personal kind of a story and one is more of a team and kind of company story. So I was very fortunate. I joined Riot Games early on in early 2008 when the team was only about 15 or so

people. I don't remember the exact number, but it's around there. I wasn't the 15th person, but they had just gone through a bit of reorganization to try to like now build this thing called League of Legends. And they wanted me to be a game designer. I had just come from a failed startup and was wholly uninterested in joining another startup. But I did anyway, because I wanted to try

it again and work with some people that I had met along the way. But fast forward, we launched the Legends. And around the time of launch, I was essentially made the transition from game designer to game product manager. I don't call myself a producer because I'm actually not that good with schedules. I'm actually not that good with process despite the fact that I think it's important. I was really zeroed in on

what's most important for the player, right? And what are we actually prioritizing to give the most value to the player? And that really aligned with my personal philosophy. That was something that Riot is famous for and I believe to be extremely genuine during our time there. But anyway, we launched the game and it started to become more and more successful than even we had thought.

Right. And so I remember ringing up the president of the company one day, my boss, and saying, you know, I want to do your job. I want to essentially be the executive producer of the game. And he kind of laughed at me. He means like, I don't know if you do. I was like, but I do. I do. I really want to do that. And so I was really fortunate to essentially serve as the lead producer, senior producer, executive producer. They called it five different things since then. But I was in charge of prioritizing the Legends. And we were going through a crazy growth phase.

I did that role for about three and a half years. And during that time, the development team grew from around 60 people to around 400 during that time. And league became massive. And it was really a testament to just the passion of everybody on the team and having a great game and us, you know, making some of the right decisions along the way. and fending off competitors. I had a really important revelation, which was I didn't want to do that job anymore at one point, which even in retrospect, when I tell people,

that sounds insane. You know, I loved that job. I loved the team. I loved everything that, all the opportunities that it afforded me. But I realized two things. I realized that one, I was kind of created.

really exhausted after essentially six years of 24 hours a day, seven days a week of Leave Legends. And I wanted to work on something else at the company. I wanted to still work at Riot. I'd do something else. But two, I realized that the job was bigger than me at the time, right? You know, I had grown immensely in terms of my skill and my relationships and my prowess. And, you know, I would put it as like one of the 10 best jobs in the entire game.

industry. And I remember super clearly, I walked into my boss's office again, you know, and it was like, I'm not going to do this job anymore. Like, I don't think that this is the right structure. I don't think this is the right people. And, you know, and I love it, but I, I think we should do it an entirely different way. I think this job should not be one person. I think it should actually be. And so, we had this conversation and he kind of laughed at me and was like, no, you're not going to, really? And I was like, yeah, really, I'm not, I don't want to do this job anymore. And it's not because I don't love it. But I was really just thinking about that cycle of like the vision of kind of why I was doing

this, like what was important to me and how much value was I adding to the company. And I actually just realized that this team and game and product would be better if we did this role a different way because we were still kind of running it the way that we were when it was 100 people. So I actually took the next six months to think through what would really be important to setting this up for success. And so we came up with an entirely new process on how to run the development team. We came up with a three-person leadership structure. I talked a bunch of people into doing this job, you know, and how are we going to decide, like, what to do?

And it really, like, worked myself out of a job over the next six months and walked away and ended up moving, you know, to an entire. different riot office. And as far as I know, they still use that structure today. I've actually heard people who I've met along the way use the process that we developed at Riot now, kind of an agile scrum at scale for games. And really just like walking away from that because it really just,

it was an incredible opportunity and I'll probably never have anything like it again. But it just didn't fit my vision for what I wanted for my what was important for me of the team. And so I spent the next six months building alignment on what we were going to do instead. And there's probably still a bunch of people today who think that I got fired from that job. Because who would walk away and who would give that up? I swear that's what happened. But it's just a fascinating story.

And when I reflect back on that, I see a lot of those principles. Even if I maybe couldn't articulate them at the time, I look back now and think about that story a lot. Fascinating. Fascinating. I did not expect the alignment that you were building to be the one that got you out of your job. That was an interesting, an interesting version of putting these principles into practice. And I think it's a funny thing, too, because you mentioned that kind of in passing, it's like you didn't necessarily have these principles articulated, but you were doing them.

And then you've kind of articulated them later. And I found that to be very true in my own career and even most of the great kind of designers that I speak to. It's like you can only kind of build, you know, you can tell your story in retrospect more so than you can, you know, going forward and then you refine it over time as you put it into practice. Okay, but now you've got me intrigued by this, this, you know, you built a whole new process of riot, of riot agile, kind of, it's not enough and strong. But that was a good. Yeah, yeah, no, you're taking full credit for it. Nobody else had any clue what to do.

