Meet Forest San Filippo
Forest San Filippo is a Christian, an artist, entrepreneur, and the co-founder and former creative director for the indie studio FlippFly.
Whisker Squadron: Survivor
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2140100/Whisker_Squadron_Survivor/
Race The Sun
https://flippfly.com/racethesun/
FlippFly
https://flippfly.com/
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I think this image and this concept of yourself as an artist can be really damaging, especially
with this,(...) I guess I would call it an idol of self expression, you know, that what I really need to do is tell the world how I feel.(...) And the world really needs to hear my thoughts.
And so that was something I really had to come to grips with over the years of doing work for other people and realizing that, you know, when I finally did have the opportunity to make my own art, realizing that that wasn't the end, you know, that wasn't what I was looking for.
While I love doing it, you know, it wasn't going to give me the identity or the purpose that I needed in life.
Forrest welcome to Faithforms. Glad to be here. Thank you, brother. It's been a while since we last talked. I think it was we were at M dev, right? Last fall. Yep. Yep. Last fall. That was pretty cool event. It's it's getting pretty big. Yeah, you graciously offered your sister's house to me to come stay with that feels like a total brother move. But it was awesome. You and I had actually never really got to hang out and talk before we had exchanged emails and some stuff over the over the years, I think. But that was the first time we actually got to hang out and talk and get to know each other a little bit. And I was really blessed to be able to also spend some time with your brother in law and your sister and their whole family. It was really an awesome experience. Cool, cool. Yeah, I'm glad I'm glad it worked out. It's fun to chat and kind of share vision and hear where you know where we're at with work and faith and and you know, all of the adventures and struggles related to that.
Love for you to just tell people about your story and stuff. But first, I just want to catch up and see what have you been up to since we hung out.
Yeah, so I'm still doing doing my my day job as a contract worker.
I've got two two primary clients right now.
One is my brother, who I used to own a business with and I'm going to bet that's kind of how I got into games. And then the other is a research lab at the University of Wisconsin. And they do games for research and education kind of simultaneously.
And I love working with them. So we've been we've been doing some cool projects.
Contracting work. Are you primarily doing 3D art or what? What are you working on?(...) Yeah, so I got into the interview and contracting for games since it's been three years now, I think. And I when I jumped in, I was really trying to do UI and 3D work kind of stylized 3D as my specialty.(...) But I ended up with the opportunity to do some illustration for a mobile game a couple years ago. I did. I was nervous about that because I've only really done tiny bits of illustration for UI work mostly.
And but I took it on and it turned out to be a really good learning experience. And I was able to produce a high enough quality that I felt good about it. So I've considered putting myself out there for that again. But I have a very narrow style that I work in and it would have to be the right situation.
What was your relationship with games growing up? You grew up in a Christian home, right? Yeah, so my parents were kind of just after the hippie generation, they called themselves freaks. That was kind of how they defined their movement.(...) But they were very much about getting back to nature, you know, getting out of the city. They were raised in suburbs of Chicago.
So we moved out west when I was two.(...) And I lived in very rural areas for the next eight years.
And so video games were very suspect. You know, that was just kind of rising,(...) gaining popularity.(...) You know, first with the Atari was the one that we started seeing in friends' houses.(...) But eventually they allowed us to rent a Nintendo,(...) which was what you did back then when you didn't own one.
The video stores actually had Nintendo units you could rent. And we also didn't have a TV for a chunk of my childhood. So we'd also sometimes have to rent a TV.
So video games was this very special kind of experience that we were allowed to do for(...) special occasions,(...) which usually meant that as we got older, of course, if we only had like a weekend with the Nintendo, we actually eventually then was a Super Nintendo.
We would just stay up all night playing through whatever cartridge you rented.
So some good, you know, good memories and good experiences. But it was still kind of on the margins of what we did. You know, we mostly entertained ourselves outside of the house when we were younger.(...) Nice. What did you think you were going to do when you grew up?
You know, I didn't have a clear picture. I think I went through the typical, you know, looking around me and seeing what other people were doing. And when we moved to Wisconsin, when I just as I was turning 10 and a lot of people around me were farmers, I thought, oh, maybe I'll be a farmer when I grow up. And then I decided pretty quickly against that.(...) But my brother, who was just a year and a half younger than me,(...) he knew right away that he wanted to make video games. And it was really it was kind of neat because my mom was she was the one who was most against kind of having video games as a regular pastime. But she was very for creating things. She wanted us to be like creative people. So as soon as he started like showing enthusiasm for games, she was like, you could make it. You could make them. And you know, so so as I got into, you know, kind of young teen years, we talked a lot about making games together. You know, and it was kind of this dream. We started doing the thing where you sketch out the story and and we ended up with a home PC and we and eventually got missed on the PC. And that was that was kind of a life changing moment for me, because just realizing that
there could be this this level of interactivity and story mixed together was a totally new thing for me.
