Meet Mike Perrotto
S1 Episode 02:
Mike Perrotto is a streamer, programmer, and the best project manager I’ve ever worked with. Mike and I have worked together on several projects at Numinous Games, including two VR titles, two games about cancer, and one game designed around accessibility for The Playability Initiative.
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Brock Henderson: Welcome to the Faith Forms Podcast, where we explore the question: what does it mean to be a Christian in the games industry? I'm Brock Henderson and today my good friend Mike Perrotto is joining me
Brock Henderson: Mike and I have worked together on numerous projects with Numinous Games. He's a streamer, programmer, and the best project manager I've ever worked with. So i'm really excited to talk with him today i know you will come away blessed Hey Mike, thanks for joining me on the second episode of the Faith Forms podcast.
Mike Perrotto: Absolutely. So happy to be here,
Brock Henderson: Mike,You are one of the biggest gamers i know when did you fall in love with games?
Mike Perrotto: I would probably say back in probably 1986 or 1987 we got our, our first Nintendo Entertainment System and a little old game called Legend of Zelda. We borrowed it from my uncle and he had actually gone through and like drew maps on graph paper of like all the different areas in the world and all the different dungeons. And I just could not believe that you could have like this crazy adventure all within the TV screen and then a few buttons on a controller. It was, it was, it was magical at the time. And even today, I find myself playing games that make me feel that magical.
Brock Henderson: That was such a good game. Did experiences like that make you want to make games early on?
Mike Perrotto: I think so. I, I mean, I didn't really understand really anything about game development or anything until I was probably a, probably an early teenager, so probably like 12, 13, 14. . And then I, I did, once we got I got my own computer in my room when I was probably like 14. And I started writing in Q Basic.
I started learning Q Basic and just making little adventure games word-based adventure games. And that's kind of where the love and, and me kind of realizing that it was a possibility kind of started.
Brock Henderson: Nice. Yeah, that's what our friend Ryan Green said that you two used to make basic games together.
Mike Perrotto: Yep. We made basic games and then we taught ourselves C And then we got into ascii art for a while. And so we would, we would use an application called Acid Draw, which dates me way back to the mid nineties. But it was super fun.
It was kind of my first experience of like, kinda like pixel art.
So you've been programming a really long time.
Mike Perrotto: Yeah. Yeah. Right out of high school. Like literally the week before we graduated, I got a job as a web developer. So I was making websites back during the.com boom. Moved on from there into the healthcare industry, and then eventually, about 10 years ago, made it into games finally.
Brock Henderson: Was that with That Dragon, Cancer?
Mike Perrotto: Yep.
So not only are you a game developer, you're also a a streamer. How long have you been doing that?
Mike Perrotto: Oh man. I've been streaming for a really long time and my follower account does not represent that , but I've been, I've been streaming for, gosh almost 10 years, probably, almost 10 years. I started doing it. I started before that even, I started doing a yearly charity called Extra Life raising Money for Children's Hospital.
And a lot of that was because of because of Ryan and Amy's son Joel. I, I wanted to do something to, you know, just kind raise money for the hospital that was taking care of their son. And so I felt like that was a really good thing to do. . Since then, I've put together a team and our team has raised over $50,000 in the past 11 years.
So it's been a lot of fun. And then I turn that into streaming and so I stream primarily to raise money for Children's Hospital as well.
Brock Henderson: That's super cool, Mike. That's a, that's a lot of money. What, what are you streaming now?
Mike Perrotto: Right now the game's on my list uh, mainly because uh, The Last of Us is on HBO and it's getting a lot of talk. People are talking about it. Every time I go to a a podcast to listen about, like a kind of a breakdown of one of the episodes, they tend to throw in last of us two spoilers and I haven't played Last of Us 2. So I am currently playing through last of us too. And I'm also playing a game called Marvel's Midnight Suns, which is absolutely fantastic. It is better than I ever could have hoped. It is a, to me it's kind of a sleeper hit. Like there's a group of people that love it, but it wasn't marketed super well.
