Meet Brent Batas

Brent Batas is the Founder & CEO of AutoAttack Games, which was recently acquired by NinjaKiwi. At AutoAttack, he is the Lead Designer & Leader Programmer for Legion TD & Legion TD 2, which has sold over 500,000 units on Steam, and in 2020, he made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Legion TD 2
https://beta.legiontd2.com/

Join Legion TD 2 Discord
https://discord.com/invite/legiontd2

Legion TD 2 On Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/469600/Legion_TD_2__Multiplayer_Tower_Defense/

• Transcript

  October 2019, I remember just at night being in tears because all I wanted to do is play the game and there's like 27 people online and since it's a skill-based matchmaking game,

  the system tries to find a fair match for you and it'll wait if it can't. And I just waited for 20 minutes and it couldn't match me with anybody. And I was like,(...) I guess maybe this is it.(...) (upbeat music)

  Welcome to FaithForms. I'm your host, Brock Henderson, and I am really excited about my guests today.

  Brent Bautus is the founder and CEO of AutoAttack Games, which was recently acquired by Ninja Kiwi. Him and I have been in the same circles for a number of years through him, Laudris, but we've never actually got to sit down and talk, so I'm super excited to get to talk with him.(...) At AutoAttack Games, he's the lead designer and lead programmer for Legion TD and Legion TD2, which has sold over 500,000 units on Steam. And in 2020, he made Forbes 30 Under 30 list. So Brent, welcome to FaithForms. - Thanks, Brock, it's great to be here. - So let's jump into the exciting news. You were acquired by Ninja Kiwi. How cool is that? - Yeah, so that's been awesome. It was in the works for a little while.

  We were connected by a mutual friend, and both of us just really hit it off in terms of how we approach games.(...) We weren't talking business at all. It was just a connection of like, hey, you guys think alike and you both make tower defenses, you guys should meet. And then so before we, you know, we were talking about things like the language we use in patch notes or like how we do community management or like some intricacies of game balance and like business was pretty far from our minds. And then after our initial meeting, we both kind of came back and be like, why can't we work together with these guys? Like even if we're working on different products.(...) So yeah, I forget if it was us or them who followed up first, but then we just kept the conversation going.

  And yeah, one thing led to another and took a little while to figure out what kind of partnership made sense. And ultimately we landed on acquisition as kind of like the thing that made the most sense for everybody. So I'm super stoked. They're like just really awesome people. Like they, it's like they have the CEO of the company, right? Of like an 80 person company. And he's like pretty hands on with like the patch notes. So it's a very kind of like they're deep in their craft. And it's not like a CEO guy meddling in people on the ground thing. It's like, he actually plays the game enough and has like he's straight up a gamer like us. And that's kind of a really cool environment to be in. We also, I think hit it off in terms of how we approach like work-life balance, which is really important to me and just so many other things. So yeah, we visited them last fall and then just signed earlier this month actually. So super super. - That is so cool.

  - Yeah.(...) Is that kind of out of nowhere for you a little bit? Like the impression I get when I've heard you kind of talk about it briefly is that, you know, you've been on your own for a number of years and you're an entrepreneur.

  Did you ever think you would do a deal like this?

  - I think for so many years and development, it was just thinking about the next step, like how can we make the game even just work?(...) Like how can we actually make something we can play? And then it was like, how can we make a game that someone will actually pay money for? And then it was like, how can we make a game that like doesn't crash for half the people that try to play?(...) So there was just so many years of like asking,

  like how can we even just make it to the next step? And we had so much doubt every step of the way, like can we even like make the next step?

  That it wasn't, something like acquisition wasn't on my mind for a long time until fairly recently.

  I probably first started thinking about it maybe in 2022 after full releasing Legion TD2,

  just in terms of like, you know, what do we do next? And it was kind of in an awkward position where

  we love Legion TD2, we love the community it has, and we've worked really hard to build that up.(...) I think financially, like if you just looked at the numbers, the like quote unquote smart thing for me to do would have just been to like,

  just let the game go and move on to something else. And just kind of let it be passive income. But none of us even considered that we're like, we love this game so much, we love community, we wanna keep working on it. So it kind of put us in an awkward position where it's like,

  we're trying to do what's best for kind of the business and keeping sustainable, but also wanna do what we love.

  And then we started thinking like how to make that happen, we like consulted some friends and yeah, like we kind of floated the idea of raising like investment money, but like didn't kind of hit it off in the same way with investors as we did with the Ninja QT guys.

  I mean, still definitely possible future is there for the future, but yeah, it was,(...) we were just exploring a lot of different options out there for partly why it took so long.