So I got excited about it. But I was also pretty lazy teenager. So I didn't spend the time learning how to actually make games. I did like art, though, and I didn't somehow didn't conceptualize that I could be an artist(...) and do that in games. So I played around with 3D art and, you know, making gifts and that kind of thing when that was just just coming to the forefront.
And eventually I I had the opportunity to get into graphic design at a sign shop when I was like 20 years old. And that was kind of my path into art.
But it sort of led me away from away from video games. And I didn't, again, didn't even conceptualize that those two things might meet up at some point.
So did you after high school, did you go into the workforce then or did you do any college or?
Yeah, I didn't do any any college at all. I just just didn't have any desire to. I think partially because I've I've always been a cheapskate and I just couldn't overcome the idea of how much money it was going to cost.
So I know a friend of mine got me a job at 18 doing doing landscape work or not last year, I'm sorry, land surveying work. I did landscaping work as a teenager,(...) freelance, and then did land surveying when I turned 18. I got a year and a half into that and I realized, OK, this is this is really not how I want to spend the rest of my life. I really love to music. So I started auditing music classes at the university. I thought maybe I'll maybe I'll get into music, but also realize that there's very low probability of making money doing music.
So I took the job, which was at the time a part time job doing graphic design.
The business that I started working for started growing and the owner, the owner was like, hey, you want to buy this business?
And so I did in my early 20s, I bought I bought a business and I at the time it was just kind of science and graphics. And I really wanted to move it more in the direction of doing visual, you know, visual arts, logo design, that kind of thing.(...) And I did that for quite a while, like a decade.
And I ended up realizing that doing designs for other people was not quite what I was looking for either.(...) My best work never made it never made it through the review process. It was it was always the subpar version that made it out there.
I was a little caught up at the time, I think also just kind of self expression. I, you know, being, you know,(...) just wanted to get my ideas and my art and my work out there. And it was a little bit self focused, I would say. So I was kind of making myself more miserable than I needed to be. But I thought maybe it would be music, maybe it would be maybe it would be art.
So I actually ended up quitting the I sold the sign business kind of for a pitifully small profit and ended up trying to make music and make a go of being a musician.
I did that for less than a year, learned a lot about audio, a lot about recording and kind of hit a pretty hard wall realizing that I didn't quite have the musical ability that I felt I needed to go to go that route.
And the combination of just the chances of success with the realization that I needed to spend a few more years working on my musical ability was just too much. Totally.
So you're on this winding path, but your brother Aaron is just kind of laser focused. Is that what it sounds like? Yeah, yeah. So he put himself through college and got recruited right out of the University of Madison to work for Raven Software, which was I don't remember the size of it, but it was a medium sized studio in Madison. And they pretty quickly, I think after that got acquired by Activision.
And so he started out working on kind of their own IP, which was he found really interesting and engaging, kind of got to own pieces of the game.(...) And then Raven turned into a Call of Duty studio. So there was just much less in the way of creativity and kind of grinding out the next Call of Duty. And so he was about seven years in when he realized that he was hoping for something a little different in his line of work as well. He was hoping to make creative steps. And so at that time I had sold my sign business. I had taken a few odd jobs and ended up doing website design. So I was doing freelancing again, but this was for websites and doing WordPress stuff. And then of course all the graphic design. From what I've gathered from our time together, you guys have a pretty close family. Were you still pretty close to Aaron during that whole time? Or was he pretty heads down at Raven working? Yeah, we were always doing family stuff. Madison's only about an hour and a half from where I am here. So we would do all the holidays together.
And we got a lot of time to talk about the different projects that we were involved in.
So he got to that point about seven years into working at a AAA studio.
And I was doing websites, which just felt like a kind of a failure because it was a return to doing other people's art. And kind of again, watching my best ideas never make it through the review process.
And he said, hey, this indie thing is starting to take off for games. You want to give it a try.
And we had always talked about making a game together. And at this point, I realized I did actually have some useful skills that I could apply to video games. And I hadn't really been playing a lot of games since I was a teenager. But the mobile gaming thing was coming up. And I was starting to see the potential there.
So yeah, that's kind of simultaneous with the app store starting to explode.
