Welcome Indie game adventurers to the Indie Game Lunch Hour.

Today we're talking with Jared Geger about the distribution and the power of community.

The Indie Game Lunch Hour.

Welcome all to our live indie game podcast, in which we give game developers the chance to hear stories of breaking in from industry experts, as well as directly ask them questions about their areas of expertise.

In the second half of each episode, as always in your host here Willem Dovenhal, the head master at the Indie Game Academy, and joining me today is Jared at Yeager.

Jared is the head of developer relations at on Kaid and is here to talk with us about distribution and the power of community, a massive area of study and terribly important for all the indie game developers out there.

Jared, I am excited to be talking about this one.

Welcome to the show.

What are you having for lunch today?

Hey?

Thank you much, Thanks all here than up.

Thank you for aning you for the community and everyone who's working in the industry and looking to break in.

I am having Thai peanut noodles today, so I'm very excited.

What are you having for lunch today.

That's amazing.

Tai peanut noodles, fantastic choice.

I have no idea.

I am in one of those downtimes where I am in desperate need of a shop.

So just govers in the fridge.

There's some old mushrooms, maybe like some pummin I don't know, coffee for sure.

I can definitely answer that.

Always amazing.

Well, we'll come to the show, Jared.

So I was excited to have you on and excited to talk for a little bit, as I think most indie developers who have even given indie development half a shot.

No community building.

Community development is one of the most important things for you to do as an indie to have any kind of audience by the time you release your game.

There are some stats that easily back this up.

One of the ones that is really and I find that a lot of first time indies don't know, is how how much of the audience for a Kickstarter campaign actually comes from your own community.

For instance, so about seventy percent of your backers on a Kickstarter campaign are from your own community, And how much of like sales happen before you ever finish your game, how much building up that community of people who care about your game, care about you, matters for the success of an end deliverable, so absolutely important topic.

I'm very curious to hear what you have to say about it before we actually talk, before we invite my cat onto the stage.

I'd love to start with our first question, which is always the origin story.

So, Jared, tell us where you are in the game industry today and how you got there.

Yeah, so I'll start kind of where I am now, walk back a little bit, and then kind of get into the true origin story there.

So currently I'm serving as the head of developer Relations for ONCAD, which I'll get into more detail on what ONCD is what we do and how that actually ties into again leveraging the past hour of again distribution and community.

I'm also still currently a partner with Indie Fund, which invests in independent games, an advisor and consultant for multiple teams, including publisher Acupara Games, developers, Ludo Systems, Terror, Luhmann Games.

Recently joined the Advisory Board for Women and Games inter National.

I'm also indicaid's Awards Jury co chair and an adjunct professor with the University of Southern California, where I also teach game design production and then leading into my current roles, I was previously serving as the executive producer for Walt Disney Games Twentieth Century Studios Properties, so basically leading teams of producers working with devs and pubs on games and integrations based on everything from Avatar, Alien, Predator, Family Guy, and more.

And then you know, I've always had I guess my foot in I guess you could say the corporate game space and also Indy So actually when I was still part of Fox Next Games before the Disney acquisition, also led an independent games fund at Fox where we actually invested in Tribands, What the Golf, Love that Game, Love that team as well along of Altered Matters Etherborn before that.

Again, going back in some of my dev relations background was also having also had dev relations leadership roles with Razor and Uya was director of product development at Capcom's Bline Interactive their mobile division back then, and then various production and publishing roles over at jam City, Activision, Vendi, Sierra Games.

And then actually we're going to go now back in time like a Tarantino film, starting off actually in QA and just really grateful for being you know, being able to be in the industry for twenty three plus years, worked on about seventy ship titles and integrations, I'm not very fortunate.

And again I attribute a lot of it to community and mentors and people that I've worked with over the years.

And you know, we talk about leveraging community for distributing your games, but also for your career, like community is your safety net, and then you're also part of that net for everyone else that you work with in industry as well.

So it's about giving back and helping of others wherever you can.

I'm actually going to be participating in helping in a virtual career fair this upcoming Friday, because again it's it's all you know, again, it's a it's weird, it's a big industry, but we all have to be there for each other like a family that kind of help support get everyone through, especially kind of the more trying tougher times right now that we're seeing in the industry.

So to your original question, you know, how do I get started, like many others, you know, really falling in love with games at a very early age.

So I grew up in a very big board game family, which was great a lot of family game nights.

So we're talking like early eighties, like eighty five whatever.

So like when it was a five year old already playing a lot of board games with them, can't recommend that enough.

And then I was in nineteen eighty six, my parents maybe regretfully at the time they got me my first it was Nintendo good old nes and a Commodore sixty four, and off to the races after that, to the point where I was playing so much, you know, they were asked me to go play outside, but then it was a rainy day.

It's like, what am I gonna do?

Said, well, you still can't play.

So what did I actually ended up doing.

I would modify board games and actually have friends over and have us we drew out like two D video game designs and then pass them around and give feedback with each other.

I kid you not like at age like eight nine or ten, and we turn all sorts of you know, great games that we play indoors and outdoors, fun things like that.