If not for you, they would have failed long time ago. I understand. I heard you. But no, well, okay, so this is a thing, you know, again, like I'm, I'm, I found that there's a very different structure. We've, we've developed our own kind of, I mean, a lot of people say they do agile, they do, they do scrum processes. And what that means is they break their waterfall down into two weak chunks. But in reality, well, first of all, there's going to be some people listening that have no idea we're using jargon terms. So let's maybe a little bit about what that means and why it matters.

a little bit about how you think about applying these principles to making games with kind of small team, right, where I'm at, you know, a dozen people to big team of 60 people to massive team of hundreds. How does that necessarily change? I'm fascinated by all of that. So maybe a little short, short, top line for people that need a little orientation. And then let's dig into some of the fun details of how you run a game design team. Yeah, great. So I am not a process guru.

I'm not a certified scrummaster or anything. right? But my first introduction was really when I went to riot at first. And it was the idea of Agile. And so Agile is just the concept of, you know, really iterating for software, right? Because software is fundamentally unpredictable. And when you add in this intangible element of fun, right, like we were joking earlier, like what is fun, you know, fundamentally you are just saying this is a process for a thing that I know I can't predict. And so thus I am going to be smart about it.

It is not an excuse to not have a plan or goals or a vision or anything. You're not just like agile because you like, you know, don't know what you're going to do past a month. That's not agile either. But really, like, you know, agile is just that concept. And it's evolved a ton. But my first introduction was when I went to riot. And it wasn't even my thing. I didn't really know much about it.

But as I started to take more of a leadership role in the company, and we started to find that, you know, going from a team of 20 people to 60 people at launch to a 200 to a 400 person, you know, global unit, right, was extremely difficult. And I think the top line for me of why you do agile other than, you know, the unpredictable nature of software, especially, you know, games is that. that if done correctly, it allows people to participate in that process of having a shared vision, prioritization to determine what's most important, and then fundamentally building alignment. And so that's kind of the why you do agile and the benefit you get out of it. And as far as jargon, I'm not even the expert on that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So, and again, I don't think there's much value in it, right? The basic idea of agile methodology, as I understand, is that instead of saying, here's the plan, go build this, when we don't know what, you know, things are unpredictable, as you said, both in terms of fun and how the software is going to work and how long things are going to take. But we break it down into small chunks with smaller goals that we can all get aligned around. And then we execute on those smaller goals. We learn from that. And then we adapt and continue in what.

That's right. That's right. And fundamentally, everybody has their own version or flavor of it, right? Right. And I've had people argue different sides of this in terms of like the, you know, kind of more formally being a week or two weeks cycle or, you know, I've, I've had people push for continuous deployment versions. And, and, you know, there's a lot of different ways.

And I don't think there's a single right answer. I think it's going to depend upon your team and your structure, right? But that's where I want to learn from you because, like, again, you know, hopefully I'm learning on this stuff as I go. We've developed a massive improvements in process since I spoke to you, you know, last, whatever it was in February. We've improved a ton, but it's tricky. I feel like there's consistently room to grow and to learn.

And what's working for us today at the team size we have would definitely not work if we tripled in size. And so it has to shift. So what was the process that worked or didn't work either? You can pick the version of Riot that you built or you can pick a version of your own company. Like how do you think about that from a like I want small team, medium team, big team. team, new project, big project. How does it shift? I want to kind of just piece apart.

If somebody out there is thinking about building a team and building a project like this, how would they approach it? Yeah. I think fundamentally, there's so much good literature and examples of building a small team for agile that, you know, essentially like everybody's got their own rules around it, like you said. And it's just whatever works for your team. but, you know, say you've got a team of four to 11 people, like, whatever that right size is,

I think fundamentally the things that are universal are cross-disciplined things, avoid service teams, if at all possible, which means, you know, it always happens where there's a UI team on a game, and then there's seven other teams that need the UI team, you know, to do things. That will inevitably happen, but try to minimize that as much as possible. But fundamentally, what you're trying to do, whether it's a 10-person organization or a thousand-person organization, is you are trying to create autonomous teams that can accomplish goals, right? And that fundamentally is the core principle of it. And I think what we did at Riot was we did about literally probably eight different versions of trying to do that at scale. because it was really important to us on the team that we're bringing in some of the most talented people I've still ever worked with.

And, you know, I fundamentally believe that I'm not the smartest person in the room. Like my job isn't to have the best ideas possible. My job is to get the best ideas out to our audience, right? And now, obviously, coming up with great ideas is fun along the way, and it's part of what I love to do. do and I think that's being involved in the creative process is still where my real passion is. Process is not, but process is a means to an end to get that creativity out to your players or out to your audience or to whatever goal you're trying to accomplish. And so trying to do that at scale with Riot was the real challenge.