So we decided to keep our day jobs for a year and make a game.(...) And we did that.
It turned out really better than I thought it would. It was this mobile music making app. It wasn't so much a game as it was a toy for young children to make music with. And it didn't sell really well. We didn't know a whole lot about marketing and monetization in the mobile space.
But Apple really liked it. And they featured it. And we got a ton of great reviews. And we just felt like, OK, we can do this. Between the two of us, we make a good team.
So the next step was we talked about just diving and quitting our jobs and going for it.(...) So we went over the next potential projects that we could do and kind of did the whole list of here's all of our grand ideas. Here are all the prototypes we have. Which one actually has a chance?
And again, I think it may have even been called Race the Sun early on in the prototyping process rose to the top. And we decided to do that.
Convinced that it was going to be a six month project. And again, I think we were still young enough in doing the whole process to think that a six month game could happen.
Do you remember what the inspiration for that was?
Yes, really. My brother was just thinking of this idea of going really fast. How fun it is to go really fast. And we had one of the games we had rented as kids was Star Fox on the Super Nintendo. And it just blew us away. It was like the first 3D game we played.
And so we would repeatedly rent it and play through the whole game basically in one sitting.
And so it was kind of that idea of what if it was even faster?
And we hadn't really played any of the arcade games that were in this genre of just go fast, avoid things.(...) But that was the prototype. It was just a triangle flying through a bunch of cubes. And it was immediately fun. So then I can't remember at what point the idea of making it flying into the sunset came. But it was just kind of an iconic scene flying towards the sunset. So that happened. And then from there came the idea of, oh, what if you're solar powered and the shadows are also this thing to avoid that might slow you down or kill you in the sun is setting. And the whole idea came together pretty quickly.
Cool. And it had a bunch of success too, right? Yeah, it took a while to get there because our budgeting, personal budgeting was for six months.
And so we were approaching a year later and running out of money. And the game was not finding the traction that we'd hoped it would. You know, we just realized from what we knew enough to know that we were probably not going to have a hit if we released it.
So we we've run for this Kickstarter and got about halfway through the Kickstarter and just realized that the Kickstarter itself was going to fail.(...) And so we took a hard look at the game. I was very new to 3D art and I had didn't have a real clear direction for the game kind of throwing things in there. So it was it was ugly.
And we just realized we had this massive content bottleneck where we weren't going to be able to produce enough content to get make the game and just interesting.(...) And so over the course of a week, I redid all of the art in the game and my brother created a procedural generation system that would allow us to quickly create content and generate it, you know, kind of get it into the game in interesting ways.
And so just worked our brains out for basically, you know, two weeks during the Kickstarter and re kind of relaunched the Kickstarter midstream and it just barely just barely squeaked by and made the money, which was a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things. But it was enough to keep us alive, you know,(...) and the Kickstarter itself generated a lot of a lot of buzz amongst kind of, you know,(...) newish indie games community.(...) So that was exciting and and got us on people's radar. We wouldn't have been on otherwise.(...) So for the first year, the levels were all hand designed. Yeah, so initially it was yeah, we were we were kind of randomly trying to come up with ways to randomly spawn things in the world.
And we were just I was just manually making like individual models and placing them in the world.
And part of the problem was just like creating interesting models that you would see for a split second.
It just had a strange feel to it. And so this is this is, you know, again, a big a lot of credit to my brother in coming up with this idea of what if we just went super minimalist and, you know, kind of back to the original prototype just kind of cubes and spheres and went with that. And I realized I could if we went that route, I could lean more heavily into like the post process and, you know, simple colors. And we came up with the idea of starting in black and white and then progressing into more and more color as you get into the game.
And so, yeah, so it went from this kind of scattered randomness. And then I guess the big innovation was realizing that we should hand design chunks of the game and then spawn those whole chunks into the into the level I had of you so that we would always have something interesting, both visually and gameplay wise. And suddenly the game actually got interesting. So how intimidating was it jumping into 3D for the first time? It's pretty scary.
You know, I did a lot of work in vector when I was doing graphic design. So conceptually, I understood what was going on, just kind of added that third dimension. But I had so many gaps in my knowledge that I, you know, I didn't understand how shaders worked.
And just the process of figuring out how to take the thing from, I mean, it looks this way in Blender, you know, how do I get it into the game? And a lot of learning, but it was fun as well because I was making, you know, kind of for the first time, I was making my own thing without, you know, without anybody else's filter going on it. And it was fun to be able to put that in front of people. And it wasn't, it didn't always land, you know, it wasn't always the right thing. But I discovered I was able to,(...) that my, my eye for composition that I developed as a graphic designer translated really well into the 3D space, you know, that I can look at a scene.