  But yeah, I mean, just, it was such a long journey though. Again, I started Legion TD2 in 2014.

  I made the original Legion TD mods back in high school in 2009.

  So it was just, yeah, many years of, like all I wanna do is just make this game and,

  yeah, it's really cool now being in a position where

  I kind of know what I want.

  Like I'm kind of locked into making the new game with Ninja QT.

  Whereas before it was like, there were just so many unknowns like can we even do this? And now I feel like I'm gonna hit my stride and kind of be able to do what I love, but have a little bit more job security and kind of security for the future. - That's the dream, isn't it? - It is.

  Honestly though, if you told me how much work it would be, at the start, I still probably wouldn't have done it. It was like, there were a lot of tears and a lot of struggles along the way. And I would have been scared off. Like if you showed 24 year old me,

  it's how much work is involved.

  - Yeah, I think all of us would.(...) Game development and running your own studio is just so much work. It's that naive optimism is what actually helps enable it to actually happen. - Yeah. - So I wanna go back to high school. So you were making, your original mod was when you were in high school, you said?

  - Yeah, so Legion TD, the Warcraft mod. And I made a bunch of Warcraft mods before that, but none of them took off in the same way. So I started in like 2003 actually. I was in 2003, yeah, yeah. Right around maybe a year after Warcraft came out, I started making all these mods.

  Yeah, it was such a cool creative outlet. And like, I still miss those days a lot of the times where it's just so pure when you can just make games kind of for the love of it and not worry about and just provide a living for me.(...) And it just feels like, that's sort of my dream retirement is just like, be able to make games without any kind of worry about monetization. - So before you were making the mods, were you learning how to program and stuff? Or is it just your love of the games that actually kind of drove you to just start taking the first steps?

  - It was pretty much modding that got me into programming. I mean, I did,(...) I think the very first thing that could be considered programming was when I played Roller Coaster Type Caring and I would run some scripts that people wrote to modify the game to be able to like build way past the limits or build certain coasters underground that you weren't supposed to. And yeah, it was really like Age of Empires, Warcraft III that I learned to program. - Cool, tell me about the modding community. I've never modded games. - Yeah, so I mean, I'm sure it's quite a bit different now than back then.(...) Back then, forums were really, really popular. There was no Reddit, there was, this was actually pretty Google in the early days, or maybe Google was just like a super small thing.

  Yeah, no Reddit, like no Discord.(...) So forums and IRC were basically what I used.(...) And forums are for people who haven't really used them. They're basically like discussion boards. It's kind of like Reddit, but less about the upvotes and more just like a bulletin board. And you see kind of the most recent posts

  rather than the most popular posts.

  So yeah, I did,(...) I would like ask for so much help on basically everything because I didn't know anything studying out. And I got really good at like online communications and yeah, it ended up being like an admin of several of the large Warcraft III communities. And I think that gave me a heart for community management and like just the joy of seeing, of being part of a well-run community and the pain of when a community is not well-run. So that was by myself.

  Like yeah, definitely gave me a heart for communities.

  That's really cool though. I mean, I think what maybe makes the press is,

  examples of harassment and toxicity, which are totally problematic, don't get me wrong. But there are a lot of really cool ways that people are blessed by online communities and I'm pretty passionate about trying to have those outweigh the bad apples. - Yeah, PixelPug, my little studio is, that's kind of the vision that God's given us is just to create community. So I'd really like to just pause here a minute and talk about your community building experience and what you've seen and what makes a healthy community.

  - That's a very good question. So I think there's definitely a lot to unpack there. I think probably one of the biggest lessons I learned along the way was building a good team is just so essential.

  Like you can kind of be the, I don't know, benevolent dictator model up to like a certain amount of people. But after that point, it becomes unsustainable.

  And also it's really hard to make the right decision if you're emotionally involved.(...) So for example, if someone's toxicity is like specifically directed at you as an individual, it can be tough to not,

  maybe like disproportionately react to it. So yeah, having a team of people who can like

  kind of provide some checks and balances for yourself

  and also just support you is really important.

  Going along with that, I think having

  a clear sense of vision and rules is important because everybody has their own individual kind of beliefs and tolerances for what feels kind of acceptable versus not acceptable.

  I think like everybody's generally aligned on things like spam and all that stuff is bad, but then it's most of moderation and community management boils down to a gray area and how to decide what to do in those circumstances.

  And since it varies per individual, I think having kind of clearly defined rules and vision for what the community is supposed to be is important so that individuals don't just like

  kind of make decisions from their own individual judgment.(...) Because we definitely have circumstances where that happened and yeah, lots of learning experiences along the way.

  Yeah, lots of other things, but other just a couple of maybe tangible examples.(...) - Yeah, how big is your community right now?

