Travis George — From League of Legends to Vela Games: Prioritization, Leadership, and the Power of Constraints (#75)

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 can find episodes and more

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... I discovered Travis at the Dice Conference earlier this year.

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.

riot by how what kinds of questions he asked and what questions 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 can 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 last 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. 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 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 meaning as a jumping off point. Because my background 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? I know there's several people that go to Dice but don't officially go to Dice and 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. 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 has gone on, I'm now an entrepreneur. You know, 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.

that was my first dice as well um and i bought a pass so i've been to all the others but i think that um there's just nothing that replaces meeting people in person right and we're such a small industry um 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

um 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 and 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 that you got to go to the tabletop conventions, like every like the creators and certainly I think this is probably more true for tabletop than than for digital games. But I think.

it's definitely true for both of us. You're here because you love it. Everybody is passionate about the industry, is passionate about making cool things and seeing other people make cool things. 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 round tables 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 longterm, right? You've been doing this for 20 years. I've been making, I've been making a living in the games for 25 years now. You know, 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 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 you're 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 that, and I'm an introvert.

I'll stay 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, has just paid so many dividends. And I really regret not doing it for... 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.

I'm always exhausted afterwards. But it's that introvert energy, you know, is all expended being an extrovert. But I always come back and generally I always feel like that was super worth it. yeah yeah and it's and it's also tough too like the more you know there's 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 we're like

you know, you're busy and you've got a company to run and you've got games to make. And it's like, you're taking yourself out of that for five days or a week or whatever for this conference. And then you've got your recovery period, which is at least a couple of days to get back up track. 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 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, yeah. going out again. Okay, so let's take this to the Wayback Machine because I really 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 kind of more indie experience and growth there. And you've made a lot of interesting choices along the way. I won't have a chance to pick them all apart, but I want to start again at the early days. I think 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 games. 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 what would be now an IT services company. It was basically like, can I work with my friends on computers and make money? And that sounds amazing. Um,

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 I just didn't have any passion for IT services and enterprise.

software. So I was like, you know what? I love video games and 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 you 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 uh full sale i went there in 2002 uh three months after i even learned about the program i was enrolled moved across the the country to florida and starting um and so i just went for it um And I learned a lot. 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. I don't know if I should say that, but I broke the rules a little bit at school. We had a big final project, which was part of our grade, and everyone was supposed to code on it because primarily it was a coding course.

uh 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 uh you know doom 2 you know we made a very very simple tight uh 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.

really opened the doors in terms of 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 uh 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, you know.

where there's plenty of that material out there, but I think it's great. You know, what, 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 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 want to back up a little bit because I'm just fascinated by this IT company that you founded when you were 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 uh doesn't come back into your journey till much later so i'm curious what was what was what was the traits that sparked that and what what kind of took that off just a little bit more color to that part of the story. Yeah, I was just fascinated with technology. So I...

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 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... the early late 90s early 2000s like enterprise boom so i actually um uh right after we started the company i actually flew out to las vegas to go to comdex

which was, you know, the big consumer trade show. And so I went around and looked at a bunch of like the Oracle booth and like the Sun, you know, microsystems booth.

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 the getting on the internet at school when we first got our connection um and so it really just like there was nowhere for me to work in that and so the really the drive became because i wanted to learn more and work in that environment and there was no place for me to do it so i thought let's start our own right 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 we drove to the state capitol and registered our business.

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. you know churches and uh i think the crowning achievement was we actually so we actually won a contract uh 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 a company still going. in my hometown now.

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 an age to just really go door to door and make the sales and figure it out.

out and craft the business around it is fat is i mean you know that's a common trait 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 it 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. 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 shift

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 like, no, you know what? I'm going to shift 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. I was the CEO of this small company.