And, and even if I couldn't make the individual models look exactly as I had hoped, the scene itself would come together in a way that was pleasing and fun.
How confident were you that you could just figure it out? Are you, are you that type of person that will just get moving and then figure it out? When it comes to visual stuff, yeah. Yeah. When it comes to code, I, you know, I've always been terrified of, of code. So it's taken me a long time to overcome that. But I, I'm finally like creeping my way into that world. But the visual stuff, yeah, I've always just taken an approach that says I will keep tinkering with this and I'll keep trying things until I get it the way that I want it. When you were doing websites, did you do any of the HTML and stuff there or were you just kind of handing it off to someone else? Yeah, yeah. So for some reason, HTML, CSS wasn't as intimidating to me. And then I ended up because of WordPress creeping into PHP.(...) And I had, you know,(...) it was, it was my only real experience with programming. So everybody told me how terrible a programming language it was. I don't know. This is all I know. I'm sure I've forgotten all the PHP that I learned. But for a while there, I did conceptually understand it. So that that helped a little bit in my stepping my way into into the programming world.(...) You're working with your brother and you're finally getting to do art that you that you believe in. And the game's successful.
Is that kind of like a high point in your career up to this point?
That was, you know, the biggest success that we had had that I had in business.
And it was also my first experience with something that was mass market for everything up to that point was, yes, I'm working for one client and that client is determining how this thing looks. And I realized that when you are, you know, when you're selling to, you know, a thousand people or 10,000 people that you do still have that feedback and aggregate.(...) But there's a lot more freedom to create and you can instead of instead of molding your product to look exactly how one person wants it to look, you can actually go the other direction and find your audience and find the people have similar tastes and interests as you and make something that will delight them.
So I was hooked, you know, at that point I was sure that this is this is what I wanted to do.(...) Looking at your LinkedIn, you were worked with Aaron at Flip fly for 10 years. Yeah, so we did that.(...) Sounds that sounds right. I think we did. We started in 2011 under the radar. We released Monkey Drum in 2012, I believe, and then 2013 was was the release of Race the Sun.
And then that basically,(...) Race the Sun kind of became an ongoing thing because at that time, Sony reached out to us when we went to we went to PAX and they found our booth.(...) So we ended up we ended up porting the game to three of three PlayStation platforms.
And from there, I think we went to Xbox and then back to the iPhone, which was funny because, you know, it seems like a ready made mobile game, but it took us a long time to go back and try the try the mobile space again. So and during that time we were trying to figure out what to do next. You know, what is our what is our next project? We ended up taking on a publishing slash porting project with a game called
just slipped my mind. Studio is fun selector and the game's absolute drift.(...) And that was that was neat because it was a game that felt like it fit in the world of Race the Sun. It was kind of a very minimalist artistic game.
So we did we did a couple ports for that game and kind of helped release an updated version with with new features. And that was a blast. But from that point,(...) it was we really wanted to get into making something original. And we had this idea for a hexagonal puzzle game,(...) which in hindsight was so completely different from everything else that we had done. It was it was a huge risk that we didn't realize we were taking for the porting game. Absolute drift. What did you do on it? Was there art to be done?
Yeah,(...) that was an interesting one because the art was mostly finished. So and the and the developer, the fun selectors of solo developer. So he had done all the art and programming himself. So I ended up in this role of doing a lot of QA. I did all the marketing materials. I've made a trailer, you know,(...) got some some fun experience there. But it was yeah, I wasn't getting my hands dirty in the art, which I was really excited about.
I think probably contributed to this idea of like, you know, we want to we don't want to be a publisher. We want to make our own thing. So the hexagonal puzzle game, are you guys into puzzle games or what brought that about?(...) Yeah, so it's interesting. I think we had both found, you know, different mobile puzzle games to be really engaging. I thought we wanted to make one.(...) And we had this this idea for a world which was it was low poly and really, really fit a particular aesthetic that I was really excited about because I think because my work in Race to the Sun just realized that we could make this stylistically
something unique.(...) But the game design piece of the piece of the puzzle was was definitely more complicated. And it took us a long time of a lot of iteration, a ton of prototyping to find something that really worked well.(...) And then in the end, we ended up with a with a puzzle game that we wanted to set in this 3D world. And we wanted to give you the sense of progression through a 3D world. And looking back on it, like conceptually, it was maybe something along the lines of the witness, right, where you have a 3D world that has is really a 2D puzzle game. But you're playing your way through it. And we, of course, didn't have the budget or time to, you know, to make it this big adventure game. So it ended up being really narrow and in some ways found a maybe a bad balance between those two things. So the puzzle game itself was a lot of fun. Because you were in this world, you felt like you wanted to go and explore and, you know, do an adventure kind of thing. And it really was very limited on that, on that front.(...) So it, once again, like found an audience at Apple, we got featured several times.