  - So I guess the community is sort of split across Discord and Reddit as the main ones.

  Reddit, we only started really paying attention to

  maybe like a year and a half ago or something. So that's quite a bit smaller. There's probably like 6,000 members there, but it's slowly been hitting up activity. The Discord is like 30 or 35,000 members now, something like that. And it's been pretty much organic growth.

  Like we actually had a Slack channel before Discord and that was kind of funny because gamers are like, why are we in Slack? That's for work.

  Eventually someone was like, dude, you should use Discord. And then we actually were pretty hands off on the Discord almost from the start. And then we got a little bit more involved to take it from feeling like just a

  kind of unorganized single channel to kind of put some structure on it. And then now we got a pretty good moderation team and then like a community helper team below that.

  Yeah, they pretty much handle everything.

  They also,(...) we have community staff that run monthly cash tournaments called the Nova Cups,

  which I think at one point we were having like 300

  participants every time. It might be down to like a couple hundred, 200 now, but it's still pretty big event.

  It's been an unfortunate and so on. And it's really cool. It's all community run.

  It's just so much more sustainable in the early days when we were kind of doing everything ourselves.

  - With a community that size, I'm curious about your team. Like how big is the like community management side?

  - So right now, so there's one cool thing with the Ninja Kiwi acquisition in the future, we're definitely hoping to hire a community manager

  at least part-time if not full-time. Because you've felt a little stretched thin between my (indistinct) So our moderation teams probably like(...) maybe like six or seven, maybe six active people probably.(...) And they're the ones that are kind of making the final call on rules and fractions or things like that.(...) And then we have what are called community helpers. We probably have like 30 of them or so.(...) So those ones are not moderators. Like they can't actually like kick or ban people, but they are kind of just prominent active community members that generally seem pretty helpful.

  There's a little bit more like,

  I don't wanna say like a lower bar, but kind of, like we don't really, it's fine if they kind of disagree with us quite a bit on certain things.(...) It's just like if they're doing a lot for the game and we like value their opinion and stuff, then we'll usually invite them to be a community helper.(...) So they're kind of the first line, like they'll probably,(...) they're usually the ones that answer when people have questions and things like that. And then moderators are usually called more in when something needs to be done.

  But yeah, that's pretty much been what we needed for a while and then Reddit's kind of a little bit of the Wild West, but it kind of pleases itself. We have maybe just like a couple of moderators for that. - Running a community is a lot of work. What are some cool things that have come out of it?

  - Yeah, so I mean, one of the big ones is the tournament thing, like I mentioned.(...) Like we have somebody who casts the tournaments every month and then he gets like, so we basically gave him almost no guidance. We're just like, hey, like just talk about the game and like entertain people. And then he's got one of the things like,(...) he's gotten guest co-casters with him

  pretty much every single month.(...) Actually last,(...) maybe it was March, not April. Yeah, March. We got a League of Legends pro caster, like someone who does esports for League of Legends.(...) I think one of the European casters co-casted with him for our game. It was really cool saying like, this guy who you can look up calling League Highlights,(...) kind of doing the same for Legion TD. And he's a high level player in Legion actually himself. He's like a top 1% player in Legion.

  So it's been really cool connecting with people like that with just the community.

  Other cool things are we have a publicly available API to develop apps for Legion TD too. So people have made like ways to like look up your profile or leaderboards outside the game. But then also they've gone beyond and taken a lot of the game data and crunched like win rate numbers or like different graphs and like trends of what characters seem to be popular or like winning a lot

  and kind of like using data and really cool ways to talk about the game. And we just basically provide, we're like, hey, here's the data, here's the tools.

  Wish we had the bandwidth to give you more guidance but if you're able to figure it out, here it is.

  Some people have even like modded the game actually, which is kind of cool. It feels like it's going like full circle. Like they've made custom UIs and things for the game.

  - Which is cool. - Do you have mods that support in then? - No, it's like it's not a plan thing. - Hacking the game. Like they're kind of like, some of them have been like, I feel kind of guilty doing this, but we're on like really good terms with the people who are in the modding. So sometimes they'll like ask me like, is it okay if I'm doing this? And I'm generally, as long as they're not using it for any like gameplay advantage,

  generally just fine with it. I mean, I'm still, I still feel like a modder.

  Yeah, it's really cool. Like for like,(...) it's hard to discuss the cool parts without getting into game specifics, but yeah, it's mostly just user interface tweaks and updates.(...) Since the game is a, the gameplay is run on a remote game server, whereas the client running on your computer is usually just kind of for rendering in UI.

  But they can't really modify gameplay, even if they wanted to.