So again, gaming, film everything was a big part of me growing up.

Loved film performing and then actually that kind of led into high school too, where I would try to find ways to get extra credit in like English classes and others by kind of turning the books that were reading, including Dante's Inferno, into a board game and submitting that like a class project and things like that.

So my mind was always there, like adaptations, finding the function and form thematically.

So then I eventually still with like my hard half in theater and films, and you know, still wanted to do games.

I got into the University of Southern California nineteen ninety eight, started off as a theater major, worked my way into the film school.

Again, there weren't a lot of options, as you may know, like to just like I'm going to go to game school, right and learn how to make games, and you know, there weren't a lot of big programming classes, so I didn't.

Really know how to get in there.

But again I loved film and theater, so it was taking classes there and then met other friends who also loved games and actually snuck into my first E three.

I think statue limitations is over on that, but yes, I snuck into my first E three nineteen ninety nine and was dazzled by everything I saw there.

I was like, I have to figure out a way to get involved in some capacity here.

Fortunately, the university started offering just kind of some random starter game design courses taught by Tracy Fullerton and Chris Swayne.

Tracy still teaches there today.

He is one of the big leaders in the program, awesome mentor as well, And I just kind of soaked that all up, and interestingly enough, those those classes and actually on the classes I teach now that's focusing on intro to game design.

Part of the assignments there is to modify existing board games and create your own if there's no coding involved.

It's about fostering constructive feedback and teamwork and work together.

And I absolutely love that.

And from that point on, along with learning that you can have cathartic experiences of games like you can with film by playing ok Arena of Time and packing thirty people into a dorm room to watch the end of that game, I realized, Okay, this is what I'm gonna go do.

And so I.

Had a lot of film internships, a lot of constructive feedback, script reading coverage for what scripts are great films and kind of took all that experience and applied it later into what I'm about to get into, which is I'm graduating USC didn't have a game design degree or anything like that, but I took all the courses I could.

I went with a.

Song and a prayer to E three or a little resume because they still had design conferences kind of like GDC above the show floor, and I was talking different designers.

Met the one of the lead designer creatives for Command and Conquer series.

Like I got my resume.

I can't code, I can't do art, but I worked well on the team and I got design chops, I believe, and fortunately enough he referred me internally at EA at the time to interview to be in quality assurance internally at the studio Thinks for the Metal of Honor series reports.

Then went in there and that's where I leveraged.

And I cannot stress this enough for anyone who wants to work.

In the industry.

You know, you could be a great coder, you can be a great artist, but going in there and talking directly with devs and having to give constructive feedback that can help the process or help a game be better is so important.

If you can learn to work with others and develop the soft skills and the ability to share ideas in a constructive way, and to respect people's feelings and just focus on to make something better, you can go far.

I still to this day can't do a look at code by tribute so much of my ability to move in this industry by leveraging those skills, even from when I was doing script reading and coverage about how to write things in ways that can help people.

Recently, there's a student that mentioned something about in a project talking about like, oh, this part of the game was boring, and I said, well, how can you rethink that and talk about, hey, I wasn't as engaged in this part, like what and then kind of talk about how to make some more engagement just that alone.

If you're receiving feedback saying this was boring, that can hurt it's like and also how does that help?

And so thinking about how you can provide solutions and your feedback is key.

And I was able to rise my way up in QA that way.

There leverage that my next job, where it became an associate lead leading some testers and some of the processes, and then becoming a project lead where I was leading multiple testers across larger projects, sometimes thirty testers deep.

At Vivendi Sierra games where you are then filtering that feedback and now talking directly to the publishing producers about what feedback and items matter, what's going to make something in the game you stand out, what's going to make it clean and chip with as little bugs as possible, because as we all know, nothing ships with zero bugs.

That's a fallacy.

And again developing my Chops and communicating with executives and others in a way that people would trust me to take on more responsibility.

And that's how I was able to make the jump from being a QA project lead about three years or so into the industry or so I think like two thousand and five, to becoming an associate producer on the publishing side, and then you know, working my way up on you know, a variety of titles, then through our the good old Activision Blizzard merger and worked on games like DJ Hero, the first Skylanders game, various DreamWorks game adaptation, and then to kind of deuilop my mobile Chops.

This is where like the indie side of things kick in here.

When I was still at Activision, I came of a game design DA worked with a couple of students at a USC to make my first mobile game, and that was what allowed me to kind of get into jam City when it was starting off to be their lead mobile social producer and take a lot of the scrappy design chops and disciplines that I developed just making that game and bring it into a startup environment when jam City was really beginning to get rolling.

And then also through that period as well, that's when I started volunteering to be a juror with Indicaid and reviewing lots of indie games, keeping kind of those creative feedback muscles strong, playing a variety of games at different stages of development and giving a lot of constructive feedback.

And that's how I worked my way up in that over time to become one of the lead jurors and now the co chair of that award story trying to put a spotlight on as many great game devs and games as possible over the years, which then also then built confidence in my network with friends.