And, and so I think it'll hopefully we'll have a long tail cuz it is a fantastic.
Brock Henderson: I know you've streamed a lot of classic games. What game is given to you the most followers?
Mike Perrotto: yeah. I was playing through and still kind of am the entire final fantasy series. I'm a huge final Fantasy fan. I love J RPGs. And I've been, when I played through that, a lot of the big, big title games. So like, you know, Final Fantasy Four and Final Fantasy Seven and like Nine and 10 tend to get a large response cuz people, especially if you throw up there like, Hey, this is the first time I'm like playing through it, or first time I'm trying to get like a hundred percent or something. It tends to bring out the fans and they want to watch you and they wanna, you know, give their advice and all kinds of stuff and tell you how you're, you know, fighting a boss wrong or whatever.
And I'm, I'm usually pretty cool with all of that cuz I've played most of, of these games to some degree. And so I'm not too concerned about spoilers or anything like that, so I just say, yeah, sure, I'll, I'll try your, your method or you know, whatever. Like I don't claim to be an expert. I'm just having fun cuz I love the series.
But those, those tend to get pretty big, pretty big numbers. I've been playing a game called Octo Path Traveler Champions of the Continent which is a, a mobile game and it's a prequel to Octopath Traveler that came out on the switch and I think now is also available on pc. But that game has been getting a pretty big response in my stream.
I think people just like to watch gachas and people like pull for characters and stuff like that, so that's always fun. And I actually turned those into pull videos that I put up on my YouTube channel and they get pretty good responses too. So that's, it's been fun.
Brock Henderson: Nice. At the end of the episode i'll have you plug your channel and hopefully you can gain some more viewers
Mike Perrotto: Cool.
Brock Henderson: So in addition to being a, a game developer and a streamer, you also happen to be one of the best project managers I know I've been on a bunch of different teams over the years and and a lot of different styles but there's something, there's something about you, Mike, that that sets you apart, and that's why I'm really excited to have you here because I wanna pick your brain.
Mike Perrotto: Let's.
Brock Henderson: I'd like to understand what you think makes a great project manager.
Mike Perrotto: I think there's a lot of things but what I tend to lean on there, there, there's a few big things and I'll, I'll try to hit those if I can. I think one and we'll come back to this, but I think one of the primary things is showing respect and love to your team. . I think that's a huge thing.
And I've, I've been in teams where the project managers really just kind of phoned it in where they've also let the development team kind of walk all over them. Where, you know, the things that they're planning and the things that they're saying don't really fly with the, with the dev team. So I've seen a lot of ways that you can fail and kind of not even like fail spectacularly, but just like fail kind of silently.
Like the project manager ends up kind of just going by the way side, but, and the dev team is ultimately somewhat out of control. And before the project manager even really notice, So I think there's a couple important things there. Obviously organization you know, you gotta be a highly organized person.
You kind of gotta like to, to play with spreadsheets and, and, and look at calendars and like, that kind of has to be your jam. Which for me, I'm very detail oriented, and I like to work off of, you know, task lists and spreadsheets and timelines and all that kind of stuff. So I'm just driven that way anyway, whether I'm a developer or I, I'm project managing or QA managing or whatever, that's just how I keep things organized.
But to kind of come back to some of the things that I, I, I see there maybe, maybe I try to do a little differently, I guess, are you know, respecting and loving your team. . I think it's really important to kind of work with your team and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and do your best to play to those.
Another thing that has always helped me, and this isn't necessarily a requirement for, for a project manager to be good but it always has helped me, is that I do know some of the technical things behind, you know, what we're doing. So I can apply my knowledge as a developer and be able to. , the developers that I know, you know, I know where they, where they excel and where they don't excel.
And so I can kind of help say like, these are the tasks you should probably take on to be most successful. And then if we're in a crunch time, it's like, Hey, ACE is in their places. We need the, the best people for the best things. Doing those things first, and then once we get outta crunch time, like, then we can talk about, okay, let's go growth, let's talk about what are some things you wanna challenge yourself with? And that's where the respect and like the trust on the team comes in. Like, folks wanna start doing stuff that they'd never done before and we need to let them, let them grow and breathe.