  The only place that gets like slightly sketchy was where there was information available to your computer, like information available to the player, but what was intentionally obscured a little bit. And then the modders would sometimes, so to put it in concrete terms,

  every character has like, every unit has like a gold value.

  And if you scout your opponent, you can kind of see at a glance what they're doing.

  But unless you were like insanely fast at calculating, you couldn't see exactly how much like the number, the amount of gold they had spent on all their, oops sorry, I used to shut off.

  You couldn't see the exact amount of gold they had spent on their army, which would, knowing that exact number kind of informs your strategy.

  So the way we ended up, what we ended up doing is we ended up just exposing that number, like making that number available for everybody,(...) because we're like, "Oh, like we're not gonna win the battle here. Let's just let everybody know that number."

  But that's probably the closest, and even that, that gives you like a very minuscule advantage. So it wasn't really a big deal.

  But yeah, those are some examples.

  Yeah, otherwise it's just been super cool seeing people stream the game, seeing people have stories like husband and wife, like husband was like deployed overseas, and like he would play with his wife like every weekend or something, and just like seeing how it brought people together, or like a son and his dad would play together, or even actually Jamie Harris, who I met through Imladris, he's the founder and kind of director of satellite gaming.(...) He played Legion TD2 before I met him with one of the students he was ministering to, and that was kind of like their activity together. So it's super cool, just I always take so much joy in the individual stories.(...) Now there's one more, where a guy, someone asked me for permission to play(...) the Legion TD2 victory music at his wedding, I think the wedding ceremony, like when the guests were coming to get seated, and then he showed me a video later of like them actually doing it. That was like incredibly cool. - Wow, that's pretty special right there. - Yeah.

  - So how do you go from high school modding to Legion TD2? Because Legion TD2 is in Unity, right?

  - Yeah, so Legion TD2 is in Unity, the client, and then the game server is C sharp, just let standalone executable.

  - And then did you go to,(...) help me fill in the timeline here, did you go to college? - So I went to college between,

  so Legion TD,(...) I did senior year of high school, and then I went to college, studied programming.(...) I actually open sourced Legion TD, the mod,

  end of my freshman year, I think.(...) I just kind of ran out of time to keep up with it, and also kind of wanted to, actually there's sort of a longer story behind that. I was kind of running out of time, but also wanted to kind of surrender that area of my life to God, like and just kind of focus on not only college, but just kind of friendships and being present in person, and rather than kind of being fully identified by my online persona.

  But actually, yeah, open source Legion TD

  didn't really do a whole lot with it(...) for three and a half years, and then started Legion TD too, about a year after college, graduating college,

  when I was kind of like, okay, I've kind of done life without games for a while, and I kind of feel like I'm games is where I'm supposed to be.(...) So that was kind of when I started.

  Yeah, college was definitely helpful for building a lot of fundamentals of programming.

  They didn't actually teach C sharp or anything like that, so there was a lot of learning.

  Yeah,(...) I rewrote the code like three times, so. - So I want to touch on something you just said.

  It sounds like your online identity kind of defined you. Is that how? - I think for a little bit, I think, I mean, because the original mod was played by probably like a million people or some crazy amount. For an 18-year-old, that's kind of a lot to kind of process.

  Especially,(...) so I'm like the middle child of three,(...) two, the older brother, younger brother, kind of was always,

  in middle school and high school kind of felt a little bit like I was in the background.

  So I was always kind of just on my computer and my own thing while my older brother was getting all the college attention, like college applying attention, that kind of thing. And then younger brother was cute and stuff.

  So yeah, just having that much attention, it was kind of tough to know what to do with it. And then maybe in college, I want to be well-liked and respected in college. So I would kind of try to mention that I have this really cool mod, that is kind of what maybe people remembered me as in my freshman year. Like that was, you know, you're trying to meet as many people as you can and you kind of remember one or two things about them. And that was kind of what people remembered about me.

  But yeah, I think in hindsight, I'm super, super glad I kind of took a little bit of a break during college.

  - So where was your faith? Did you grow up, like, as your family believers?

  - So I grew up Catholic.

  And so we were going to church every week. I think it was kind of more of a cultural thing for me. I wasn't like sort of against it, but also didn't feel like it was something that's supposed to kind of change my life up a lot.

  So it wasn't until I think freshman year of college where I started to take my faith more seriously. I think the difference too was back home,

  I didn't really have friends at church. I think it was kind of just like my parents and kind of their friends.(...) And I grew up in Florida, so it was like definitely a lot of old people too. So I was like, church is worth lots of old people. And whereas in college, I stumbled upon a Christian fellowship flying Frisbee and having free pizza. Got to know some of them, got to see, some of them were actually really, really brilliant people. And some of them were like PhD students or master students or other, I mean, they were at UC Berkeley for a reason,

  but also taking their faith really seriously. And that was a combination I hadn't really seen before. And yeah, I think that just kind of unlocked my mind to be like, oh, like maybe Christianity is, it's even an option on the table.