Kelly Santiago, who's the previous vice president and founder of that game company, was one of the lead members of Indie Fund, saw kind of my eye on, you know, indie game development, and then invited me in to join Indie Fund as an investment partner to help fund independent games.

And again that's kind of where we bridged from.

You know, where I have been recently and where I came from kind of there where.

Even today, I consider myself someone who has one foot very much firmly planted in the indie game space, and then also one very much still with access really to I guess the larger corporate game space and larger companies, and I try to serve as a gap between them.

So when we talk a bit more about distribution and community, I'd like to be a connector between really great indie devs out there, and then you know, sources of funds and publishers and and platforms for indies to be seen and heard and help them succeed.

So long winded, but hopefully it gives a good, good idea there and it is helpful for your community.

Absolutely is a great story.

The first question from Wendy is when did you sleep?

I know I still ask that of myself right now.

It's funny.

Even on top of that, I actually also do voiceover for for games and TVs as well, and barely for them, but yeah, two dogs, two kids as well, I do sleep.

I value it probably more than more than ever.

I think it's just about time time management.

Uh and just I think if anyone again, if you're gonna be a good producer, anyone.

It sounds so silly, but like it's uh.

Well, I mean not silly, but it's the just.

Making a to do list and like setting priorities and like figuring out what you're going to cross off what's important on a daily basis versus a weekly and monthly.

It could be personal stuff or whatever I think is great.

I mean you could just do that with you know, just a word doc or excel.

I have some friends who use airtable or Favreau or some other project management tools for their own personal life.

That is not a bad way to go about it, but it really is against Like taking those same producer chops you will for games and applying it to your life is really key.

And I also mean that too for breaking out time for work life balance as well in time for family and to your point earlier time time to get food for your refrigerator.

Yes, honestly, what a really cool story.

I think one of the things that's wonderful about running this show is that we get to run into people exactly like you, and I think for those who are who feel a little bit more lost, there's a templatization or you know, examples that they can pull out of this show when they hear stories like your own.

I hear some similarities to my own own story.

I often like to talk about how my first game design experience, Well, yeah, the one that I felt most connected to my face first game design experience was I would frequently in elementary school asked to make board games instead of writing book reports, and I never had a teacher say no, which is still kind of wild to me to this day.

They were always like.

Oh okay, And a couple of those times were really powerful.

I remember reading Aragon and making a whole like dragon adventure board game, and my teacher was so like, sort of enamored with it.

I think, you know, this is probably novel for her that we spent an entire class day just playing that game as a classroom and it was yeah, pretty powerful experience, entertaining the entire class.

Just playing a board game about Aragon.

So yeah, I love that.

There's a lot of stuff.

Yeah right, fantastic, Yeah right.

I definitely learned a lot about it.

Fantastic, I think the I think one of the things that I'd love to hear about here is a community building.

You're largely using here as a way for personal career growth, and I think that that is extremely important.

You likened community to the safety net for an individual contributor in this industry.

I have found that to be very true myself.

My most recent job I only found because I have built the LinkedIn presence that I have built, and I happened to get picked up by them when almost almost immediately.

It took us a long time to negotiate, but I started the conversation almost immediately after I got laid off from Paradox, and I recently because they just saw what I was working on was like, oh, that's actually perfect for what we need.

We wound up in a whole long conversation that eventually led to a job.

So I guess I'd love to hear first maybe the one on one on that personal safety net building for a lot of people in this industry.

I think many of us are are awkward folks, and it can be intimidating to try to network and to build out those connections and to do things like sneak into E three and go talk to gam designers.

You know, what is your introduction?

How what are some words of wisdom that you can give to those who don't feel like they yet have built that safety net?

Yeah, I think And again it's you know, I'm I'm talking on this podcast right now, and it seems like I'm confident I know what I'm doing, but like I've been there of everyone else where again, like you know, you're scared to go talk to people your word, but people think what you look like or how you talk, or even like you know, they don't like the interests that you've got.

I mean, I have been there, and you just kind of I mean it's so easy to say just put yourself out there, but I will say kind of walking it back a bit, just as a way to kind of prep just the like the idea of like again going back to board games right where you have to sit in front of someone and play with other people.

I will say, just you know, going to like board game houses are playing with strangers, like where you have to force a talk with other people, or playing of other students, or like any kind of board game clubs where you have to be social, going playing magic gathering with someone or whatever.

Like I think that's actually really great social practice before like I'm going to go to a GDC and have to go like go up and talk to someone.

I honestly think though too, like going up and altruistically just having a conversation with someone without an angle behind it is great.

Like for example, let's say you go do an in DECAYD or the mix or IGF going up to different booths where devs who are feeling extremely vulnerable showing off their games and just going up to play their game, picking up the controller and having a conversation with them and asking them about their game and just start talking.

Again.

It doesn't have to be an angle of anything like oh, you know, and trying to get a job or this or that.

But again, like that's there.

There's no real stakes on the line there.

And again again it doesn't matter if you know the back of your mind if they are going to like you or not.

But just putting yourself in the situations where you're going to be social and there's no you know, major pressure there.

I mean, again that's more industry focused, but honestly this just sounds crazy.