We were doing a pretty kick-ass job for five high school kids. And I was working with literally some of my best friends in the world. It was just me and my friends. And I was like... I can't imagine myself doing this for another 10 years. And it was just that age where I really started thinking about what do I want to do? And my parents had always encouraged me to find something that I was really passionate about and then find a way to make money off of it.

um you know and i'll quote unquote never work a day in the life you know thanks mom and dad um but um 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 programmer and so um 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 and we don't have to stay in this part of your timeline but like i've noticed this even in my own company right i've been running it for 15 years now and there have been windows where i've sort of 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, both financially and in my soul, to make a reshift back over and 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 which you've been running for what five six six years seven years something like that something like that yeah and uh and and how do you think about structuring that and building it so that you don't end up in that kind of a trap

making it so that it is a culture and an environment and a work style you know goals that you're you're aligned with yeah i think if there's actually one common thread through my entire career um 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.

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. 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 um and and when we kind of bring forward fast forward a little bit to vella games you know that um since really 2017 when i started filling out paperwork but 2018 is when it became kind of myself and my two co-founders full-time jobs um you know as yourself 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 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 change shape those are called ages so when i refer to the second age of mella games i refer to kind of this idea of uh quite a different

world that we live in now um because our perspective has shifted right um but i think there's a common thread and so even though i've had worked it 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...

to 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 your decisions are negatively impacting somebody else or some obligation that you care about or team members or...

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 think of just really asking yourself, 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

OK, 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 two

before you should and like leave the, leave the challenge. Or if you're like me, I'm like tenacious to a fall 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 let my natural tendencies and emotional charge make bad decisions for me. Yeah, I think that's very wise. I've definitely not done that in several cases, but I have a really strong principle about game design life, product management, entrepreneurship, is 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. 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 roles before, and I'm like, I have no idea what I...

expect out of this. I have no idea what it's going to be. And that tends to be when I'm doing something new or like at Riot, there were a couple of 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 etc 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, let's always make a decision, but you can decide not to decide is an interesting distinction. You can decide to make the final decision later, right? I see.

When you say that, does it have to come with a specific timeline or just like, eh, I'll revisit this in three months? Yeah, you always have to set the time, right? Like 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 um and you time box 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 has to 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 before.

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 uh you know 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

all the time deciding what to do and just realizing, give myself the grace to take things in and really process how I feel about it and how I'm reacting to it and what's really going on. That for me is what feels like wisdom. But, you know, I think that you can, in my mind, you can defer things, but it has to be specific, right?

It has to be for a reason on a timeline. It may be okay to do it again, but at least you're doing it consciously and you're not letting the decision or the weight of not... deciding 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, Summit 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 you know you're you're having to make some judgment calls here and there there's a lot of consequences on the line And you're...

you know, how do you decide when you make those calls, right? I mean, we're wrestling with this stuff right now. We're building out our 2025 kind of release calendar for products and crowdfunds 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.

Ascension's our main line. It's our 15-year anniversary. We're definitely doing an Ascension thing next year. But then we've got like, okay, there's 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 gotta make a decision you know and then you know how 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 in case of digital games oftentimes it's you know maybe a swing every couple years um how can you walk me through a process that like that where you've had to make those tough calls or and what that felt like either in riot or in villa or wherever makes sense yeah i'll um

I'll talk through a little bit of the framework and then I can give maybe two different examples. Some tough decisions along the way. But generally... When I think about great game designers, 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.

You know, 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-founders of Riot. 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... It's like a secret lens you can look through and understand, why would I even do this 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 in a project with a team, even if you're a solo project. I've never done a solo project, but I would imagine that doing this process is valuable for a solo project as well. But 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 spending to get to this point. And so I really, really think that 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 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 every all the thoughts there you have 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 as 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 processes and tools and methods that you use are a speed function. They allow you to go faster. 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 have, 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 uh

It's the fuel in the engine. I've tried to think about that as well, but I love thrash, and that's a very elegant way of just get the thrash out of the way early as much as possible. yeah okay so we've there's a i love i love how you think about the stuff this is again we we geeked out on this uh 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 um uh 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 and real examples. 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... least as valuable uh so uh what what let's talk about a couple stories and then maybe we'll zoom back out uh 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. a story and one is more of a team and company story. 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 i we launched league of legends And around the time of launch, I 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 and he's like, I don't know if you do. And 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 League of 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.

It was really a testament to just the passion of everybody on the team and having a great game and us making some of the right decisions along the way and fending off competitors. uh i had a really important revelation which was i didn't want to do that job anymore uh at one point um which even in retrospect when i tell people that sounds insane um you know i

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 creatively. really exhausted after essentially six years of 24 hours a day, seven days a week of League of 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.