And I got to work with some really awesome people. You know, my main partner in crime was a guy named Alea Alderson. It was an awesome Icelandic guy. It's a venture capitalist now, which, you know, plot twist. In other solutions we make in our lives. But, you know, we really worked hand in hand to try to iterate on this with a lot of the leadership team and with everybody. So it was a huge group effort. But really the commitment was that we were iterating on this product.

You know, League was a huge live service game. You know, I remember early on when we were comparing ourselves to World Warcraft, which we viewed when we were tiny and 20 people, said, how often do they patch? And it was every six weeks. We're going to patch it for two weeks. It was just kind of an arbitrary number that sounded crazy. But we did that for years and years and years.

And that was the lifeblood of the game. And it really developed this like live service pattern. And so we're iterating on the product all the time. Why wouldn't we iterate on how we make the product better as well, right? and really empower and enable the awesome people that were joining the company as we were growing so quickly, serving different markets and different players. So that was just a really core principle of that. And Alay especially took the lead on developing that process.

And really what the breakthrough was was the idea that when you reach a certain scale, you almost kind of assign what we called initiatives at the time, but essentially large team goals that are almost like their own product structure. So we would have something like champions. You know, champions is the lifeblood of League of Legends. You know, you can't do that with 20 people at the scale that we were trying to do it at. So there were a hundred people, you know. And so they had their own tech lead and design lead and, you know, product lead and art lead.

And they were fundamentally kind of equipped with everything they needed to just go make the best champions possible and prioritize that. And then at the top level, myself and the rest of the technical leads and the art leads and everybody, the design leads, we would prioritize across initiatives. And so we essentially just made this super product structure inside of it. And it really worked well for scaled teams. And they've evolved at a bunch since then. So, yeah, I've worked in riots since 2017. But fundamentally, it was that idea of just empowering a group of people to work within and kind of almost manage their own product inside of it. It was very different than like a business unit, kind of that like 1980s, you know, old school management style.

It was really built around arming people with the creative kind of goals and then letting them go do it. And there was some really wild stuff that came out of that. So would you give them like, you know, kind of a KPI or key metrics that they would be judged on and then give them the resources they need and then just say, okay, go. as long as you're doing this, you're within the resource bucket and hit the KPI's, you're on your own, go get them? Yeah. And in the simplest form, that was it, right? You know, again, it was the challenge at the top leadership level was making sure that

all the groups were moving in relatively the same direction and kind of addressing any kind of strategic needs that we had from the company, right? So, you know, oh, we're behind on our champion cadence, so we really need to put that up. oh, Dota 2 is about to come out, which is this massive competitor from one of the most famous game companies in the entire world, right? We have to kind of strategically align

to everybody in the same direction. But then when it comes to the decision making and the product they're outputting, we were kind of the quality bar, but at the end of the day, really, you know, we tried to empower those teams, those initiatives,

and then these initiatives tried to empower their teams as much as possible, right? So it went from me kind of having a much heavier hand in like, oh, we're going to make this champion and this is what they're going to do to, you know, being in a review every couple weeks and seeing all the pitches and kind of helping greenlight those, you know, the jinx came out of that process. Like arguably the most iconically Legends champion ever came out of that process from one of the small champion pods on this huge initiative on this huge team. you know, you still got that like real spark of creativity from people. And our job was to take those things and elevate them and make sure that they had the ability to go deliver it to players. Yeah. Wonderful.

Well, I'm going to use that as a jumping off point. There's two other major topics I want to hit before we run out of time. And they could take quite a bit of time, which is live service games, running and operating a live service game. What does that mean? How do you do it well? How do you like learn as you go? Because that's the kind of thing that, you know, it's a lot of people, I mean, it's the main business model for all the most successful games now and that this continuous content and operation and learning is critical. I think it's very hard to do well.

You've done it a lot over different projects. So how do you approach live service games? How should people who want to build live service games approach them? What are some lessons we could learn on that side of things? So since we're recording this in the year 2024, my thoughts on live service games are very different that they would have been in the year 2014. I think live service games at the moment are

what's one step removed from nearly impossible. And I think that's really a testament to how well the existing live service games have done. you know, when live service was this kind of concept of, you know, MMOs and Muds were kind of the early versions of live service games. But as we think of them now, you know, the fortnights of the world, the League of Legends of the world, the Valerans, the counter strikes, etc. They've literally had hundreds of thousands of creator hours and billions of dollars invested into them for the sole purpose of still being the best games on the planet, right? And arguably, they are. So even 10 plus years ago when we were growing at Riot and, you know, I was interviewing people for strategic product

roles at the company. I loved asking them the question of how would you take down legal legends? You have as you have as much money as you want, you do whatever you want. How would you take down League of Legends. And that wasn't because I was thinking about a company that would eventually be a competitor to League of Legends. I was thinking about it can't just be build a better Mova, right?