But just striking up a conversation with the person who's checking you out at the grocery store or something like that.

Just practicing and making small talk and just doing something like that, like these kind of low risk scenarios where again, okay, well maybe you know those conversation does get awkward or gets cut off, but you've had that.

That practice, I think is is key if you're you know, working in teams in QA or whatever and talking about games or again playing games with others at lunch breaks.

The amount of networking that I did back in the day by just playing card games at launch of people in QA that went on the go do other great things at Google and other game studios.

What was key I remember back way back in the day.

Uh, you know you had to join some sort of wow clan at work.

It's of like, you know, everyone going to go play golf whatever, but you know it's or some other sports that you hear in the corporate world.

It's it's you know, it's it's some of that, just like playing games together in the act of play, how you really can connect with others.

So I think just all those simple things that you can try and do, you know, opening up conversations and then putting yourself in low stake scenarios.

Just chat with someone is is is step number one for me.

M I can definitely agree with that.

I think so much of I think maybe I want to I want to call it two things.

One is those who don't feel like they have yet figured out being social.

I think as somebody who started in that space and eventually got more comfortable with it.

I think a lot of it has to do with the imagined perception of the other person.

So you're like, oh, they probably think I'm an idiot, or they probably think I sound super awkward.

I'll give you two things.

One is, nobody is thinking about you as much as you think they're thinking about you.

They're all thinking about themselves.

That's the first one.

And second of all, who cares.

Maybe they are thinking that about you.

It doesn't matter.

It's okay, and in fact, it means nothing.

Yeah, if somebody thinks this conversation with you is super awkward, it's an awkward conversation.

I mean, that's fine, whatever, it's no big deal.

Yeah, let's let that go.

And then yeah, second thing play in games is like, is why we're all here?

Ultimately, it's the shared experience of giving that to folks, of giving that to our players, and of starting as players, which is where all of us, you know, fell in love with it in the first place.

Every single person I talked to in this industry has like one game that they point back to it that they're like.

That was when I knew I needed to work in this space.

Mind scoring a Trigger best game of all time?

Find me for it.

It's absolutely one of the Yeah.

I play that almost every few years on the DS.

I love that version.

Yeah, oh yeah, that's good.

That's in my top five for sure.

I recently got into retro console repair and I fix up a Superintendo and I got a remake.

I don't have an original because it's so expensive of credit Trigger, and I've been replaying it on there.

Yeah, but just finding opportunities to play games with folks is maybe one of those easiest opening the doors that you can go for.

My first industry job was at Lamosity, the brain training game company, and just about every lunch break we were playing games together, and a lot of it was Super Smash Bros.

And sitting, yeah, sitting in that room with other game developers who have their own opinions about how a game functions, works and feels is one of the most potent things you can do for your own education and then of course for networking as well.

Yeah, and I think just remembering like nobody cares.

We're all super big dorks and even if we're judging you, ah well, like doesn't matter.

Yeah.

Yeah, And then you know, I think back in the day, you know, I think maybe it was trying to be maybe too much of a people pleaser.

But I think in the day, like if you're you know that can learn about what other people think that just aren't into what you like, then you know, probably maybe you're you're cutting to the chase and I forgure out who you actually want to be talking to with anyway, or or spending time with instead of trying to kind of like adapt to be everyone for everyone.

Right, So I think that's okay.

Let's get all right.

So I like to get very actionable, super super simple tips for folks as much as possible.

So what are some of your go to opening lines?

How do you initiate a conversation?

Well, interestingly enough, like okay, that just had like it was just at packs, right, I will just go up and find the developer ats at the booth and just and just say like.

Like tell me about your game.

Like I literally it's like like all this looks good, Like tell me more, like what is it about?

And this will kind of go into the kind of the homework assign for everyone here as well, but like I just want to know, like the quick, what's the log line about your game?

Like who's it for?

What makes a difference special?

And like you know, can I play your game?

And like I'll start from there, and then just now you're they're gonna start feeding you a lot to go with right there.

Like that's the easiest thing.

You can do because hopefully they're dying to tell someone about their game.

So that's that's always my opening.

And if you're just going to these and you're not looking to go play a game, what are you even doing?

So for me, uh, you know, that's it for sure.

Or if I'm going to a conference, you know, I'll introduce myself and like it's like, oh, where do you work and like you know, what are you playing?

Just cause again that's gonna take you somewhere or you know, they might end up going off like oh I'm not playing I wish I could and this and that, and like you'll you'll go somewhere from that.

Yeah, it's funny.

I was going to say, what are you playing, because that's one of my easy ones.

Also, tell me about your game is fantastic because it's all of us, at least to our game developers, a door talking about what.

We're working on.

And even if we aren't working on something, or if we haven't worked on something in a bit, we've got some path story or a future game that we dream of building.

Actually something you want to do, right.

There's something.

And then tell me about what you're playing is a really easy one too.

When I am running classes, if we're in sort of that that that awkward period we're waiting for everyone to join.

That's one of my super easy ones.

What is everyone playing lately?

Somebody has something that they want to talk about, the other excited about the most recent game or some weird feature.