  At that point time I was like, oh, maybe it's not really like a good option, but it's an option.

  Yeah, I think that was such a crucial step to me because I feel like the gospel and the word of God is compelling on its own. I don't need to try to retell it in a better way necessarily, but then someone also has to have,(...) they also have to actually listen or give it a chance. So one way, and it was kind of a non-starter for me,

  not knowing any Christians that I kind of admired from a kind of intellectual level until this freshman year experience. So I kind of feel like one way God's been calling me through my career is just to be very excellent at what I do and so that other people can see like, oh, here's a guy who's really good at what he does. He makes really good games. Like he's also a Christian, like those two can exist. And maybe that makes investigating Christianity no longer a non-starter for some people. And that's kind of one way.

  Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a way where I feel like my faith intersects with my career.

  Even if I'm not putting Bible verses in the loading screen, it's like, which I may or may not have done in some versions of Legion TD, little known fact. It was pretty semi-transparent, so no one really knew except unless you pointed it out. But yeah, I think that's kind of one way I've seen, I've thought calm, especially for the upcoming game.

  - I'm curious, what else has God taught you along this journey? I know that it's been hard as we talked a little bit about in the beginning.

  - Yeah, so I think a big part personally has just been the fact that I'm a Christian. Personally, it has just been being able to

  kind of like live my life with uncertainty, I think has been a big lesson for me. Like I mentioned, early on,(...) I kind of just had a vision and passion and not much else going for me at the start.

  But just kind of persisted and eventually kind of made it to the finish line.

  I think my tendency is to kind of want to know,

  want to plan as much as I can. And like my wife knows this, like I like to plan for contingencies kind of to a fault.

  I think, you know, in the Bible it says,

  even our best laid plans can go awry in the blink of an eye. And I think with Legion TD too,(...) it's been such a lesson and kind of just taking things one step at a time. I think a big example, aside from the example of open sourcing Legion TD, which was just really scary, because it's like, here's this thing that goes up. And like, I knew that like, when you open source something to like a bunch of other 14 year old kids, the first thing they're gonna do is delete your name, put their name and that's exactly what happened.(...) So it's actually for a number of years, like people,(...) like, it was funny, like some years where like people didn't really believe me when I said I made Legion TD, they're like, no, like the name and the loading screen is like this other guy. And I was like, yeah, like he deleted my name. You're like, okay, cool, sure, whatever.

  Eventually it kind of came full circle once people dive deeper, but that was kind of funny, like seeing something like this very much yours, like the feel like no longer yours, I think was kind of a cool, like that's where it feels like an idea really has legs as one,

  or a creation really has legs as when it's like no longer your own.

  So yeah, that was a big step. Another big step was so after launching the game in early access in 2017,

  the game had kind of a rocky launch, like it sold a good amount of copies, probably just because of the reputation of the name and such, but there were a lot of like server issues that were mainly my fault. And then kind of just issues with the game.

  The review score was like 20% for a little while.

  Obviously not very good on Steam,(...) I think. But like it made a decent amount of money just because it's an upfront 1999 purchase.(...) So again,(...) at this point, this kind of smart, fiscally smart thing to do would be take the money and run, but we stuck with it. We just were like, we're gonna re-release the game. It was in early access, so we still kind of felt like we had a redo. Like we'll full release the game, we're like, we'll do it in a year, or hopefully last, but maybe a year. And it ended up taking four more years to get the full release

  during which we basically paid ourselves almost nothing and actually cut off our paychecks at one point.

  And the game was like dwindling in player base the whole time. And for early access launch week, I think it peaked at like 30,(...) 3500 or something, which is pretty good for like a small indie game. But then like every month, it was like being cut in half or something. At one point, I was just in 2019,(...) October 2019, I remember just at night being in tears, because all I wanted to do was like play the game. And there was like 27 people online. And since it's a skill-based matchmaking game, the system like tries to find a fair match for you. And it'll wait if it can't. And I just waited for like 20 minutes and like it couldn't match me with anybody. And I was like,(...) I guess this is, maybe this is it. Like we've been working full time on it for like two years of early access at that point. And I don't know, none of the bets kind of seem to be paying off. And yeah, I was in tears, I think.

  But for some reason, I just knew it wasn't time to give up.

  And we kind of still kept at it. And even if we couldn't see where it was going.