Or it can't just be build a better shooter, right? It had to be, how can we fulfill the needs of this audience in an adjacent way that's potentially better or more interesting or more social or X, right? I actually think that's what the current crop

of live service games have done, is they use surf the early live service games like the World Warcraft and etc even though world of warcraft is awesome and still going strong it's just not the size of fortnight you know league of legends pub g right and so i think those games have almost done so well over the last decade and a half that it's almost impossible now to create a new one um deliberately and we can kind of see the graveyard of live service games right so i actually think premium games are having kind of a moment now where there's a couple benefits there where you get a clear expectation as a player as to what the experience will be. Because if your game is free to play and you've been working on it

for two years with 30 people, it's not going to have the features, the quality, the content, the uptime of the League of Legends, the Fortnites of the world, right? And so it has to be so, so compelling and so, so good, and it has to have so many eyeballs that you keep that I think live service is incredibly difficult, right? And that's not because live service is bad or wrong. It's actually because the games have done so well. The existing and comments have done so well

at maintaining and growing that audience. And then when they can't, building adjacent products into that audience, like, you know, UEFN for Fortnite, right, is just opened it up to a whole group of content creators. Riot took a different approach, was like, we're going to go build Valerent, right? You know, it's a serving a core need for this audience.

And so live service and me have a different relationship at the moment than maybe we did a few years ago. Sure. Yeah, that's fascinating. And then it's great. I mean, that's fascinating. And then just for people catching up, so UEFN is the Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

And this is actually a previous guest who hasn't aired at the time that we're having this conversation. Alex Seropian has built a whole company around this. So it's a fascinating. So I definitely recommend people listen to that episode if they want to learn more about it. But that idea of user generated content and punting in a sense, some of the labor of building that live services to your audience is pretty fascinating. And it's a maybe a way to solve this problem. Because I think like this is now we're getting to like, you know, the future of games and what's,

what's next, which is always a fascinating topic. I'd love to talk about, but I think there is something in that puzzle piece, right? So one, your point is well heard that like, it's very hard to compete with the big boys in the space. They've got, you know, the resources and the audience and everything and sort of pull people out is very hard, especially when your expectations are that your live content is continuous and moving. And, you know, we view our content as part of our marketing strategy, as part of our development strategy, like what's cool new things that keep people coming, keep people coming, you know, telling their friends and getting new, you know, showing that we're live and developing. And as a little, you know, as a small developer, you have to be like so extra

kind of connected to your core audience because they, you know, they're staying with you not because you're the prettiest or the shiniest thing in the marketplace. You know, they're staying as because they, you know, they feel connected and they feel a sense of personal identity with your, with your product and your team. So it takes, you have to overinvest in that core community. And it's very tough. And so giving that community tools to grow and create content and, you know, participate in the upside, right, which is something that we've also done with we decided to kind of add some Web3 elements to let pay players, you know, earn and get some connection and own their objects and everything. There's a lot of different mechanisms for

that. User generated content is one, some Web3 elements is another, to maybe create some other competitive advantage space for a smaller team. team that wants to move in and do something that's live service-ish or at least life service adjacent. How do you think about that kind of thing? Yeah. And I think that even while you're talking and speaking, I think the definition of live service now is so broad, right? Even when I talk about like premium games, like there's hardly a premium game that doesn't

give you some kind of updates, whether it's pay DLC or free game updates. So that definition is so broad now. but I love the idea of exactly what you said, which is like connecting with that core audience, right? So finding out who they are, you know, or they giving them a way to find you, right?

And then building that connection, you know, I think is as old as games themselves, right? You know, like I played a lot of chess, but it wasn't really ever my game, you know, but it has this huge audience and it's built in.

So I think that, um, live service now has given us ways to go beyond just kind of the initial game, which I think is just so exciting as a creator. And so when I talk about I'm not in love with live service games anymore, I really mean giant market leading free to play games. And I think that's so hard to get into. But fundamentally, like, we all should be thinking about how we can have an ongoing

relationship with our core audience, right? whether it's cool marketing content or UGC or Web3 enabled. I think that there's always going to be a different way to slice and build out what's valuable. Again, knowing your core audience, but I think I don't ever, unless you're, God, I was going to say even making a movie, but then you make a sequel, right? You know, like we're in constant pursuit of keeping people with us to go on the journey. And if it's done really well, it's that feedback loop too. They're inputting things and making your product better.

And then you're solving problems that they don't maybe know how to articulate or that they have. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that combination of listening, finding your audience, listening to their needs, interpreting what they say and being able to deliver on the things that they don't even necessarily know how to ask for is like that's the real core loop of a. I can imagine. That's the hard part. Okay, so there's somewhat related to that, right?