never took off as a very marketable experience. The people who played it were fairly happy with it and it was generally well received, but I think it was just hard to grok from a screenshot or from a video. You didn't understand exactly what you were getting.
- From a player standpoint, did you lose a bunch of your audience from Race to Sun and find a new audience? - You know, it seemed like the Race to Sun audience stuck around even without a lot of new content, but I don't think there was a lot of crossover. We tried to do cross promotion and I think it was just so different that our Race to Sun audience wasn't very interested in it. So we did bring in a few new players from outside, but it never really took off in any particular market.
- Was the puzzle game primarily mobile? - We released it on Steam, but it didn't do anything on Steam. It was very much in that kind of artsy low poly style that just wasn't doing real well on Steam at the time.
- What was the best platform for Race to Sun?
- Oh, that's a good question.
It's still going. So I'm not sure when all is said and done.
I'm guessing that Steam is still probably the top platform.
Mobile did really well, even though the price was lower on mobile.(...) And now there's a free version on Android,
which is up to 10 million downloads. - Wow. - The free version is not like it's,(...) it gets a lot of plays and it's highly rated, but it doesn't monetize real well.(...) And my brother's done a ton of work just figuring out how, trying to figure out how to monetize that in a way that retains the structure and the fun of the game.
And it's just something about the way that it's put together makes it difficult to make a lot of money. So the 10 million downloads looks like we should be making a ton of money off of that,
but it's not so. - So now Flip Fly is working on Whisker Squad, right?
The next kind of iteration, it seems like it's even more Star Fox. - Yeah, yeah. So they're kind of in the middle there. We released Evergarden that didn't really go anywhere. And we tried a few games that we, we even announced one and we had, at this time Flip Fly had grown to have a couple, a couple employees along with my brother and I. And the next game we were working on just didn't seem like it was gonna land to me. I wasn't very excited about working on it. - How far into it were you?
- Well, it was again, yeah, it was supposed to be a short project.
And as games do, the timeline got extended
and the concept got bigger and bigger.(...) So I think we were almost a year in on it.
And I just realized I was not excited to keep working on that game.
And I did have like,
along with this whole path of like creating all these other games, I'm like learning how to program a little bit. I'm starting to make prototypes. And I got really deeply involved in the design of a small, we actually in the middle of after we made Evergarden, we made a little puzzle game version of that, which took on a totally new life and ended up with completely different mechanics. But I got really excited about the design of that. And I realized that I love designing the games as well. Like, and I wanted to be a part of that. So part of my, I guess my realization was one, I don't want to be really working on this flip fly game for the next year. And I really want to get into design,(...) but I didn't want to take that role for my brother because he, you know,(...) really the whole reason that he had left AAA was because he wanted to create things and he wanted to design. And being a tiny little company with two designers just seemed like it wasn't going to be a great way to move forward where one of us would always be sad that we weren't working in the, you know, doing the primary design. So at that point, I decided to step back and start my own company and try out some of the ideas that I've been prototyping over the years.
So that was, gosh,(...) end of 2019, end of 2019. That was a step back.
So initially I was just doing contract work to keep the bills paid. And I wasn't working for flip fly at all. But after a couple of years,
I and my brother started working on Whisker Squadron, which was this, yeah, kind of a building off of the Race to the Sun idea. And he needed some art help. So I came back to help out with Whisker Squadron. We've been working on that for a while together, which has been a blast. - How's working with your brother at this point that you've left?
- In some ways it's more fun because when we were both owners and we had all the financial stuff and the whole kind of the whole future of the company on our shoulders and we're trying to work that out between us, there's a lot of stress.
And we both always committed to the idea of we're brothers first. So the business is never gonna get in the way of that.
And so coming back and just being able to help out without the pressure has been a lot of fun.
- You're also what, a dean in your church? - Yeah, so that just happened about a year ago. I accepted an elder position at my church,
which was a big step.
My wife and I were pretty careful about stepping into that. When we were younger, we were both deeply involved with our church and we spent kind of every, every time the doors were open, we were there doing something.