I know, I've I've I've had my rants about games.

When I when I first played the Helldivers two tutorial and I earned my cape at the end, I was.

Like, it's just the most genius example of our board.

At the end of a teditorial, you know, we've all got thoughts.

That's why we're here.

We want to talk about it.

Yeah, and if all those fails, by the way, getting to somebody to talk about themselves or their work or their passion, even if they're not game developers is it is an evergreen topic of conversation.

We all love talking about ourselves and we all generally feel like we don't get enough of a chance to talk about our passions.

And so if you just give that opportunity to somebody, I'll be so happy.

Yeah, what do we do?

Just don't open with like talk about the weather like that, don't go there like again you know, know, know the audience where you going to be again?

Talk about games.

That's why we're here.

Absolutely, Yes, what other advice?

So this area of community building?

Now I sort of assume that this would be for any developers and building the community surrounding their games, But here we're talking a little bit more about networking and building the personal brand.

What other advice or or last words you want to talk about in terms of community building?

I think for me, well, I mean we're talking about more personal brand or.

Yeah or whatever you feel most compelled to talk.

Yeah, personal brand, And then I'll go into building community around around games.

But I think I think it really.

Is Again, I know they much like oh gosh, like corporate space, but just establishing honestly yourself on LinkedIn, in some level of social media is important.

This will go in this for games as well.

And I think keeping up And I don't mean this and like playing some sort of angle, but I do think this will served me well.

And I have done this altruistically.

But it's just you say Karma or Howard's paid office, staying engaged with people that you've worked with in the past and people that you've met, even if there's not something actionable to do business wise, right, so sometimes people will just get in touch with people like either when they want something or if there's like a deal to be made, but like continue to check in with people that you've worked with over the years and keeping up appearances even if it's like every three months or once a year, and keep all of those relationships warm.

And I don't mean that again from playing an angle.

I really do mean that from like an empathetic like and these are people or colleagues and industry and are people you've met over the years, and just checking in on what they're doing and how they're doing.

When you can, even if it's like a text or a link message or a phone call, I think that's just increbling important.

I've had certain relationships over the years.

For example, actually the great composer Austin Wintry.

I was introduced to him through Kelly Santiago.

He worked on Journey and a lot of other amazing games.

I learned from him over our course of knowing him that we, you know, we love to work and collaborate with each other on some game at some point, and you know, we just always stayed in touch.

Nothing necessarily had worked out where that everything kind of lined up, but was working on a new Alien game the developer needed a composer.

Learned he loved Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner and the Alien films and their music, and it's like, hey, you know what that's let's do a demo get at the dev He ended up doing then the soundtrack of Orchestra for Aliens Fire Team Elite and then got a Grammy nomination of it.

And again it wasn't like there was any kind of angle we're playing down to that path, but it was just one of those things like we've just always say in contact over the years, and this opportunity where I where I loved his music, he could contribute to an ip that I worked on that I loved and then you know that Grammy nomination came out of that forum and it's just one of those things you just feel really good about in your heart that I just played out the way and it created great art.

So again, that's that's why get a good example of how like that could just play it over time one hundred percent.

I love that.

I have a really simple rule for myself, which is just it's hard necessarily to keep the rolodex up to date, but it is often how those if we're talking about the financial safety net, that is often how those those next jobs happened during periods of layoffs or whatever, because you'll somebody that you used to know has an opening and thinks of you, or you think of them.

I have a very simple rule for keeping those up to date.

As you said, you've said this a couple of times tonight, and I want to echo it, which is that you know, not every conversation should have an angle.

Do your best to do these things because you want to stay in a relationship.

With these folks.

That set of a very simple rule to keep my connections like alive, which is just when I think of somebody, I reach out to them.

I know that sounds stupid simple, but like you know, I'll be talking with somebody and I'll remember a time where this goofy engineer you know, did something similar from some past job.

And then when I have that moment and I recognize, like, oh, yeah, I haven't talked to that person in a long time, I'll just have the message and ask how they're doing.

And that's a really like easy way that those people that have met the most to you you stay in contact with because whenever you think of them, the more you think of them, the more you're reaching out to them, and hopefully you're continuing those relationships.

I think some of those at least this has been true for me.

I'm curious that this is true for you.

I think some of those people from my very first jobs still to this day are some of the most important people to me.

I think because they taught me so many of those first lessons.

I've got particular engineers who really like help me understand how code works.

They've got particular designers who really helped me understand what it's like to like get deep with the player.

And I've got particular like project managers that I still think of as like the quicknessential project managers because they're just the first person that kept me organized.

I think, yeah, keeping those alive gives a sort of continuity over your career that is hard to keep sometimes.

Hundred percent I I I, yeah, like you got it right on the button.

Awesome.

All right, well, I think we are.

We're getting towards the end of our hours, so let's get to some community questions.

First.

One is from Joker of Aces.

Joker says, what are the differences between Indy, Double A and Triple A teams when coming to production?

Which did you enjoy working with the most?

It's that's it's a good question, and it's it's interesting.

I've enjoyed all.