  During that time too, I actually co-led, well, I was more of the assistant person, but co-led a mission trip team to Japan, actually, with my wife. And it was kind of like,

  I felt weird because I was like, gosh, I'm like struggling so much with work to even like have a livable salary. Like, and my wife wants me, we weren't married at the time, but she wants me to like help lead this mission trip, which will obviously take away a bunch of time from work.

  But like I shared it with my team and they were like super supportive.(...) They're not believers, but they know how much my faith needs to be. So having their support and like kind of just doing that in the midst of all this was a pretty formative experience for me.

  And I think, yeah, it's one of those things like two, I think it was two weeks, it like felt like an eternity in the moment, but then in the grand scheme of things, like, when you're talking about like 10 years, like it's not that much. Yeah, so I think just the whole early access period and working towards something kind of at a short term loss was kind of just a good experience for me and like knowing why I'm doing this, like I just want to make the best game I can make and not really end up for the money.

  Thankfully, it actually did work out for me in terms of when we full released the game in 2021, and that's really where it took off.(...) So I think not that this will happen every time, but I think it was kind of cool

  just seeing our efforts pay off there.(...) So yeah, I think there's even moving forward,

  thinking about where, like I might be moving later this year and like all sorts of other things, like do we want to have a second kid? Like all these things, there's all these uncertainties, I think,

  but I'm like kind of okay with it. It's just kind of, that's how life on earth is. - Yeah, I'm finding that out just more and more.

  How much is outside of my control? How much is God's own plans that he has for me and stuff? I've had to, over the last several years, I felt like I've kind of had to lay things down and just be,(...) find peace in God in the midst of the unknowns. - Totally,(...) totally.

  - What's it mean to you to be a Christian game developer?(...) - Yeah, so that's a question I've tried to give a little bit more thought to this year.

  It's tricky, because I actually have not thought that much about what it means to be a game developer in general.

  I think some people get into the industry, like having this idea of themselves, what kind of game developer do I want to be? And so on, almost like a brand for themselves or whatever. I think the way I got into the industry, I guess, is I just had this specific game I wanted to make and I would do whatever it took to make that product.

  So I didn't even really see an identity for myself. So I think this year I'm starting to give that a little bit more thought,

  but I wish I had a more clear answer.(...) I think in terms of being a game developer who's Christian,(...) I think a little bit of what I shared earlier was I think by living my life in the way that my faith is present in my day-to-day interactions

  and as well as excelling in what I do as a game developer,(...) to me that's kind of where I feel called to right now.

  I know there's some Christian game developers who are kind of making more outwardly Christian games, but I currently don't feel called to that.

  Yeah, it's tough though. I think in terms of just running my company though,

  we've always tried to value kind of the health of the team over the, I don't know, meeting deadlines or shipping a feature or whatever(...) and kind of always, or never losing track of kind of the humans behind the game. And that's something that I think is maybe not the case at some other companies, maybe especially larger companies.

  So that's, I think just being consistent with my values is sort of how I try to distinguish myself as a game developer.(...) - Yeah, that's good.

  I'm curious just to pick your thoughts on just the industry right now.

  Obviously there's a lot of up and down with jobs and stuff, but it's also at the same time,

  it feels like it's harder and harder to just get visibility. More and more games are getting put out.

  I'm curious like you, obviously you have an established brand and people know, but like, are you thinking about things any differently now than from when you started?

  - Not really, actually. I think maybe to our fault, I've usually kind of tuned out industry trends.

  I think again, like I got into the industry wanting to make a specific game and kind of to our fault, no one can tell me otherwise.

  Like I think when I started in 2014, 2015, there were kind of some people who were like, oh, PC is a dying platform, like you gotta go mobile.(...) And I mean,(...) they are correct in that mobile is huge and bigger, but they were kind of incorrect in that piece, like how many PCs going anywhere.

  And then others were like, oh, you gotta be mobile, like free to play it pretty much. Or like you gotta make a MOBA or something back in 2014.

  And then maybe in 20, whenever Fortnite got huge,(...) it was like, oh, you gotta make like a battle royale or whatever. And then it's like, oh, you have to like use AI or like you have to use VR or whatever.

  I think I got a little bit calloused to some of these

  kind of like industry trends and I just wanna make the game that I know I want to make. And I think there's enough of an audience that overlaps with my personal kind of green games that it'll be financially fine.

  In terms of like the kind of the layoffs and the shrinking or whatever they call it,

  that's kind of tough to say because my team's so small and the way,

  even in the QE,(...) like given what they're outputting and given they've been around since like 2006 or something, like 15 plus years, they're still like fairly small for compared to what they could be.

  So I think we haven't been like super personally affected by that.