And yeah, I just had a lot of experiences that made us cautious about diving in too far. We didn't want it to become a thing that hurt our family.(...) We've got three kids and we didn't wanna, church work can be stressful.(...) And we didn't wanna like,
we didn't wanna give our kids the impression that faith was a thing that brought stress and difficulty into their lives.
- How does your faith intersect your game work?
- Yeah, it's interesting. So that's a question I've been asking ever since I got into games, because when I was doing contract work for other people, it really was just about how do I operate
in a way that glorifies Christ? How do I work hard for my clients? How do I, how am I gracious with the people who are not gracious to me?
But then when it came to that realization of, oh, there's nobody filtering me, I can make my own thing.
I started asking the questions of, yeah, how does faith come into this?(...) Race to Sonnet was just a very mechanical game and it didn't have much in the way of story. I kind of regret that we didn't hang on, or we weren't able to hang on to it for a couple more months because there was a developing story for the game, but it made its way in a little bit. In that game, there's a,
it's an endless runner, roguelike kind of thing where you die and you restart.(...) And I'm sorry, roguelike fans, it's not a real roguelike. I've just called it a roguelike.
But we just realized, I'm chatting about it, that there's some philosophical ideas there about meaning that are pretty interesting. And so I wrote the voice of the game, which kind of comes up just in text whenever you crash, or whenever you upgrade, and it taunts you, and it just kind of asks you, why are you doing this?
And if you play the game, there are some hidden messages as you play through, and some people have discovered them. And basically it's just the same thing, hidden in a few places throughout the racism world. It says, "Life has meaning."
And for me, as a believer,(...) that's where I wanted to, I realized that it's important to ask the right questions. Sometimes I think we start from this kind of foundation of theology that a lot of us have grown up with as Christians, and we just dive into that. We start sharing what we understand as the gospel message, but we're kind of starting sort of on a pile of ideas
that sometimes it takes people a long time to get there. And one of the ones that I've been sort of obsessed with thinking about over the years is meaning, because we all operate as if life has meaning.
But the implication that life has meaning should drive us to ask questions about God.
But we stopped short of that. We just assumed that life has meaning, we never asked why, why does life have meaning? Why do I feel such a sense of purpose, or that I should have a sense of purpose in this life? So for me, that was kind of a seed. I wanted to plant that philosophical idea of here, we're all running this race, we're all trying to accomplish this thing, but why are we trying to do that? And the answer I wanted to say was life has meaning,
which turned out to be pretty interesting because there's one point in the game where the level, the geometry and the level spells out the words, life has meaning.
But it turned out to be a bit of a Rorschach test for people because if you pause the game right at that moment, you can read it as life has no meaning.
And it's like, you really have to be looking for the word no in there, it's not really there. But as people play the game, like there are people that pause it and said, life has no meaning, well, it's a pretty dark message that FlipFly is putting out there. And so that opened up some pretty interesting conversations.
- What has God taught you along this journey?
Did you struggle with identity at all at any point through your various jobs? You mentioned that you felt like a failure at one point. - Yeah, for sure. I think that idea that you are what you do, that your accomplishments define you
is somehow so ingrained in our culture that I picked it up. I don't think I, I really don't think I got that from my parents. I don't think I got it, at least not explicitly from any of the churches we were at.
But I was really looking for something to define me. I really was looking for some purpose in my work outside of just doing my work and doing well for the glory of God.
And I think this image and this concept of yourself as an artist can be really damaging, especially with this,(...) I guess I would call it an idol of self expression.
That what I really need to do is tell the world how I feel. And that the world really needs to hear my thoughts.
And so that was something I really had to come to grips with over the years of doing work for other people and realizing that,
when I finally did have the opportunity to make my own art, realizing that that wasn't the end, that wasn't what I was looking for.(...) While I love doing it,(...) it wasn't going to give me the identity or the purpose that I needed in life.
- Yeah, that was a hard lesson for me to learn.
I learned both sides of it by having some success and not being fulfilled. And then also God stripping stuff away at one point and just feeling like a complete failure.
It's kind of two sides of that coin that I had to go through for God to really feel like to learn some of those lessons about identity. - Yeah, and I mean, to be clear, I'm still learning it. So I went from flip fly where, I was the art director slash lead artist, doing my own thing to back to contract work. Once again, I'm making other people's art in other people's ways.
Oftentimes what I think is the best version doesn't make it into the game.