I know that may seem like kind of like a like, oh, you know, pick something, but I have.

It's and at the end of the day, like you really don't change your approach to working with any of them if you're on like the publishing production side, Like if you're on the I'm working at a publisher, I'm essentially reviewing game design doc models, you know, materials, playing builds, and providing feedback.

And I'm not going to change my approach to how I provide my constructive feedback or you know, review materials or interact with the teams and talk talk with the leads.

I mean, it's just really the scale and scope of that.

You know.

The one thing I would say is is, you know, obviously it's really more about the size of the game and how big it is.

Is like you're just working on that longer and and just you know, reminding yourself of what you're building over time, because sometimes a quicker, smaller game again could be built by a team of any size, You're going to see those results maybe faster, and turns me out where it's like you're working on a larger triple A team game, like a Giant open World experience that could be like a four year dev cycle, and I think we all like to see progress, but sometimes that is something that really slowly gets layered over time, and and so you just have to kind of remind yourself and and kind of boost the team through that period about like what's at the end of the tunnel, and and and keep your own focus on what that's going to be.

So I don't know if there's there's really there's there is a preference per se.

I think at the end of the day, my preference, what really, you know, drives me is what is interesting play and fun?

Right, Like I think this movie is going off on a little bit of a tangent, but I think for me, I know a game is really special or at least found the fun is really cooking.

When I've hit the end of how many hours, I'm so as you work for the day, or you know, I've already finished my milestone review report and I'm compelled to stay in that game and keep playing and can't stop.

The people ask them all the time about like for for game investment or indie fund or anything like that, like how do you know when you've found you want to do?

Like how can you confirm something is good?

And interestingly enough, it just comes down that gut experience.

If I can't stop playing, I can't put it down.

I know it's there, And it's rarely been a case where I have felt that way, and like the game has not been successful.

Sometimes it has come down to like maybe the marketing been quite land or the release day wasn't as great, but like rarely has like the Metacritic or whatever, or like audience reviews not hit the mark if I've not personally felt that way, and I think maybe for a lot of you out there, I think it's probably been a similar experience.

So what you know really is just the most exciting thing, whether it's big or small, is are they is the team innovative and bringing something new to the table of what they're building.

Mmmm, that's a really interesting Are you familiar with the Dunning Krueger curve?

Yeah, yeah, I've heard.

Yeah, I feel like I bring it up very often.

I don't know, it's something I think about a lot.

Maybe it's that moment that happens where you've learned enough about a subject to realize that you don't know anything about a subject.

Yeah, you have.

Yeah, there's a period of like real confidence where you start to learn more than your average person and so you feel like you know so much, and then there's a moment pretty soon after that where you learn enough to realize, holy shit, there's so much more that I don't know.

As I've hit that moment for myself, I have I think a lot about the balance of that.

I think a lot of Indie's aim for which is, I'm just going to make a game that I find delightful.

That's going to be all I focus on.

I'm going to make this wonderful experience, versus I think the more sort of the more like nuts in both side, which is I'm going to make a game that I know can make money and can find an audience and can sustain an audience.

The balance between those two pivotally important, both very important arts of decision making in games is quite challenging.

It is something that I have never quite found a perfect balance for.

I think what I believe these days and are curious your thoughts, is that that magic?

Finding the fun?

I can't put this game down.

I'm having such a good time is your prerequisite for the second part to matter?

It only the second part matters terribly.

There's a there's a statement I've heard before which is, once your game is done, you're only about fifty percent done because of how much it takes to actually get people to come and play your game.

But that part mostly won't matter, or at least you're going to struggle way harder if the game isn't inherently just magical, so carrious about your thoughts?

How do you balance those two things?

I think that's all true.

I think I think I think the balance.

I mean, you know, figuring that out is key.

I think going back to what you're saying, maybe the worst thing you could do.

And I think we've seen some studios burned by it, and I don't I don't think any student that's been burned by it has ill intentions or was just trying to do a cash grab or anything like that.

I just think maybe that bad Maybe like a not a great place to start is from, like trying to chase a certain trend like oh, like roguelikes or deck.

Builders are really big.

That's build this, but then and try to get that at and try to make something.

But like, first of all, as designers, do you even like that genre or are you trying to attempt to do something to begin with?

And also are you looking to kind of do something different with it and maybe turn something on its head and innovate on it, Because if you're going to do that, what's going to make an audience run from the one that they already like to yours already?

If you know, maybe the big difference is the art or the theme or something beyond that.

So I think, you know, just going back to that point, the most important thing to do is like not chase that trend.

And then you come out two years later and everyone is moved on, and it's tough because you know, again we're all trying to we're all trying to eat here.

So like the temptation like Okay, this appears what all the cool kids are playing right now, I should go do that, but you have to think, Okay, well your game may not get out for another six nine months.

They could be tired of that, Like how are you how are you innovating on that or twisting it or playing for a different genre, and are you do you have expertise in that?

Are you even passionate about that genre?

Or is your team even passionate about that?

Because I will say, like, if you put a whole team working on some of it that they don't really personally would love or believe it or even would understand if they found the fund for that kind of genre, then you're shooting yourself on the foot.