I had grown immensely in terms of my skill and my relationships and my prowess. I would put it as 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. uh i think we should do it an entirely different way um i think this job should not be one person i think it should actually be and so we had this conversation and he and he kind of laughed at me and was like no you're not good

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.

How are we going to decide what to do? And it really worked myself out of a job over the next six months and walked away and ended up moving to an entirely 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.

um and you know 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 myself, what was important for me and 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. Who would walk away? Who would give that up? I swear that's what happened. It's 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 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 i didn't you didn't necessarily have these principles articulated but you were you were doing them uh and then you've kind of articulated them later and i found that to be very true uh in my own career and and even most of the 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 uh and then you refine it over time as you put it into practice um

Okay. But now you've got me intrigued by this, this, you know, you built a whole new process of, of riot agile, uh, kind of, but that was, yeah, yeah, no, you're taking full credit for it. Nobody else at riot had any clue what to do. Not for you. They would have failed a long time ago. I understand. I heard you.

But no, well, OK, 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 a lot of people say they do agile. They do they do scrum processes and what with that.

means is they break their waterfall down into two-week 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 the 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 uh how does that necessarily change i 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 scrum master or anything right um 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 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 um 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 agile because you don't know what you're going to do past a month. That's not agile either. But really... you know agile is just that concept and it's evolved a ton um but my first introduction was i 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 um was extremely difficult and i think the top line for me of why you do agile other than the unpredictable nature of software, especially games, is 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. That's the why you do Agile and the benefit you get out of it. I'm not even the expert on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I don't think there's much value in it. The basic idea of agile methodology, as I understand it, is that instead of saying, here's the plan, go build this, when we don't know what things are unpredictable, as you said, both in terms of...

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 had people push for continuous deployment versions 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 it a ton. But...

It's tricky. I feel like there's consistently room to grow and to learn. 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?

you know either and you can pick the version at riot that you built or you can pick a version of your own company like what is how do you think about that from a like i want small team medium team big team you know new project big project like how does how does it shift i want to kind of just piece apart like how if somebody out there is thinking about building a team and building a project like this how how would they approach it

Yeah, I think fundamentally there's so much good literature and examples of building a small team for Agile. everybody's got their own rules around it, like you said, and it's just whatever works for your team. But 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-discipline 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 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 1,000-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. I fundamentally believe that I'm not the smartest person in the room. My job isn't to have the best ideas.

possible my job is to get the best ideas out to our audience right um and now obviously coming up with great ideas is fun along the way and it's part of what i love to do and and i think that's Being involved with 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. My main partner in crime was a guy named Ale Altersson. He's an awesome Icelandic guy. He's a venture capitalist now, which, you know, plot twist. 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. League was a huge live service game. You know, I remember early on when we were comparing ourselves to World of Warcraft, which we viewed when we were tiny and, you know, 20 people said, how often do they patch? And it was, you know, every six weeks. And we said, we're going to patch over two weeks. And it was just kind of an arbitrary number.

It 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 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?

you know, 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 Ali especially took the lead on. 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 is the lifeblood of League of Legends. You can't do that with 20 people at the scale that we were trying to do it at. So there were 100 people. 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

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 it a bunch since then. So yeah, I've worked in Riot 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.

own product inside of it. It was very different than a business unit, kind of that 1980s old school management style. It was really built around arming people with the... creative 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 like a KPI or key metrics that they would be judged on and then give them the resources they need and then just say, OK, go. As long as you're doing this, you're, you know, within the resource bucket and hit the KPIs. You're you're on your own. Go get them. Yeah. In the simplest form, that was it, right? Again, it was the...

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.

really need to put that up oh um dota 2 is about to come out which is this massive competitor from the one of the most famous game companies in the entire world right you know we have to kind of strategically align 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...

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 and 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 of weeks and seeing all the pitches and kind of helping green light those.

Jinx came out of that process. Arguably the most iconic League of Legends champion ever came out of that process from one of the small champion pods on this huge initiative, on this huge team. you still got that 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.