So I do feel like this is a lesson that God has had to drive home in my heart. But I keep kind of coming back to this idol and saying, if only I could make it as a musician, if only I could make it as a game developer, then people would really appreciate this stuff and then that would give me some kind of purpose and fill me up some way. And it's, in my mind, I know it's a lie,
but I still struggle with it.(...) So it's been a journey. And I think that I have found, I don't know, I found a lot of joy in doing work for other people that I didn't know I could have.(...) And along the way, I like doing types of work that I didn't think were fulfilling and realizing that if I did think of them as a place where God had put me sovereignly, that there's a moment here that I've been prepared for,
that that shift in mindset could really open up my eyes and I've been able to serve other people in a way that I believe glorifies God much, much better when I have that mindset.
- Where do you hope your career will go?
- So, I've been working on a solo project, which is unannounced because there's some publishers and platforms who don't like games that have already been announced but I would potentially like to work with. So I would love to be designing my own games. And my dream is to fall into this place where I could be doing art direction and design and handing off the coding work to people who actually know what they're doing.
And I have lots of game ideas that land in this spot where I think that they're helping people ask the right questions. They're helping people get into a brain space where we can actually confront some of the deeper questions. And one of the funny things for me is that, like this game I'm working on right now is a comedy game. And I don't think of myself as a very funny person,
but I love funny games and I love comedy. I love, especially like physical comedy in games. And one of the things that I have realized is that comedy is a way that, it's kind of an open door to people where you can open up and help people(...) ask really deeply philosophical questions if you say it in the form of a joke.
And so that's,(...) I also feel that games are like,
games can be really good at comedy. There's lots of different ways that the format of games works and jives really well with funny situations.
So yeah, so that's what I would love to do. I'd love to be making funny games that help people to ask the big questions.
- So what's God teaching you specifically now in this season?
One thing I've been thinking a lot about is just,
just seasons and God's been impressing upon me about like, he uses a season to prepare you for the next season sort of thing. So what's God doing now in your life?
- Yeah, so apart from the continually reminding me that my idol of self-expression needs to die,
he's teaching me a lot about trust.
This being a contract worker, even if you've got great clients and you're being well paid, it's still scary. Lining things up can be hard and then working with, bigger corporations or institutions. Sometimes it takes a long time to get paid.
And it's been really amazing to look at our budget and go, oh, we're not gonna be able to make it. And then just see God come through in really unusual ways
and have him just remind us that he's still working, he's still taking care of us.
But it's also a reminder that I can't go into this for fortune either. The games is sort of the carrot that's held out in front of a lot of indie game devs, right? Look at this game dev who made millions.
And I think that I'm learning right now to kind of put that out of my mind and target a quiet life that glorifies God.
And to be satisfied with that as a dream.
- I'm curious related to that and the finances, how is your wife with you being in games just because it's a hard industry?
- Yeah, so she's been through a lot. It was the early days of flip fly, we burned through all our savings, which wasn't a lot at the time. And then we had our first baby
just as we were finishing up the second game and we dove in with everything. And so that was really scary. And then the hours of work that come with that kind of panic realizing that the money's gone and we need to make it work.(...) So that's a terrible combination, like the stress of running out of money and then also having new work just insane hours.
We've had periods of stability, which have been great. And that's kind of worked.
The flip side of that is I've been working from home since our first born was born.
And it's become, initially it was kind of, oh, that would be nice or that'd be convenient.
And now that we've been doing it for so long, it's become something that I really wanna protect and a major reason why I wanna stay in games(...) so I can be home.
Comes with its own difficulties,
why I have headphones on and not a microphone because you would definitely hear some screaming or something.(...) But that side of it has been good.(...) I think that at this point, being so far into it,(...) it's probably the best career decision
for me financially as well.
So I think that's a factor as well. I feel,(...) and maybe that's my excuse is that I say I'm trapped because I love it so much.
- Do you have any advice for someone coming up in the industry?
- I've also been terrible with this because my path into the industry was so backwards compared to so many.
And initially I was literally nervous about that. I said, well, I didn't go to a university. I was a self-taught graphic designer who now makes games full-time.
I think I feel a lot more confident now that the whole structure of education is changing. So yeah, so one thing I would say is don't believe the doom and gloom. Like for as long as I've been in games,
I think it's coming up on 15 years now.
Yeah,(...) maybe 14 years. I don't wanna oversell my experience.
Every year there's a new apocalypse.(...) Something's gonna destroy the gaming industry. And what do you know the next year, the gaming industry is still growing and it's still huge. And so I would say don't believe the doom and gloom. Don't think that just because somebody on Twitter or somebody on a blog said that there's not gonna be anybody making games in two years, but that's really what's going to happen.