Or you need to hire people that that do because otherwise, yeah, I think you're just gonna be in a tough spot.

Mm hmmm, awesome.

Yeah, very something I'm always thinking about.

Amazing all right.

Another community question for you is from Wendy.

Wendy says, knowing all that, please sense tell me your tips for project and time management.

Ooh so yeah, I.

Will.

I think this is really important.

I think if you can, and I know, again, development is not so much waterfall these days, and it's a lot of agile development.

But I do think especially if you're working on the publishing side, if you're an indie publisher, but even if you're a dev working with a publisher, I think, even though it can be really frustrating cause you just want to get started, let's say you're going to get funded or going to publisher, I think it's so important to take your lumps up front.

And by that I mean when you're let's say you're doing your contract or milestone schedule, trying to define that as best as possible and spend as much time on that pre planning phase so that both sides understand what the deliverables are going to be, especially early on, so that again I don't think anyone's trying to cheat one side of the other, but just that everyone transparently understands what is being built and delivered at every stage, especially early on, so that everyone feels like, you know, the work is you know, I guess be transparently done and we're all working from the same page.

An example, I will as I was working on a game long ago.

I'm still social producer.

I came on board the game was still like pre Alfa or whatever, and a milestone came in and I forget what some of the deliverables were.

They were very vague deliverables that dev were supposed to deliver on.

I think it said this was like weather phase one, and I was I was curious to how am I supposed to provide feedback on this?

And the deliverable was that the sky just turned gray, untextured and like these big, thick like polygons just kind of felt like didn't look like grain or anything like that.

It's like, what is supposed to be?

Wrote the review and this is a chunk of the milestone.

They say, yeah, its phase one, and then phase two, phase three, by phase three, it'd all be good.

But it was just like, how how do we have faith that's going to get there?

If the milestone actually said weather Phase one was it's just to show the system works and the sky just gonna be gray, and it's going to be very specifically like this is how it's going to look.

I think everyone would have been fun.

You know, you're attaching a dollar amount that what's going to be paid to this, and then you've got the finance team and the publisher saying like are we paying for this?

Like is this what was promised and expected?

And the problem was like what was going to be delivered was not clearly defined upfront, and so from a project management perspective on the publishing side and everything like that, it slowed things down because now we had to kind of figure out like, Okay, do we need to rewrite what is actually planned and maybe and again I came on board Laber, but was there enough time even given to the depth to really kind of build out their sprint schedule and the milestones in a way that actually felt achievable and we work within that schedule.

I don't know.

But even if it does take a few more weeks, just getting that very clearly defined where possible, obviously you're leaving room for you know, you're going to do some code or you know, play a live build and then rework and do some stuff.

But I just think that's that's really important.

And then in your contracts too, making sure that, like, hey, the milestone isn't approved, is there actually a realistic cure period built in there so it's like, Okay, we have thirty business days to fix these issues or whatever, like is that going to be enough time of milestones rejected?

So I think just building a strong, transparent schedule with also the ability to address things without just the train backing up is so key up front.

Yeah, really interesting and important.

I am a huge fan of game jams.

We were just talking about them at the beginning of the episode, and no matter how far I am into my career, some of my biggest game design mentors still do game jams to this day because these little microcosmic examples, you know, they're another iteration, they're another place to practice.

And something we've started doing in our community is this thing I mentioned at the beginning, the megajams, where we build teams of thirty or more to work on a game in forty eight hours.

It's very difficult to make that happen because there's so much bureaucracy on a team that big, and what we do to make that functionally possible is be kind of cheap.

Before the jam actually starts, we build a skeleton GDD that tells us exactly what we're building, and then we slot the jam's theme into that GDD.

And I don't think something like that would be possible, at least in my opinion, without without coming in going all right, you're doing exactly this, you're doing exactly this.

We still have some room to pivot, we still have some room to talk, We still have some room to iterate.

But then at least every person knows what's being delivered and knows the expectations of that delivery, and it's not stuck.

Is not stuck interpreting something that sort of miscommunication you'll both agree to the same thing, even written down on paper, even with pictures, and build two different games is such a tremendous part of project management and games, the challenge of project management in games.

All right, we are at just about the end of our hour.

So before we say goodbye, Jar, this has been a fantastic episode.

I hope people have enjoyed.

Before we move on, I of course want to do our last two things, which is first to assign some extra credit.

So what can the audience do in the next week.

It'll take them about an hour to practice and what we talked about here today, oh.

An hour okay, because that one of the things I think is important, like like your question of the question of the day, I think what's really important.

Again, we're talking about again talking with people, communicating, building your community.

And I don't even think we even got like into like the distribution part of like are kind of building out for selling game, but I will say it starts with that one on one interaction, right, So it's amazing how many students sometimes they'll come up and ask them like what's your game?

What is important?

Like why do I want to play it?

And they get like tongue tied, and again we'll start out, okay, So I think for your team or everyone who's who's listening, I think with great thing to practice is you know, imagine you're at IGF the mix indicaid, someone walks up to you or heck, you're you're trying to build a team, right to work on this game, this dream that you have.