And that's a, a great gift to give them. And so that's one of the other things I think of when I, when I think of like loving and respecting your team.
That's really good. Yeah. I'm so glad that you talked about that. Cause that's what I wanted to specifically talk to you about because I think, being a Christian in this industry we should be marked by love, right? That's what Jesus talked about. That's what it's our defining feature.
Brock Henderson: And so, Project manager, you're like a cornerstone of the whole, or the whole team and like the whole project kind of, you're kind of like holding it together in some respects. Right? So what have you noticed, like, is there any common tension points or places where teams usually get tripped up that you've seen over your years.
Mike Perrotto: Yeah, I think there's, there's probably a number of things. Some of the things that stand out to me are. Process for the sake of process. I think teams, I think there's a, there's a way that you can introduce process into a into a dev team or, or a development cycle in a way that also, and lets them trust you.
I have been on a lot of teams where it really felt like process was being put in place just because it's like the textbook way to do something. And I, I'm a firm believer from a project management standpoint that like not every single not every single thing works for every team. And so you kind of need to pick and choose.
And so I love that, like I've got some kind of a broad experience, like I'm not certified as a project manager or a scrum master or any of that kind of stuff. , but I've taken classes, I've worked with many different project managers and Scrum masters over the years. And whenever I approach, you know, a new team or something, I like to pick and choose like, what do I think is gonna work for this team?
And I always want to, I always want to display that with, with some facts. So I think another really big thing with a project manager is you know, being honest and, and coming to the table with facts. , A lot of times you are the, as a project manager, you are the person that the higher ups are gonna be talking to as a, as a direct kind of conduit for the dev team.
Like you're the spokesperson for the dev team in a way. And so coming to them with like, this is what we did, you know, during this last iteration, this is how, how much we did, this is how much we predict we're gonna do. A lot of that is very important and coming to it with actual numbers. I remember when I first.
Was introducing kind of a scrum mentality to one of our teams. I remember that very first, after the first like two or three weeks, cause we had one, I think we did one week iterations. And so after like the third iteration, I was sitting in the room with like one of the v one of the vice presidents of development.
And I was like, you don't know how good it feels for me to sit here now and tell you that we're gonna be late, but I actually have the data as to why we're gonna be late. Because before it was always just like, we're late and I really don't know why other than we didn't get it done, you know? And so having that data was just like night and day different.
And the response they gave me back when I told them that and I told 'em exactly what the data was and like when we predicted we could finish things they took that so much better. And so I think being, being very data driven, being very honest. and just, yeah, just showing a lot of respect is, is is huge.
Brock Henderson: And along with that, another I guess area that I see a lot is just scope. Scope tends to balloon. Oftentimes you get creative people in a room, they just start riffing. How do you lovingly help people stay within scope or, or kind of reign them back when you need to?
Mike Perrotto: Yeah, that's really tough. And I've, I mean, you and I have worked together for a while now, and you've seen me struggle with this. We both have struggled with this, and I think most developers do struggle with this. Project managers, developers, the QA team, like they all struggle with, you know, scope creep.
And, and how do you, how do you kind of reign it back? I think it's tough. I think the best thing is to be honest. I, there really isn't a better antidote for that. Like there really isn. Like a trick or anything. It's more just, we need, and, and it kind of goes along with data, right? Like, if you can say, and you can tell these creatives, like, they're, they don't care about data, like the creatives, they just wanna be creative and they wanna, you know, they want all their ideas to end up in the, in the, in the product or in the game or whatever you're doing. And I'm, I'm not saying in a bad way, they don't care, but they, you know, it's, it's the last thing on their mind, right? So if you can kind of come in and you can say, okay, like all this is great.
