This article was originally posted on the Joy Machine blog; maybe check it out too! <3
Some time during my time living in Washington, D.C., roughly, May-June 2016, I was coming off of a few months without working on a game in my spare time for the first time in almost a decade. And then, one afternoon, I wanted to make a game with mechs. I called it MECHOTRON — because it was basically Robotron, but with neat mechs — and it was going to be a one-two week project (I’d complete it, it would just be simple; I did this shortly after I moved to Austin in 2009). The next day, I was already attached to these mechs that I found on the Unity Asset Store. And the assets all came as individual parts that you could snap on to other parts to form the mech you wanted.
And that was really all it took. I wanted to take over 16 years of game development experience (ten of which have been professional, though I did author a book when I was 17, and co-authored a few others at 18, so I think that counts as professional?) and make the kind of game that I felt was sorely lacking in the games industry: a game that truly, to its very core, was centered entirely around providing players with a game that responded to their actions, allowed players a (hopefully) unprecedented degree of freedom in defining how they play the game, and a game that, above all else, would constantly surprise even veteran players through a variety of interwoven system simulations.
I moved the project over to Unreal Engine 4 and started playing with a little scene composition. It looked like this:
The Very First Screenshot of What Would Become Steel Hunters
The Very First Screenshot of What Would Become Steel Hunters
That was the beginning of something I’ve actively pursued in whatever time I could scrounge up since then. Eventually, in October 2016 (I had since moved back to my home state of Michigan, in East Lansing), I decided to re-form the company I first started in 2015 in Austin: Joy Machine, LLC.
A Little About Me
This is going to be a bit of a diversion from what I’m aiming to talk about, but since this is the first time I’ve written an article that wasn’t explicitly for Joy Machine’s website, maybe a bit of background is in order.
Stardock Entertainment
I’ve been professionally employed every single day since the summer before my final semester of college at the University of Michigan. Where I was finishing my English degree. I was working at one of the only game studios in all of Michigan: Stardock Entertainment. I was working as a gameplay, rendering, and engine developer (and the occasional design consultant on some of the games we were publishing at the time, such as: Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod. My very first game on the market was The Political Machine 2008. And, boy, was that ever a great feeling. The game was far from spectacular, but I had a professional game that people could play. My excitement was endless.
After a couple years as a developer, I wasn’t happy with how generally isolated developers were from, well, social interaction (amongst the team). I would come into work at 10–11am and work until the day ended, go home, and often that was without ever doing more than cracking the occasional joke with my coworkers.
I wanted to be a game designer. I wanted to be able to take principles and ideas and mechanics that I’ve seen in games and have been dissecting since I was ten-years-old, and apply them to a project I was working on. Finding a job as a designer, when you’re a developer by trade, is… Not trivial. I spent about four months getting turned down from jobs to the point that I was willing to even consider a contract role as a designer on a shoestring-budgeted Spongebob Squarepants game in California. Even got rejected from that one.
LightBox Interactive
Then one of the first companies I applied to called me (three months after I had applied) to setup a phone interview. I talked to the Lead Designer of LightBox Interactive, Josh Sutphin, and we pretty instantly hit it off. A week later, I was being flown out to Salt Lake City, Utah in my first flight ever for an in-person interview. I think I threw-up once right before getting into the car they had setup to take me to their studio (which was in the process of being prepped for its move to Austin, Texas). To say I was nervous is a profound understatement. I spent 10am — 4pm in back-to-back interviews with various members of the team. I left the studio afterward, went back to the airport, ran to the first bathroom I could, threw-up again.
It took three weeks before I heard back from them (and I believe I was e-mailing once-twice a week to check on the status of my application). And then, while playing Forza Motorsport 2 on my Xbox 360, I got an e-mail containing an offer letter for the role of Game Designer with LightBox Interactive. I would be working on what would eventually become Starhawk. The project took roughly three and a half years to complete (I believe I was the thirteenth employee of what would eventually be a 48 person studio).
And, for people who don’t know me very well: I’m a work horse. I will take any task given to me, regardless of how well I knew about what it entailed, and I would work ceaselessly until I not only understood it, but could complete it, and complete it well. The amount of time I would spend doing this was irrelevant to me. It was a challenge for my brain, and there’s never a brain challenge I’ve ever turned down. And while I’d never endorse crunch, every additional hour I worked beyond the standard 40 hour work week, was almost exclusively my decision because I wanted to make the game as good as I possibly could. I think, at one point, I put in an 80–90 hour week. Which, obviously, catches up with you, but at the time I was so enthralled in the challenge of improving everything I was working on (on top of watching every single television series to ever exist while working).
Every month, Josh and I (and the studio/game director, Dylan Jobe) would fly out to Sony Santa Monica to do a playtest with the God of War team, which was always completely fascinating. It was about as opposite an experience as I had ever had at Stardock.