And again, like people are busy at these at these conferences or festivals, right, they're going to go talk to people, play game to game to game.

They come up to you.

I think everyone should practice someone comes up to you and ask, what's your game about?

Can I play it?

Practice saying what your game is, what's it about?

Who is it for?

And what makes it different?

Special?

And can you succinctly do that in like three to four, like three to four sentences, like max, because like they right there, like someone's going to decide whether it's investor or player press or whatever.

Are they going to spend you know that there's so many games on the show floor.

Are they going to play your game?

Do they want to talk to you more about maybe joining your team?

Like just being able to succinctly sell your game in a log line scenario.

And because if you can't speak to it that quickly, then maybe you haven't quite figured out like what is you know, breaking it down to what that hook actually is and why you're passionate and why you think there's an audience for it and what makes it different than all the other robe lights or deck builders or dungeon crawlers out there.

Just practicing that, So again, it may not be an hour long thing that you're doing, but sometimes it may take an hour to kind of really figure out and distill down.

How are you just selling your game really quickly in conversation because you may not have a deck to share right like, you've got to do it right on the fly.

You're doing a mix, You're going boom boom boom to person the person.

I think practicing that is huge.

I love that, and I love those four questions that you've given here because these are four questions that I can tell you if from working with the number of first timers that I work with, that a lot of people don't actually have answers.

For the majority of people, the four questions are just to reiterate them, what is your game, what is it about, what is it for?

And what makes it special?

The majority of juniors make a game that they want to play and that can be good, that can totally work.

We've seen a couple examples of that.

I would say that that is less likely to work.

And thinking a little bit more deeply who this game is actually for.

I think that's one of the biggest ones that people don't do when they're first getting started.

They are building a game that they think is exciting, and that can sometimes line up with the real audience of real players totally.

But even in that case, it helps for you to say, Okay, so then who am I as a type of person?

What about this do I find special?

And who is going to find that same kind of thing special?

So spend a moment your homework for everybody here before we say goodbye, to spend a moment to answer these four questions.

What is your game, what is it about?

Who's it for?

And what makes it special?

Give us a little bit of a definition of that, and then perhaps even practice it irl, Go find strangers, go to something else.

You can as always be brave and post that homework assignment to LinkedIn.

You can tag us will In Dubenthal as well as Jared Jeger and the Indian Academy.

We'll be excited to see your homework.

Post it out in the wild, amazing.

All right?

Before is a goodbye, Jared, anything you going to plug or any last words of wisdom you'd like to give us?

Yeah, I would say.

Lastly, everyone who's here, you're absolutely welcome to add me on LinkedIn.

I'll post it in the chat here.

Again.

I'm happy to network and help anyone offline outside of this.

As I mentioned before again, I'm the head of developer relations at ONCAD.

We talk about distribution again, if anyone wants to get in touch with me about having your games on our platform.

Essentially, what we are I mean it is at the court, it's about distribution community.

So what we do is we essentially enable studios to earn with players and creators in an influence So if you want, you can go check out onk dot GG.

So basically what's great about this is that developers, all of you out there right now, you can sell your Steam keys directly to players, and every user that goes to our game store can get an affiliate link or any game, you can promote it to your community, and you can actually earn a rev share on every key that you helped sell.

And since the platform fee on encaid are a fraction of what it's taken on Steam devs, you can take those savings paid forward to your community that's promoting your game, So devs and players can spend their earnings to buy other games.

They can even cash out same day, so there's no net thirty period.

But what it really comes down to at the end of the day is communities being incentivized and earning and being rewarded along with the developers, so again leveraging your community, but also helping them out in the community again hand in hand working with developers.

So I'm really passionate about again finding out how can communities and developers and their games earn and win together and hoping that you know, in this new age of where distribution I think can honestly, you know, really be expanded beyond just your traditional channels and new ways to reach audiences, that we can really help a lot of devs communities out there that really need support.

So feel free to check us out there, hit me up on LinkedIn.

Happy to help people out however I can.

And again it's been absolute pleasure being here today.

Thank you for doing what you're doing for everyone out there.

Absolutely it is a In fact, I really love Acupara.

Do you know Buddy Sola, Yes, yeah, yeah, Again I advise that team.

I still help them on content acquisition and you know, again helping them find new games to publish from the indie community.

Buddy's great.

I really love Buddy.

We've talked with him a lot about some of the stuff that we do here.

At some point I asked, aren't you nervous about giving me all of this advice that might wind up making us compete with you?

And he said, oh man, it doesn't matter.

It's indies versus the world.

And you know I love that mentality.

I get that same mentality from you.

So thank you for your time here.

It has been an absolute pleasure.

As always, everyone, you can find us again back here next week twelve pm Eastern time.

There's also links to everything we mentioned in the chat down below, so check out Jared, check out Kid and Uh.

If you enjoyed this episode, we asked that you send along the recording to just one other person that would be tremendously valuable to us.

All right, I think that's gonna be it.

Thank you for your time, Jared.

Thank you so much.

Awesome goodbye everyone, By

Oover