>> Deciding to go indie was an easy decision,
but if I knew how hard it was, I never would have done it.
It is extremely difficult.
That being said, now that I'm an indie developer,
I don't think I'll ever do anything else.
I just don't think I can go back again.
I think the first time I realized I wanted to be
indie was when I was in San Francisco.
There's something about taking your future
into your own hands that is so empowering.
My very first job in games I got I was in college
and I went to a conference called GDC
and I met a new studio called Slipgate Ironworks,
and they were on the other side of the country.
And I hadn't actually graduated college yet,
but I left New York immediately
and I moved across the country to go work there.
And that was really fun.
And I learned a ton while I was there.
I think I was at Slipgate Ironworks for about six months
before the studio closed down and we all lost our jobs.
And that was terrifying.
I had signed a lease for a year and I was stuck in this place
so far from home with no friends and family
to speak of other than people I just met while I was out there.
And then it was gone in a moment.
I moved from California back to the East Coast,
I moved to Boston,
and I've been here ever since.
I worked at a studio called
Irrational Games on Bioshock Infinite.
I really loved working on that title.
The character that I'd worked on
was painted on the side of a skyscraper.
We had advertisements for it during the Super Bowl.
It was huge. But shortly after we shipped the final DLC,
unfortunately the studio closed
and we all found ourselves out of the job again.
That's kind of how the industry is sometimes.
It's always been incredibly turbulent.
It turns out there is a silver lining to this sort of thing,
I was in Boston,
I was surrounded by incredibly talented people
that I loved working with,
and I managed to get together with five of them.
And we founded our own studio, The Molasses Flood,
and that's how I went indie.
That was my first taste of going indie.
So the first title I worked on
after I went indie was The Flame in the Flood,
I was really proud of this game.
I loved it.
But initially it didn't do so well out of the gate.
We didn't have a lot of sales.
We were constantly struggling to find work,
to keep our studio together. There's nothing I can say
that can describe what that feels like.
It's really hard.
Not only are you letting yourself down,
but you're letting down other people.
Over time it did a lot better.
And I'm really proud to say that The Molasses Flood
is still making games today.
And that gave me the strength and the background
I needed to go and take off completely on my own.
After that project,
I went and I founded my own studio Chump Squad,
which is where I'm making games today.
I was already part of an indie studio.
I didn't really initially plan to go even more indie,
but over time I had started this side project at home
and it was a tiny project
that couldn't sustain a larger studio.
And so I talked with the team and we came to an agreement
and I just had to take off and go work on this smaller thing.
And that game became Kine. It became huge.
Over the course of two years,
it became a game that is now on every platform.
It's on every console.
It was a launch title on Google Stadia last year.
And I'm extremely proud of how that panned out.
And that's just not something I could have done
without the Unreal Engine.
I'm a studio of one person full time
with a couple of contractors. I don't know, C++.
There was a time when I couldn't make a game like this.
This engine has reached a point where somebody like me,
who is an artist, who comes from an artist background
and who does not know how to program,
can make an entire video game. This is huge.
I'm working on a new title now, Lab Rat,
which was something that was very much inspired
by the coronavirus.
I don't want to make a game that makes people sad.
Instead, I thought it'd be more fun to talk about tech,
to talk about this shared experience
that we have right now.
And I think the best work I've ever done
is the work that tends to marry those two things
where I have an interesting piece of technology, a tech demo
that I really want to use.
And I've got a feeling that I want to capture
and I want to showcase to the world.
And I think if you can find a way to combine those two things,
that's been my strategy to to figure out
what to work on at any given time.
I find it is so important to work
on something that I believe in and that I'm passionate in,
and after having gone through the experience
of being at these companies and working on these titles
and still being laid off, I find that especially
when you're working on a very small team
or when you're responsible for the work,
it is extremely important
that you love what you're doing.
In video games, the vast majority of projects fail.
and if you're going to fail, then by God,
you better be working on something that you believe in.
I think that's the whole reason why people go indie.