There's the, you know, how do you find that core audience? How do you speak to that core audience? And then I want to use that as a jumping off point to get to the idea of, you know, working with publishers versus fundraising versus trying to, you know, kind of just bootstrap your way to building something. you've made some interesting choices along the way here. So whether you want to jump in at the, you know, how do you speak to your car audience or how do you think about leveraging these other paths

to building an audience and a team and a whole process in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. And so when we started Vela Games, myself and my two co-founders, you know, two of us had been at Riot, most recently, one of us in Electronic Arts. And, you know, we really thought for this to, to, We were kind of on the big moonshot path, you know, of go raise, you know, a good amount of entry money, go build a free to play game, build our own platform, new IP, just kind of everything

hard mode. We used to joke because it's like, we're just rolling hard mode on everything here. But at that's core, what we really want to do was build games that people could have a great time online. And, you know, specifically for us, that meant thinking about game design. community building and even technology choices that we made, essentially orienting a company around the idea that we are going to build experiences that don't have to be a miserable pain in the ass, right?

You know, and specifically, like a lot of online games, playing with other people is a burden, right? Or there's a high chance that you're going to have a very negative interaction, right? And you're going to hear about all the obscene things your mother did last night, right? And that's not what keeps you coming back, right? And so we started with that vision of like, we want to build games like this, whether it's the first game or the 10th game.

And so when we started thinking about, how are we going to find and connect with the core audience, we started with that. And so we really started with like, here's our thoughts on building games that people can enjoy online. And we're not trying to make a friendship simulator. We're not trying to make a social network. We're just trying to make it so that there's a high chance,

that you have fun with someone, even if they're a stranger. And that really actually resonated with a group of people, and especially because some of our past was linked to League of Legends, which I actually maintain has a great community, but maybe doesn't have the best external reputation as having a great community. We found a lot of people gravitated towards that message. And then we actually announced our first game, which was Everhorred Heroes. And during development, it actually took this change from like a straight team-based co-op game,

to a competitive PVE game. And we found that almost all of our original kind of followers stuck with us. And it was because we were kind of like, why is this? We're kind of changing the game here. Like this is now a little bit more of a competitive experience, but it was because we had that core vision in place and that kind of core, what we were trying to accomplish as a company. And then fast forward, we launched Evercore Heroes into a closed beta.

It just didn't have the metrics to support kind of continue. development. So we unfortunately made the super tough decision to like wind that down. That meant changing the company, scaling back, kind of what I alluded to like that second age of the company. You know, now we're a very small kind of indie team again. And we've actually made a dramatic change. We're making a second game. And it is very different than the first one. Like the first one was more action RPG, Mova inspired. This game is very much a hero roguite. It's a roguite. It's a roguite. It's a completely different genre than the first one. And we still talk about this every day where it's like,

there's still so many people in our community and our Discord who are still here. And they maybe don't even play this type of game. But they're here because they've found something that they love with us, whether it's the heroes, the world, the IP, the relationship we have with them, the core vision of the company. And it's just, it's really a testament to that idea of like, even though the products are different and have changed and everything, starting with that idea of like,

this is what we want to accomplish and we want you to tell us if we're doing a good job of that or not along the way, has really proved to just be a super durable thing that we are just impressed by every day because we're a very small, you know, struggling indie company now. And, you know, we have a great way larger than we deserve community and we're thankful for it every day, you know. Yeah, so I want to just sort of on a granular level, what that means is before you launched your first game, you were putting out, like, what, articles or doing interviews or writing blog posts, doing interviews with press, just really talking about, like, why we started the company and what we wanted to do, right? Got it. And it was it just your reputations that got you that and that a little bit more of a platform maybe than other people might have starting? Or did you also, like, did you raise capital when you started?

We did both. definitely do you think that, you know, our reputation kind of got us at the door, so to speak. Like, I'd be, I'd be silly to say it didn't. But at the same time, I think what we were talking about, and, you know, let's be very honest, like venture capitalists, you know, we can all have kind of the opinion of them we want. But at the end of the day, you know, what they're looking for is commercial potential, right? And so our argument was, hey, look, like, we know game. are inherently the social construct of games makes games more successful, you know, we can do that better was essentially kind of our pitch.

And that so the reputation got us in the door, but the vision, you know, myself and especially the two co-founders that they kind of brought through the table and we articulated together, you know, got us the funding and got us the start and ultimately built us the team and a project, right? Yeah, great. And now I want to hear more about this pivot period because that's very tough, right? You went from a large team building a game that has a good number of fans and people that love it, but not enough to justify continuing to develop it and can't support the team that you have.