I'm going to use that as a jumping off point because 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's uh 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 than 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 um you know the fortnights of the world the league of legends of the world the valorans the counter-strikes etc they've literally had hundreds of thousands of creator hours and billions of dollars invested into them

um for the sole purpose of still being the best games on the planet right um 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 League of Legends? You have as much money as you want. You can 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 MOBA. Or it can't just be build a better shooter. 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 because i actually think that's what the the current crop of live service games have done is they usurp the early live service games like the world of warcraft and etc even though world of warcraft is awesome and still going strong. It's just not the size of Fortnite 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 uh to create a new one um 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 Fortnite's 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 incumbents have done so well at maintaining and growing that audience. And then when they can't, then building adjacent products into that audience, like UEFN for Fortnite.

is just opened it up to a whole group of content creators. Riot took a different approach. It was like, we're going to go build Valorant. It's serving a core need for this audience. um, 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, that's, uh, uh,

It'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.

uh 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 uh which is always a fascinating topic i'd love to to talk about but i think there is something in that puzzle piece right so one Your point is well heard that it's very hard to compete with the big boys in the space. They've got the resources and the audience and everything. And so to 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 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 saying is 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 over invest 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 web three 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 web three elements is another to maybe create some other competitive advantage space for a smaller team that wants to move in uh and and do something that's live service-ish or at least live service adjacent how do you think about that kind of thing yeah and 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 paid 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, is, is.

old as games themselves right you know like i've 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? We're in constant pursuit of... keeping people with us to go on the journey. 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, 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 that's the real core loop of a magic that's the hard part um uh

Okay, so there's somewhat related to that, right? 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, you know, speak to your core 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 and so When we started Vela Games, myself and my two co-founders, two of us had been at Riot, most recently one of us in Electronic Arts, and we really thought... For this to do it, we were kind of on the big moonshot path of go raise a good amount of venture money, go build a free-to-play game.

build our own platform, new IP, just everything hard mode. We used to joke, it's like, we're just rolling hard mode on everything here. But at that core, what we really want to do was build games that people could have a great time online. And 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 miserable

pain in the ass. Specifically, 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?

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 Evercore 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 continuing 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.

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 moba inspired this game is very much a hero roguelite it's it's a roguelite it's 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 they 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 um has really proved to just be a super durable thing that we've are just impressed by every day because we're a very small you know struggling indie company now and uh you know we have a great way larger than we deserve community and we're thankful for it every day you know yeah so so uh 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 blog posts doing interviews with with press just really talking about like why we started the company and what we wanted to do right got it and it was 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. And I definitely do think that our reputation kind of got us at the door, so to speak. I'd be silly to say it didn't.

At the same time, I think what we were talking about and um you know let's be very honest like venture capitalists um 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 uh commercial potential right and so our argument was hey look like we know games are inherently the the social construct of games makes games more successful you know um we can do that better

was essentially kind of our pitch. So the reputation got us in the door, but the vision, myself and especially the two co-founders that they kind of brought to the table and we articulated together, got us the funding. got us the start and ultimately built us the team and a project right yeah great and now 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, you know.

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 and 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 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 you know um i haven't talked about it publicly a lot but i've talked about it with you know um

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.

You know, 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 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 designer, just 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. 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. 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 either 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 can 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 really didn't have an alternative other than shut down the company on

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 uh you know i always said they were great and awesome and luckily they all found other roles but that was obviously the toughest part was just not 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, having to break up kind of the band, so to speak.

um was super super tough on everyone right yeah you know and and i'm still there so i can't even talk about you know the impact that it had on the people 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've been 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, or everybody loses their jobs and everybody loses everything. So it's a very, very tough thing.