We've had this amazing brain brainstorming session. Now it's my job to help prioritize and we draw a line somewhere based on how much time we have and how fast we think we can go. And that's my job is to make sure that that line is there and everybody knows about it. So usually I create, I try to create something like a dashboard or some sort of a view where we can say, these are all the major features.
This is where the line. Here's all the nice to haves, everything that's gonna get dropped off if we don't have time. And sometimes that can be a way to motivate someone who, you know, might want to dig in really, really hard on like one specific feature and spend a lot of time on it. It might be a way for them to say, you know what?
I've spent enough time on this because I really wanna make sure that like, item whatever gets above the line, you know? So it's almost. , it's almost like you're tricking them. It's like a game. It can be right, but you're doing it in such a way that it's like none of this stuff is throwaway. It's all on the list.
It's just a matter of what can we get done and when we think we can do it. And so that's, that's kind of how I like to, to kind of architect it a bit.
Mike. That was so good. I think those insights are really going to help people.
Mike Perrotto: I'd like to change gears now and ask you about what's your currently working on. And what kind of stuff gets you excited about games these days Gosh, I mean, I'm currently working on some VR projects right now. We're doing a prototype, which is really exciting. I really feel like virtual reality hasn't quite hit. Its kind of mass Especially in adoption. I feel like there's certain things that are, they're working really well and I think things are, have been developed really well.
And there's some really compelling experiences, but I think there's a ways to go still. So I'm really excited for that. I'm starting to dig into some AR stuff too, which I've never really done before. So some of this augmented reality stuff is really, really interest. Other things that are really exciting, I think are the ver the new various ways that people are telling stories in the industry.
I'm, I'm very excited about it, like playing through I was a late, I kinda came late to the whole last of a series. And just the amount of quality storytelling that's being told there is just fantastic. You know, whether you, you like the content or not, like the stories that are being told are extremely well crafted.
The, the actors have performed them extremely well. The animators have animated the emotion into these, these characters on the screens in such a great way. That it just has me very excited about like where this industry can go and what kind of stories it can tell moving forward. Obviously we were a part of that dragon cancer and, you know, being able to tell such an emotional story through this medium was huge and I've just seen, you know, leaps and bounds in the quality of that over the past, you know, six, seven years.
Brock Henderson: Yeah, we did, we've done two games about cancer together. And then we also did the Playa bility Initiative. Would you wanna talk a little bit about that and this, like Jack and some of the impact you saw there?
Mike Perrotto: Yeah. So you know, for those who don't know, the playability initiative was something that, that Numinous Games kind of started up and it's still there just not being actively worked on at the moment. Just for funding reasons. As you know, everybody in the indie game industry knows . That's what, that's what happens.
But. , we were really focusing on creating experiences that anyone can play. And so we focused on a game called Painted Waters, and that was a one button game. And so if you could flip a, flip a switch or use a sip puff or push a button or do anything that would kind of just turn on and off, something like a one in a zero, right?
It was very binary. You could play the entirety of that game. And so we've been looking at ways to. You know, take that, that architecture that we, we developed painted waters and see if we can apply it in different contexts which is where we kind of are right now in a, in somewhat of a holding pattern.
And what was really cool about the entire thing is that we got to meet such incredible people and we did focus on a specific population for that game. It was the spinal muscular atrophy population. And, these kids just have this disease that just deteriorates really early in age. So like they would most of 'em were born with it, and within a year or two, they were usually like wheelchair bound for the rest of their lives.
And we met a young man by the name of Jack who was, let's see, I think he was like 24, 25 years old. And so he was helping us test, because he did everything with I. So he used from his, from his chair, he used an I Gaze system and was able to do work. He worked for a school and did like expel Excel spreadsheets cuz he was just a wiz at math.
And so he loved playing with Excel spreadsheets which is why I think him and I got along pretty well. But uh, he would use I gaze to do that. And then we kind of engaged him and, and we would meet with him once a week and just have like a little, you know, hour long block where we would just have him test out different eye gaze configurations that we were playing around with and just, he was giving us, you know, val, super valuable feedback on how that all worked.