I think almost anybody out there that's been making games for a while has been in this position, has felt this. Some people give up at this point. Some people go on way too long and are forced to give up. But you found a way to make some hard decisions, make some hard cuts, and then make a decision to pivot to something that it sounds like is using the same core IP, but a different gameplay. That's right. Walk me through that experience and that decision-making process. Yeah. It's simultaneously, I haven't talked about it publicly a lot, but I've talked about it with, you know, close people and team members and things.

it's simultaneously one of the hardest and easiest things that I've ever had to do. It was easy because there was no real alternative, right? In my career, I mentioned earlier in the conversation that I've worked on more failed or canceled games than successful ones. One of the things that really stood out to me was when I was a designer at a previous company. I had been there for a short amount. I had been there for enough time that I was invested in the project and cared a lot about it. The company in my mind tried to hold on so long that eventually, you know, they did multiple rounds of layoffs. And ultimately, they just completely went broke and ran out

of money. And I was so upset about that as a design. I was a designer for myself and my fellow designers is the most important thing to me was that the work that we had done would never get in front of players. And I felt like betrayed by that. And I felt like, betrayed by that. felt like my work was wasted and our team's collective creativity just kind of went down the drain. And that was so frustrating to me. So when we were faced with this kind of reality of we have a game, we believe there's a ton of potential here, but the market has changed, you know, just all these factors that ultimately we don't have control over but have to respond to. We looked at it and we said, this is just untenable. We can't do it. And so we can,

try to roll the dice and work on this for a very short amount of time and basically hope we get one in a million lucky or we could make the tough call and importantly we can keep all the kind of the spirit of everyone's work that was contributed even if they're not here anymore and hopefully at some point get that out to players and that was you know not the only factor but that was a lot of the guiding principle of those decisions so from that standpoint it was easy because we didn't have an alternative other than shut down the company on, you know, and gamble, right? And I just didn't feel like that was fair to the spirit of everyone's work. And so myself and the co-founders, we made the tough decision. It was obviously incredibly difficult because we had to

let it go of a lot of people. And I still maintain it was the most talented team I've ever been a part of was kind of that Evercore Heroes team at Vela Games. And, you know, I always said they work great and awesome and luckily they all found other roles but that was obviously the toughest part was just not even having to let people go which is incredibly difficult but not being able to kind of keep that energy and that spark and that relationship that everybody had you having to break up kind of the band so to speak was super super tough on everyone right yeah you know and i'm still there so i can't even talk about you know the impact that it had on the people who who were affected by it.

But that was really tough for everyone. Yeah, and it is, and thank you for sharing that. I know that's not easy. I have been through that cycle myself, and I almost did exactly that wrong thing and kept going and put the company into massive debt because I didn't want to have to lay anybody off and didn't want to have to go down that road

and, you know, it was forced into the situation where it's like, okay, well, I either do this or everybody loses their jobs and everybody loses everything. So it's a very, very tough thing. I've, it was the most painful thing has ever happened to me in my career, I am, I'm grateful for it in a sense in retrospect, because I learned a lot and I got, you know, I realized that, you know, to make that decision

sooner in the future, if it is also, everybody was fine, right? Like, you know, it, you feel like you're, you're killing every, you know, you feel, it feels like like, like death. And, and, and, and, everybody got, you know, they got other jobs. They made it through. We, you know, and, and the company was able to be stronger. And I do, I realize now that I do a disservice, if I don't, you know, take those decision seriously early. And so even though it's difficult, I think is just the other part of being a good leader is having to be able to make those difficult decisions, you know, at the right times when they need to be made.

Like we said earlier, you have to make the decision. You can't not make a decision, you know. That's right. That's right. Deferring it. It was super tough, right? And this was kind of at the beginning, end of 2020, or end of 2023, about a little over a year ago now from recording this.

And it was just when the industry was starting to get bad. And a lot of people actually have found other roles. Unfortunately, some people have actually been laid off from other roles because our industry is not stable. It's never been stable, but it's unfortunately more unstable than it has been in a long time. And so I really feel for kind of the uncertainty and disruption that it causes in people's lives. But at the end of the day, I keep going. My co-founders and our team now keeps going because. we just really believe in the work that everybody did.

And even though it's in this completely different form now, like we've changed the gameplay, it's a different product, it's game two, but we're using as much as we can because we really believed in that. It just wasn't the right game at the right time and the right development cycle. And so we're trying to kind of write that now. And hopefully, even if people aren't working on it now, they can look back and say, well, you know, I worked on that hero or I did that gameplay or whatever. be proud of it.

Preach. Preach. Honestly. I mean, like, it's really, it's hilarious to me. I just, like, feel like it's, I have the same narrative in my own head, right? I mean, we, I literally was working on the original version of SoulForge, which was a, you know, mobile T-CG. There was the game that we almost bankrupted ourselves on. I had to lay people off.