The other thing I would say is like, don't wait.
For somebody to like give you permission or require you to make games. There's literally no reason why,(...) like if you own a computer,(...) there's no reason why you can't download Unity, download Blender,(...) download Inkscape or GIMP or something, and just start making games. There's a glut of fantastic YouTube tutorials about how to make games.
There's at least three legitimate game engines out there that are free,(...) maybe more now that you can actually publish games from. There are platforms you can distribute games from for free.
So I'd say, I've been in a position to do some hiring over the years and to kind of influence the hiring at different organizations.
And one of the things I can do is immediately spot when someone's portfolio is all assigned work. Like I didn't look at your art portfolio and say, "Oh yeah, a professor made you do every single one of these."(...) So as soon as I see somebody, especially, you know what I'm talking about, because art is mostly where I've been able to influence things. It's like, if you're an artist, like make art,(...) don't go to your professor and say, "What should I make?" Make art and when someone in a position to hire you or to bring you onto a team sees your portfolio and they see that you love the thing that you're doing and that you actually invest your personal and your free time in doing it, they're gonna be so much more excited about working with you.
- What's a telltale sign of that? - One of the things is just the quantity.
It's a small amount of work that most artists are required.(...) And then it's kind of like,(...) it'll always be like a one of a kind thing. It's like, "Oh, here's the rigged character.
Here's the one material that I have had to make." And you can just, you can kind of tell that the person wasn't learning materials. There's not a, "Oh, here's the 10 materials I built while I was learning how to make materials." It's kind of like, "Here's the one I was assigned that got me the grade."
- So you say not to be doom and gloom, but I'm curious,(...) you've been out pitching your game. Do you have a sense of,(...) with publishers and just kind of the general feeling in the industry about like when things are gonna turn back around right now or kind of in the down cycle? - Yeah, I've been trying to figure that out. And to be honest, like I haven't worked as hard as I could have with the pitching. And part of that is the elder thing. It just, it was, I guess, an eyes wide open choice to realize that between my contract work and being an elder and family that the personal project was going to suffer a little bit.(...) But my best assessment is that it's gonna come back because the industry still needs games. The industry still, you know, there's still people, people are still playing games. Their habits are changing a little bit.
But my best guess at this moment, from what I've heard anyway, is that there's not a lot on people's 2025 portfolios.
So at some point, the publishers and the investors are gonna realize that they're not gonna have a business if they don't start signing games for that time period.
And so the, you know, whether that's the investors going, hey, you know, who's making money off of 2025 games? Or that's the publishers going to the investors and saying, hey, you know, you're not gonna have an investment if you don't give us some more money. I'm not sure how that all plays out. I've never been in that part of the business.
But it does come back. And I think that one of the things, one of the reasons that it feels so bad right now is because we had COVID, which created this, you know, unnatural bubble in the games industry and a lot of money flowed into the industry.(...) And of course that bubble burst, everybody could see that coming. But I think that coincided with sort of the epic, you know, the epic games store money,(...) petering out the new consoles(...) kind of being maybe the last of that type of, you know,(...) market where you would have a device and then allow money flowing into the industry to fund games for that device.(...) So I think we're in a transition period. I think that the Netflix model is really interesting. It seems to be working pretty well for Netflix and for Apple.
And I've seen the consoles go that direction as well. So it might just take a little bit of time for all of the systems, you know, kind of the processes where games get found and then make their way to one of those platforms. That might just become the new way that publishing happens.
- Sure, that makes sense.
Well, it's almost an hour here. I wanna be respectful of your time.(...) Been really blessed by our conversation here today. Is there anything you want to point people to? Anything you wanna promote?
- Gosh, I don't have much to promote on my end right now because it's all behind the scenes.
But I would say, you know, if you wanna check out Flip Fly's latest game, Whisker Squadron, it's Whisker Squadron Survivor because there's a plan for another game in the series.(...) But yeah, check that out if you're into, you know, if you're into Race the Sun or into Star Fox, you know, kind of like that sort of thing. It's a lot of fun. I've been doing, I'm one of the artists, Flip Fly's grown again. So I'm working with a whole team. I get to be just one of the artists, but I'm doing the VFX and some of the 3D art for that.
- Very cool, yeah. We'll put a link in the show notes to that.
Well, thank you again, brother.
I loved our conversation. Thank you for taking time to talk with me. - Yeah, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's been great.