Unfortunately he passed away like a year ago, and it was pretty devastating. But we all we all knew it was. And he was a super special guy and, and we loved him. And Ryan and I were able to go out to his to their funeral out in Pennsylvania. And that was really cool. We got to meet up with his dad cuz we, I hadn't met his dad in person.
So it was really cool to get to meet him and, and talk to his family and see all the people in his community that he impacted. It was, it was pretty special.
Brock Henderson: Yeah. It was. It was pretty beautiful. We got to make a few of the few mini games for him Right. Inspired on his likes and stuff and get to
Mike Perrotto: Yep. We got the zip line and the fountain in the game for him, and that was like his favorite things.
Brock Henderson: in the, in the Boomie towers that he get to knock down. Yeah. It's, it's pretty cool to be able to, to work on a project like that to they just had God's heart, right? Like designing for the one, the least of these.
Mike Perrotto: Absolutely.
Brock Henderson: You know, and accessibility is a, it's really hard to. I guess designed for, for, for if you're a small indie game,
Like the big studios have a budget for it and they can they can afford to dedicate time and resources to it, but as a team, it's, it's very difficult.
Mike Perrotto: Yeah, I think it was. I think we had a very unique position. Especially as an indie company, because we decided to kind of start with that first. And if, if we hadn't, there was no way we would've been able to make that work. There's no way we would've had time to try to bolt something on after the fact. And I think that totally worked to our advantage, and I think that's where what we've got in our, kind of, in our architecture I think is gonna be hopefully helpful in the future.
Hopefully we'll be able to do more of that kind of stuff. I'm, I'm excited about that possibility.
Brock Henderson: Before we say goodbye. I'd really like to hear about your journey of faith and how you became a Christian.
Mike Perrotto: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's. Hopefully not too long of a story, but let's let's see if I can, I can reign it in here a bit. So I grew up in kind of the Catholic religion, but we were kind of like Catholic light, you know, it was like, you know, I went to Sunday school, I did my first communion kind of all that stuff.
I was baptized as a baby, you know. And then we would only go to church really on like, Easter,
Brock Henderson: Mm.
Mike Perrotto: Christmas and like weddings and funerals, like that was the extent of my, of my church going for most of my life growing up. Actually for pretty much all of my non-adult life. That was, that was pretty much it.
So fast forward a little bit after I kind of was an adult and like moved out of the house and I met my, my now wife Cheryl. We came back to church through. through a program called Financial Peace University. So through Dave Ramsey's thing. So we came, we found a church that was, that was doing it was hosting it, and so we started going to church there.
After we, you know, met the pastor and all that kind of stuff and, and did the class for a few weeks, and then we was like, Hey, let's just try the church out. So we tried the church out and it seemed like at the time, a really good fit. And my, my wife had asked the pastor like, Hey, is there like a new believers.
Like group or anything like that that we could join. And he's like, no, but you are now the leader of the new Believers Group , which is I think from, and we didn't know this at the time, but like when I talked to Christians about it, they're like, yeah, that's exactly what happens. If you ask for something and it's not there, you have become the leader of it. We did not know this . So that was pretty funny. So cuz we're not like I've never been, like, I've always been like kind of a believer, right? I've always kind of believed in God, but I didn't really know a lot of the very specific things that came along with, with, you know, Jesus and, and, and, and, you know, committing my myself to Jesus.
And you know, I always, I always believed in it, but just, it never was a, a thing that I lived. I think there's a big difference between like, just saying, yeah, I believe in God, versus like, yes, I believe, and I also kind of live this way. So we started kind of starting to live that way and started thinking that way.
And so a few years after we I think about two years after we started going to church there, we, we both we got baptized together at the church which was, which was really cool. So it was a really awesome experience and yeah, it's. been pretty great since then. I mean, obviously in the today's climate, like I, we still struggle with, with, with faith and like what it means to be a Christian and all that stuff.