  Yeah, like, I mean, I'll just see like graphs of like, like anytime I say a graph and there's like a double digit billion number there, I'm like, I don't even know how to relate to this.

  (laughing)

  Yeah, I guess the only other takeaway for me is like, once I start hiring people later this year and next year, there'll be a pretty big pool.

  Yeah, I mean, otherwise it's definitely like commiserating with friends I have in the industry

  that were affected by layoffs and like, it's definitely a tough situation

  and I don't wanna detract from that, but I think in terms of like,

  do I alter the like strategy or vision of a company based off of trends?

  Probably not.

  If a student was to come to you seeking advice, what would you tell them?

  So with advice, I always think like context matters. Sure, okay. It's pretty impossible to like give market advice.

  Okay, what about, okay, what if some students, some students that are graduating college here and thinking about either going indie or trying to work for a company or, you know, kind of weighing their different options. Like should they launch out and start trying to make their dream game like you did? Or should they go work for somebody for a while? Yeah, so that one's a tough one because it depends on so many factors, like so many circumstances, like what risks you're willing to take and like what vision you have. Like for example, if it's someone who kind of likes the idea of being indie, but doesn't really know what they wanna make, versus like someone who's like, I absolutely wanna make a game about bug hunting for my kid. It needs to kind of look like this, like needs to play like this and like nobody else will make this game. And then, you know, for someone like that, I might be like, like, like, you probably just wanna go indie so that you can make exactly what you wanna make.(...) Whereas the other person that might be like, like maybe it could be useful to get some industry experience first, I don't know.

  I think if I had to just give one kind of sound bite random advice,

  I think it'll be like something along the lines of like, it's good to read a lot of advice, but like be okay with kind of saying no to things or like just ignore the advice. I think these days there's just a massive amount of information out there between like YouTube and articles and like blogs. And a lot of them are well-intentioned, very educational and generally like, there's a lot of truth to a lot of them. But it's like,(...) I don't know, you can't like please everybody. You can't like follow every good practice. Like a lot of them like conflict with each other too. So that's sometimes it's just like logically impossible to do everything that you read.

  Or you just spread yourself too thin, trying to do like, I don't know, every good practice.

  Or even just like people in your life have given you again, well-intentioned advice to do this or that or not do this or not do that.

  I think if there's one takeaway from my story, it's like it's okay to,(...) yeah. Like don't just try to freak everybody. I think it's probably one thing. Like there's absolutely no way I would have done what I did if I followed all the advice I was given or even half the advice. So kind of if you have a strong vision, strong belief, like take in as much advice as you can. Like it's always good to have data points and sanity check yourself and check your blind spots.

  But when it comes to making a decision for yourself,

  like don't outsource that to like a YouTube video. - If your game hadn't have worked,

  would you still be making games? Would you still be making games?(...) Would you stay it in the industry?

  - That's a tough question.

  I think I would.

  I think I would. I think I've toyed around with the idea kind of during the early access days. I toyed around with the idea of having like a non-gaming job and then two games at night.

  But now,(...) or after having gotten married to a non-gamer and then having a kid who's currently a non-gamer but maybe a future gamer, I think the idea of doing work after hours is like kind of not a possibility anymore.

  So I think I'd still be doing games. I think for me, there's nothing quite like the experience of working really hard to craft an experience and then having someone enjoy that and just seeing them laugh on Twitch. There was a long, long time ago before game design, I wanted to make roller coasters really cool. And then I kind of quickly realized that's not just like a one person kind of like that you just do. (laughs) And then realized games would give me the experience.(...) But yeah, the idea of crafting something,

  basically roller coasters and Disney rides and things and then seeing people have joy from them. That was where my childhood dream came in. That's where my childhood dream was. And then games are kind of the same thing, just in an easier medium.(...) - How did you get connected with Imladris?

  - So at GDC, not CGDC, regular GDC in 2016,

  I had attended there just as an attendee. I was just walking around the expo floor and saw some of my games booth there. I think that, I think it was,

  I think they were just showing off G prime. I don't think they were showing off anything Redwall related. But then I met Chris Staggs there at the expo floor. And then we hit it off pretty quick. As soon as he mentioned the word Redwall, I was like super hooked because I've read 21 under 22 books. I'm like too afraid to read the last one knowing that the author died. And like, I don't know, for some reason, me and a friend of mine, actually, we both read 21 out of the 22. And then I think it's 22 books. So yeah, we hit it off and then pretty quickly found out we're both Christians, hit it up even more.