And then I've come and now we were building SoulForge Fusion, which is literally like this new version of it because I believe in the game and I believe in the work that the team did. And we're now, you know, able to kind of launch it and thrive in this, in this new way. This is where I want to dig into that part. It'll probably be the last topic we have time for is like when you're deciding on this like, you know, same but different kind of new approach, like how did you make the decision to go that direction? How do you deal with the self talk or self belief in the terms of like, okay, well, I was really wrong before, but I don't think I'm wrong about this. I'm going. What brings you to that space and how did that conversation go with your co-founders and your remaining team?

Yeah. And, you know, so I think in terms of the product and then the self-belief, so really on the product side, we, again, we just went through that process of like, you know, what's a vision that we can all get excited about that can serve an audience, et cetera, prioritize it, right, and then build alignment. Where we really focused on was we knew that we had to make something that was going to be smaller scope. and we knew that we had to make something that was still going to be like a genuine pivot, not a restart of a whole project, right? And so, you know, in that team vision that we had always kind of had that we articulated before we even talked about our first game,

and we just went back to that and said, you know, we've changed this game several times along the way, right? And so what are the best parts of that game and what are the things that players responding to. So we actually just brutally got rid of all the things that were confusing or too complicated or were kind of added for the wrong reasons, right?

And we went back to the core essence of the game. And so several years ago when we were first working on Evercore Heroes 1, it was kind of a co-op PV game with a lot of roguelike elements. And so we said, let's take it back to its roots, but really double down on the roguelike part of it, right? And so that really translated, we've had to do a lot

of work to move that over. It's definitely not kind of the quick pivot that we thought to really realize the genre authentically. But at the same time, like the game is this version, this new game is genuinely really fun.

And genuinely, I think that's why a lot of our existing player audience has stuck around, even though it's a completely different game style. You know, at its core, it was always kind of there. So we stripped everything else away. And that simultaneously made the product more clear and focused, but also made it so that we could do,

you know, that scope of work, you know, with the new reality of being a very survival-oriented, scrappy startup, you know, again. So,

yeah, that's on the product side, right? Yeah. And I think there's something, uh, I've heard it referred to as the, the power of broke.

Um, there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a real clarifying function that happens right when you've got a lot of money and a lot of runway and a lot of team like you you know that like fluff and and and starts to come in right like you just okay sure we could try this thing and yeah okay these one of you know you kind of lose a little bit sometimes of the vision and and the clarity and the efficiency when you're like nope listen we've got this much runway and this much team and we've got we've got to we've got to focus like you said the key of prioritizing it it can be done of course as you did it with very large teams, but man, oh man, does lack of funding and runway force that in a way that I haven't found anything else to be quite as effective? Yeah, I mean, constraints force, right? Like, constraints just force that, whatever they are. And so we're under all the constraints at the moment, you know? So it really has to be just like super, super clear as to what we're doing.

And then in terms of like how do we reconcile that? I think we reconcile that with I think everybody on the team really believed in the original game but what we didn't have is we didn't have the ability to execute what we set out to do, right? And that was a function of not being maybe as focused as we should have been

which I kind of point back to myself in terms of like trying to do everything. I made the comment earlier was like we rolled hard mode on everything, right? Like maybe we couldn't have rolled hard mode on two or three of those things. And we would have set ourselves up for a better chance of success when inevitably, you know, the market cycle would turn. And so, you know, we were just about to go do another fundraising round to go launch the game into, you know, a year long, you know, alpha, beta period and then grow the audience with the game

and really refine it. We just didn't have the ability to do that. And so we had to just kind of put out, focus down and put out what we could at the time, give ourselves the best chance. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. But we all walked away from that game thinking, like, under the right circumstances, we really believe in this. But the reality is we didn't have the circumstances to do that. And so it made it very easy to leave behind and say, what do we have the circumstances to do? and what can we believe in?

And it was really just that like back to our roots, strip away everything that's not important and just do this, right? And I think most people on that project would still say today as like, hey, if you got another crack at this, would you go do it? I think a lot of people would say yes. I'm not sure I would just because of the, the, the fight. Battle scars. But I certainly think it had legs,

but we just didn't have the ability to execute it. And that's the unfortunate reality sometimes is, Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's going to be great. If it's not in your reality, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. You're on the wrong timeline in the multiverse or whatever. Yeah. And accepting that and not, you know, not like blaming everyone else, right?