And for me it's always kind of fallen back to like, it doesn't matter if I can like recite, you know, bible verses, you know, it doesn't, so that stuff doesn't matter. Like if, if I can show people what it's like to be a follower of Jesus, if I can show people love, which is like, it's kind of like why we were talking about, you know, even just showing love in, in the work that we do.
I think that's extremely important. I don't, like, I can, I can talk to people about this stuff all day long, but until they see me doing what I'm, what I'm saying, like, they're, they're not gonna believe a word I say. And so I really believe that it's about showing showing that that love and that acceptance and that everything, the, the things that Jesus preached, like, you know, he hung out you know, the craziest people and, and we should be, you know, loving all the people exactly the same way. Right on. Did you know about financial peace or were you and your wife just looking for some help with your finances at the time?
yeah, like I I. I hadn't heard of it at all until it was actually Ryan and Amy, they invited me to their church for one, cuz like when you take financial peace, they say, you know, every person who takes it can bring like a friend one night out of the, out of the, out of the series or whatever. But then it was a 13 week course, I think now it's nine.
And they always recommended that you invite them to come to the like get outta debt lesson, which is like the third or fourth lesson in the. where he really, that's like him, that's like Dave on steroids. Cuz he's like pumped up and trying to get people outta debt and that his whole mantra is like, you know, get, get outta debt.
Get outta debt, right? And so we went to that one and we, it kind of fired us up and we were just like, oh, like we, we always, we had, we had debt, like we had, you know, our house loan, we had our car loans, we had a couple credit cards, like most typical Americans. And so we were just kind of thinking, is there a better way to do this?
And, and sure enough Dave Dave's course got us to the point where we're debt free except for the house. it put us on a really good path to feeling better, being able to give the way that we wanna give and all that kind of stuff. Which was, which was huge.
Brock Henderson: It's made such an impact in your life that you've gone on to teach it as well, right?
Mike Perrotto: Yeah. Yeah. We're not doing anymore, but we were, we, we taught it for like seven years, I think. . Yeah. And when I say teach, we were just the, the organizers, but, but, but we were leading the small groups and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, we did that for, we did that for quite a while.
Brock Henderson: Mike, it looks like it's coming to the end of our time. Is there anything you'd like to plug.
Mike Perrotto: Oh man. Can I, can I plug some stuff? Definitely. So a couple different things. Obviously Numinous Games, is near and dear to me, just cuz you know, I've known you guys for a long time, Ryan and Amy. Everybody that we've been working with. So we did release a game over the summer called Area Man Lives.
It's a virtual reality basically like a virtual reality radio drama. So it's got voice detection, so it literally talks to you and you can talk back and then it responds in different ways. We have a couple of pretty classy voice actors on the list. We have Joel Mihail known from the TV show community and plenty of other projects.
We have max Greenfield from New Girl. We have Ronan Farrow, the uh, amazing New York. I think he works for New York Times, maybe. But yeah, he is stellar cast. I'm in there too. I do like three different voices, so it's super fun. But it's available on quest. Quest two, the Oculus store.
It's available on Steam, it's available on vi, so pretty much every VR headset you can get it at. But definitely check it out. Would help us out a ton. And then you can find me during the week and on the weekends, usually streaming for a couple hours. I try to carve out a couple hours a night or in the mornings when the, when the kids are just kind of vegging on TV stuff in the morning.
I'll maybe at Twitch tv. Twitch tv slash Sir, Mr. Clean, that's s i r M R C l three a n. And then same on YouTube. YouTube, sir. Mr. Clean on YouTube as well.
Brock Henderson: We'll have links down below.
Mike Perrotto: Awesome.
Brock Henderson: Well, thank you so much for joining me, Mike. I really appreciate it.
Mike Perrotto: Yeah, this was awesome. Thank you for having me.
Brock Henderson: Hey, this is Brock. Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of our podcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, I could use your help. Please tell your friends and help spread the word about the Faith Forms Podcast.
Also if he could take a moment and rate us or leave a comment that'd be a huge huge help to us.
Thank you and God bless.