  And then he backed our Kickstarter, which meant a lot. Cause I was like,(...) it was pretty clear that Legion TD2 was not his competitive multiplayer,(...) pretty hardcore game was like not his normal game of choice. But then he and someone believed in us enough to give a pretty significant Kickstarter backing. - Awesome. And our Kickstarter looked like pretty janky compared to what we have.

  (Chris laughs) I gotta show you links for the call, but this did not look like it was gonna make a ton of money. So yeah, I meant a ton. Like that was like a really rare, like it was just like,

  I think that's a case I look back on where like money can be used to bless others. Like it's just, you know, you can say all the kind words you want and that means a lot too. But then when you like kind of show it with money and especially like given that we just met and like, I think he backed it that week or something. And then it was just like an action that stuck with me for a long time and was like,

  like kind of just the radical generosity that affected me. Another one actually was a friend of mine who was like a missionary and I forget which country like Ghana or something. Obviously living on missionary budget, like very much not a gamer. And she backed it for like $50. And that meant like the world. Yeah, so that was where I met Chris. And then later, like three years later, two years later, we realized or I realized

  we were living like an hour and a half away, maybe he realized.

  I was living in California when we met. So, you know, we were like, I don't know when we'll cross paths. And it turns out I moved to Oregon like two years later. And so we crossed paths.

  Yeah, we just kept in touch that way.

  It's been super cool being part of Enlaundris. I actually drove up to visit Soma's office, I think in the fall or summer last year, which is really cool.(...) And yeah, it's been, especially with my company being remote and on different time zones. So my partner's in Korea, my employee's in Germany right now and Ninja Kiwis in New Zealand.

  And Enlaundris has been a really cool community for me for kind of people who are actually awake at the same time. And like I can,

  it's a real time interactions with.

  It's been a really cool space. And I love so many of the people there and it's such a blessing to be a part of. - Yeah, yeah, it is.(...) So you're speaking at CGDC this summer. Do you know what you're gonna talk about?

  - I mean, I just feel like I got the details yesterday, but I mean, it sounds like we're gonna be talking about kind of the unity that we have as Christians who are game developers, despite coming from such different walks of life and working on very different games.

  I'll probably share some of what I shared in this podcast, I think.(...) And to me,

  it feels most natural to share from personal experience.

  Since it's kind of like I can just say what I think happened to me and people can kind of do with that as they will.

  I haven't been a particularly introspective person in terms of like my identity as a game developer. So as I mentioned earlier, so it's like I don't know how much I have to say on that. I think I'll probably, yeah,(...) just share kind of my story. And it's probably something kind of unique to me. It's being able to say I've worked on the same game for like 10 years and as founder, director of it.

  Yeah, I wanted to share some stories, some of the ones I already shared and maybe a few others. Probably put a lot of visuals too. I wanna share like, people see like a pretty polished game out there now, but like I wanna share like the early days, like when I was sketching on my, I'm not an artist, but we didn't have an artist. So I did a lot of sketching. I remember either the DMV or like waiting for my car to get service or something, like sketching characters. And then like, I mean, in my life for like babysitting for somebody and I was sketching stuff over there. And these are like, these look like classroom doodles from like a third grader or something. I don't know, third graders are pretty good, more like first graders or something. And then some of them became like, became the characters that people know and love today. So I wanna show definitely some of the early day stuff and some kind of the struggles and just like,(...) yeah, I think I wanna communicate that, I didn't have this figured out until, I mean, I'm still,

  I still feel like imposter syndrome a lot of the times, but it's like definitely didn't know what I was doing in the start.

  - Hmm.

  That's surprising to me that you feel like, have a feel imposter syndrome.

  - I don't know. I mean, I feel like with my code, like I follow like some best practices of code and I violate many others. So,(...) but my game still runs, right? So. - Yeah, yeah. - That's one of those things, like the same advice applies, like it's really good to read up and be familiar with best practices, good to follow them when you can(...) and like, but have some like leeway with yourself(...) and like,(...) it's not always gonna be textbook, so. - Well, I am really looking forward to getting to hang out with you this summer and looking forward to your talk.

  Before we go,(...) where can people connect with you and find your games?

  - So Legion TD2, you can either Google it or go to legiontd2.com and it's on Steam.

  Otherwise, if you Google my name on LinkedIn, always have to connect there, brandtavadas.

  And then Discord, if you join the Legion TD2 Discord, my name's at the top, it's Lisk, L-I-S-K.(...) You can always connect with me there.(...) Otherwise,(...) yeah, I think between those, you can probably get in touch with me. - And we'll provide links in the show notes and stuff so people can connect. - Cool.

  - Well, Brent, thank you so much for talking. It's been a pleasure. - Thanks, Brock. It's been really awesome to share. Super cool.(...) (upbeat music)