Like, you know, we could have made better decisions. We could have changed things along the way, et cetera, et cetera. So but just understanding of like it's not. always that you had a bad idea. It's that sometimes executions is even more important than the idea. For all the reasons, you know, we just weren't able to execute that first game. Well, yeah, I believe execution is always more important than the idea, or at least I'm willing to go a vast majority more times, right? A team that can execute well, can outperform a team with great ideas that can't execute. And it's like, it's a combination of factors, right? It's a good idea

as a force multiplier. The ability to execute is essential and challenging and a lot of uncertainties and the decisions have to be made along the way. The environment around you are things that you can't control that can change the success or likelihood of success of a game. And this is like one of the important lessons that I just like, it's so critical to reinforce it. Just because something didn't work, doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

Just because something did work doesn't mean it's a good idea. That's right. Like like, I mean, this, I learned this from my days, you know, playing cards for a living, right? And poker does this, does this the best is most clearly, right? Like I can, I could just go all in on a two seven off and win. And that doesn't mean that that was a good idea. I just got lucky, right?

And similarly, I can go all in with pocket aces and lose. It doesn't mean that it was a bad idea. And like your goal as a designer and a creative and an entrepreneur is you want to try to make as many good bets as you can without going bankrupt. You can't, it doesn't mean that all of them are going to work. You just try to get better at making good bets instead of bad bets. And that's kind of how you evolve and go. And so it's it's really important to reinforce that because I know a lot of people and I

have people that, you know, reach out to me all the time. they're like, oh, my game didn't work or this didn't get picked up or this didn't publish and they feel like they're a failure. And it's just, as you said, you said it before, right? You've worked on more games that have failed or not launched than you have on ones that have been successful. And that's, I think, true for everybody out there. So just that reinforcement of that message, I think is something people really need to hear.

Yeah. And I think those are, like you said earlier, too, like those are the learning opportunities, right? If there's one thing when you talk about that, you know, execution and bad idea and, you know, if we all knew how to recreate successful games that we had worked on before, you know, we'd be having, you and I would be having this conversation on our, you know,

yachts or whatever it is, right? You know, and I think the world is full of that. Like, lots of people have been fortunate to work on fantastic games because there's so many great games out there. Replicating that is almost impossible because it's so complex and there's so many factors

that maybe you don't even understand the time. But one thing I do think about a lot that, I kind of have always put together in my head is that when we were working on League of Legends, there was one common denominator that I think probably goes underappreciated is that nobody on the team really had like a stellar resume. We had actually all kind of worked on games that were mildly successful or failures or things before. Like there were a couple people who'd worked on, you know, a Blizzard game here or there, but it was few and far between. For the most part, It was a little bit like kind of the land of misfit toys, you know.

But what I think was really our superpower was we didn't always know what to do, but we knew a lot about what not to do. And we knew a lot about what failure felt like or looked like or started to kind of how it started to manifest. And we would always be willing to course correct and try to chase the ideal. So it was almost this kind of battle-hardened. experience of like this smells like failure over here. Let's not do that. And then simultaneously, this kind of naive optimism of like, what's the best thing we can imagine over here and chasing

that? And I think that's just such a powerful thing where learning from failure, like, I don't think it would have been possible to do what we did at the time without that collective experience of all those failures or not as successful things as they could have been because we just knew what to not do. We didn't always know what to do, but we knew kind of how to steer away from some of those, especially on the product side, I mean, decisions that ultimately players ended up really resonating with. Yeah.

Yeah, amazing. That, yeah, that learning from losses, moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm, continuing to be able to take those shots, work on awesome things with people that you really love to work with and then adding value to the community you care to add value to. That's the core of it. So it seems like you've been doing that the right way for a long time. And I'm excited.

So are you? I want to drive people to this awesome thing you're building. Where can they find you, your games, the stuff that you're writing and putting out there. I'm sure people would love to see more of two. What's the best way for people to find your cool stuff? Yeah, great. So most of my cool stuff at the moment,

is reserved for this podcast or other things. But my team and I are Vela games that we're working on a game called Evercore Heroes Ascension. It's coming out on PC in early access next year. It's a hero action roguike, kind of the first of its time. We're super excited about it. And it's kind of built on the awesome work of the team at Vela over the last several years from our previous game. And you can find it on Steam and wish lists us, because every support helps and you can join our awesome Discord community

and talk with a bunch of people who've been there from day one about our journey. As far as myself, I am contemplating a life of trying to capitalize on and share some of these learnings along the way. But for the most part, you can just follow me on LinkedIn and look at my goofy reposts. Well, if I had another hour and a half here, I would have continued another hour and a half here. I knew I love talking about this with you. And if you do decide you want to do more with kind of workshopping or putting out more of your ideas, I love the principles that you shared here.

And I would be thrilled to have another one of these conversations, whether it be when we record or when we do it another show. This has been fantastic. Thanks so much for taking the time. I know I'm going to be jumping into your Discord and following closely the stuff you're building because I'm excited about it. Yeah. Thanks so much, Justin. It's great podcast and really happy to be on.

and best luck with everything on your end as well. We'll both keep fighting the good fight. That's right, as long as we can. Yep. Cool. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast

platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares have a huge difference and help us grow this community and allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years. of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.