I've, I'm, I've, it was the most painful thing that's ever happened to me in my career. I am, I'm, 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 if you feel like you're you're killing every you know you feel it feels like like like death and uh 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 i do i realize now that i do a disservice if i don't uh you know take those decisions seriously early

And so even though it's difficult, I think it's just the other part of being a good leader is having to be able to make those difficult decisions 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 the decision. That's right. That's right. It was super tough. This was at the end of 2023, about a little over a year ago now from recording this.

just when the industry was starting to get bad. 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. 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

you know, 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, you know. 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 and be proud of it right

oh preach preach honestly i mean like it's really it's hilarious to me because i just like feel like it's i have like the same narrative uh in my own head right i mean we i literally was working on the original version of soul forge uh which was the Mobile TCG was the game that we almost bankrupted ourselves on and had to lay people off.

come and now we are building soul for 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 uh which is so this is where i want to i want to dig into that part of the

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 uh how do you deal with the 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 to keep going. What brings you to that space and how did that conversation go with your co-founders and your remaining team?

And so I think in terms of the product and then the self-belief. Really, on the product side, we just went through that process of what's a vision that we can all get excited about, that can serve an audience, etc. prioritize it right and then build alignment um where we really focused on was um 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 what are the best parts of that game and what are the things that players aren't responding to so we actually just brutally got rid of all the things that were confusing or too complicated or, you know, were kind of added for the wrong reasons, right? And we went back to the core essence of the game. And so...

you know, several years ago when we were first working on Evercore Heroes 1, it was kind of a co-op PvE game with a lot of roguelike elements. And so, you know, we said, let's take it back to its roots, but really double down on... the roguelite 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 the quick pivot that we thought to really realize the genre you know authentically um but at the same time like the game is

you know, 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 just... stripped everything else away. And that simultaneously made the product more clear and focused, but also made it so that we could do that scope of work.

with the new reality of being a very survival-oriented, scrappy startup again. So that's on the product side, right? Yeah, and I think there's something I've heard it referred to as the power of broke. 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.

fluff and starts to come in. You just, okay, sure, we can try this thing. You lose a little bit sometimes of the vision 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 to we've got to focus like you said the key of prioritizing

It can be done, of course. You did it with very large teams. But man, oh man, does lack of funding in Runway force that in a way that I haven't found anything else to be quite as effective. Yeah, I mean, constraints force. Constraints just force that, whatever they are. We're under all the constraints at the moment. It really has to be just super, super clear as to what we're doing.

And then in terms of like, how do we reconcile that? You know, I think we reconcile that with, I think, you know, everybody on the team really believed in the original game. But what we...

What we didn't have is we didn't have the ability to execute what we set out to do. And that was a function of... um you know not being maybe as focused as we should have been you know which i kind of point back to myself um in terms of like trying to do everything i i mean the comment earlier was like we rolled hard mode on everything 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 a year-long 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 wasn't enough um 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, it's 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 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. 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 etc etc so um but just understanding like It's not always that you had a bad idea. It's that sometimes executions is...

even more important than the idea. And 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 and and it's like it's a combination of factors right it says there's a good idea as a force multiplier the ability to execute is 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 one of the important lessons that I just like. It's so critical to reinforce. 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. I learned this from my days playing cards for a living. Poker does this the best, most clearly. I could just go all in on a 2-7 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 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 really important to reinforce that because I know a lot of people and I have people that reach out to me all the time that are 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 something 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 and I would be having this conversation on our yachts or whatever it is. And I think the world is full of that. 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 uh i think probably goes underappreciated is that

Nobody on the team really had a stellar resume. We had actually all kind of worked on games that were mildly successful or failures or things before. There were a couple people who'd worked on... 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 the land of misfit toys you know but what 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 as 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. um 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 how to steer away from some of those, especially on the product side decisions. that ultimately players ended up really resonating with. So. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. That, that yeah, that learning, 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 uh and uh and then adding value to the community you care to add value to like That's the core of it. So it seems like you've been doing that the right way for a long time.

uh and i'm i'm excited so all right i want to i want to yeah yeah so i want to drive people to uh to this awesome thing you're building uh where can they find you your games where you know the stuff that you're writing and putting out there i'm sure people would love to see more of too what's uh what's the best way for people to find Find your cool stuff. Yeah, great. So most of my cool stuff at the moment is reserved for this podcast or other things.

My team and I are Vela Games, and 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 roguelike, 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 wishlist 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 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 in 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 a great podcast and really happy to be on. Best of 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.

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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 thinklikeagamedesigner.com or wherever fine books are sold. Bye.