Starhawk’s Launch
Starhawk’s launch was not great. We got some pretty solid reviews, but the game just didn’t catch on commercially. After our first DLC launched, the studio laid off a portion of the team. And then once our next project got cancelled, the studio had shrunk to just eight remaining people. Of which I was one. We switched over to a mobile game project, which would eventually become PlunderNauts. But I didn’t stay for the duration of the project. I wasn’t incredibly psyched to work in mobile and felt it was time for a change.
That said: this was by far the greatest job with the most wonderful team that I’ve ever been able to experience. I love them all, still. And, of course, Josh is now my best friend and we talk and bounce ideas off each other on a daily basis.
Team Chaos
So, I joined a mobile game studio called Team Chaos, a sister company to Chaotic Moon Studios (now Fjord Austin). Over the course of my two-plus years on that team, I worked on roughly thirteen-fourteen different games. Eventually my role changed from Sr. Game Designer to Creative Director, and then I got the role of Executive Producer added on to that.
It was a very unique experience for me; now I was doing more of a management role internally and on some of our external projects and doing absolutely no development of any kind. So, I published two games through Team Chaos that I worked on in my spare time: SPACE COLORS and SUPERCHROMA. I adored working on those two games. My absolute favorite project during my time at the studio, though, was working with Rooster Teeth on a game I created and pitched to Rooster Teeth personally: Rooster Teeth vs. Zombiens. Rooster Teeth are some of the finest folks you could ever ask to work with. And directing the VO sessions for the game was an absolute treat for me.
ArtCraft Entertainment
Not a whole lot to say about this one other than the project is very interesting and the team is great, but I joined ArtCraft as a contract Visual Effects Artist and Technical Artist working on Crowfall. It was a great project, but ultimately the concept of working a single role was something that no longer really appealed to me. I liked variety. I liked working with every department and coming up with solutions to hard problems.
planet3
My next job was to pursue something I had originally gone to the University of Michigan for: education (I was going to be an English teacher, games were just going to be a side thing). planet3 was founded by the former president of National Geographic, which I thought was just the coolest thing. At the time, I was working in the satellite office in Austin, but that was shuttered a few months after I joined, and I was asked to relocate to Washington, D.C.. I did not like Washington, D.C., so I ended up moving to East Lansing, Michigan and working remotely up until recently.
What started as a Sr. Technical Designer role ended up being the role of Lead Experience Developer; which, in short, meant that I was responsible for the Unity team and ensuring that the gameplay was as strong and as tightly-bound to the educational goals of each mission as it could possibly be. This was my first time in an actual, formalized management position. And it was great. I didn’t get nearly as much day-to-day work done (as I had gotten accustomed to doing), but instead I was able to mentor and facilitate the work done by my team. And that was just a great experience. And now I have a LinkedIn recommendation from the guy that ran National Geographic for a long while. I call that a win.
Okay, Back to the Point: Joy Machine
When I decided to get serious about Joy Machine and the project in October 2016, I started laying the framework for the company I wanted to create, the principles and practices that were most important to me, and, most importantly, the things that I would explicitly do differently than the mistakes I had noticed in every studio I had ever worked at. Every studio I ever worked at was so unique and working on such different types of games that I was able to get a wide variety of different company cultures, production practices, budgets, the way budgets were used, team workflows, tools, so on and so forth.
So, with Joy Machine, I wanted to do the following:
Make games that players can be constantly surprised and rewarded by. The more they put into the game, the more the game will reward them.
Focus on a systems-first approach to game design — something that most of the games industry simply does not do. And, to be honest, if it wasn’t for friends like Harvey Smith (Dishonored, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Dishonored 2, and generally great guy) who lived in Austin and I got to see from time-to-time, Matthias Worch (most recently Design Director on Mafia 3) — whom I’ve never actually met in person, and the lectures and articles of Clint Hocking and Patrick Redding, I don’t know that I’d ever have thought about systems as a primary focus in game design in the first place. Harvey, especially, would reinforce their importance with me and promote my pursuit of them as a major factor in my design philosophy.
Run a studio that employs the best talent that I can possibly convince to join. So far, Joy Machine has nine employees, all of whom are working for deferred payment or have a stake in the company (though anyone who stays with the company through to the launch of our game — Steel Hunters — will also get a small — like 1%, but non-dilutable — ownership stake in the company). And they’re all putting in absolutely incredible work. Also! (And this is the first they’re hearing about it) Basically anyone that stays through at least the Beta milestone (maybe initial launch) who’s on the team will automatically get some company ownership stake that will be exempt from any potential future dilution. Because, without them, this wouldn’t even be possible.
