Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Storyteller in Depth, a podcast where we go behind the scenes to learn more about the school of Communications, Media Arts and designs, people, places and things. I'm your host, Pat Quigley. In today's episode, we'll be speaking with a couple members of the gaming studio Digital Firewood. They'll be sharing their journey from their program at Centennial and how they launched their very own studio, including what's next for them. Whether you're into gaming or looking to start your own company, this is definitely the episode for you. Let's get into it.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Thank you so much, guys, for being on the podcast today.
[00:00:32] Speaker C: You're welcome, of course. Happy to be here.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So just to start off, could you both introduce yourselves and share a little bit about your roles at the studio?
[00:00:42] Speaker C: Yeah. Right. So my name is Anthony DeFazio. I'm on paper, I'm the CEO, but I like to be kind of on the same level as everybody else. Co founder, just like everybody else. And as far as the actual game development goes, I tend to do game design, audio design, music, a little bit of programming and UI design.
[00:01:05] Speaker D: And I am Jack. I am the business developer for Digital Firewall.
I am much responsible for the outside of the production that it's usually not overseen, which is I am responsible for conferences, emails, possible partnerships, possible fundings and keep and Digital Firewood connections open and alive on the industry itself.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Awesome. What kind of inspired you guys to start a game studio? Like, how did this idea come to be?
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Right, so I think just in general, it's kind of the ultimate dream for a lot of game development students. You know, everyone just kind of goes into this wanting to do their own thing and it just kind of came to be as, you know, going through our experience in college and stuff, we just kind of found each other, found our team, found how to work with each other, and it kind of came up near the end. We were just like, you know, we don't. This doesn't have to be the end. You know, we can, we can keep going. Like, that's. It's a totally real possibility.
[00:02:13] Speaker D: Adding into that a lot of it was also because we've been working, the core group been working together since the start of college, and by the end of it, we realized, oh, wow, we're actually good at it. Right, guys? Maybe we should just focus on the team and keep going.
The game development scenario, when you hear about it, you can always think of the AAA Gigantic games. You can always think about the next gta. You can always think about Sonic Mario. We decided to do indie and try to pursue our own dreams, to do our own products, to do our own mindset and that's. We also decided to do digital firewood.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: That's awesome. And being graduates, you know, can you share a little bit about what made you want to pursue game development in the first place?
[00:03:02] Speaker D: Yeah, well, you can take a look. Yes, of course. A little bit of context. I'm going to start this one, but a little bit of context by myself. I am from Brazil, I am not born in Canada and I came to Canada to pursue game development.
I knew that back home, I did back home in Brazil. Game development industry is not as grown. It was not as grown up as it is in Canada right now. Things changed. It's been a while. It's been three years ago. Three, four years ago. So I decided, wow, let me take another step in life and let me go to Canada and enjoy game dev. It was the best choice I did in my life and I'm very glad I did.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: Yeah. Speaking for myself here, like, I have just been, I've been very close to video games my entire life. You know, I was born and with a Game Boy in my hand, you know, and I was playing, playing games as early as super young. My dad was into video games.
So I grew up very close to them throughout my entire life and I always felt very attached to them.
But it was maybe only about almost 10 years ago now that I played a little game called Undertale. And that one really set my world on fire when I was around like maybe 12 years old and kind of realized that this, you know, games don't have to be made by hundred people teams. They can be put together by just one or two individuals and be great. So just kind of, that's been my ultimate goal ever since I was maybe 12 years old, right.
[00:04:38] Speaker D: And well, I can edit and I can say this for all the team, all for digital firewood. All of us are just insanely addicted to video games.
[00:04:46] Speaker C: Oh, for sure.
[00:04:49] Speaker D: Games. If you go, I believe even if you go deeper and say, let's go to the team and ask who watches tv? Does any of us watches tv?
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Not me.
[00:04:57] Speaker D: We wake up, we make video games and then we go to sleep, we might play a little bit of video games because that's another thing, right?
I think we make more video games than we play video games now and we're happy about it, right?
[00:05:10] Speaker C: No complaints here, obviously. But you know, everyone loves doing it for just the love of the medium. So, you know, just at the core foundation of all of it is just how much we love this medium and want to contribute to it.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: So what are your favorite video games of all time? Besides the ones you're currently making and developing, what are your favorite video games?
[00:05:35] Speaker C: My favorite video games, man. I mean I will always say that like my, my all 10, my all time has to be undertale. Played it as a kid and I loved every second of it. But even more recently I've fallen in love with a lot of Japanese RPGs. The Persona series and the larger Shin Megami Tensei series comes to mind as well as I love Nintendo games.
I love, yeah like RPGs are my bread and butter but I kind of just play everything. But those two series are very near and dear to my heart.
[00:06:13] Speaker D: Now speaking for myself, I do love my favorite game ever is The Last of Us 2. I always tell everyone is a Sony game. One thing about us and the team, our team is very much oriental related. We love Nintendo. We love those games. We take a lot of actually inspirations of it too.
Recently one of our games, Electrify Anthony, I believe you can speak about it better but we use a lot of oriental sources of video games right to the production of it.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Yeah, we're very inspired by a lot of our DNA in game development comes from Nintendo and comes from a lot of that side of the video game space.
You know, obviously different places in the world have different approaches to game development. And you know, I think we just. We kind of fall into like. I mean we do cover. I think as a team we cover a broad range of games like just as our top favorites. Like I think we have experience with kind of like all kinds of genres and types of video games as a whole. But we time we tend to pull from our shared love of a lot of the common interests that we have together just because it really shows in some of our work and we're really happy with it.
[00:07:36] Speaker D: Very well. Couldn't do better I would say what.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: My favorite video game is. But you know, I don't know if many people know it and if they do, they're usually grown at it. So Kingdom Hearts. But anyways.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: Oh, I love Kingdom Hearts. Moving on. Moving on from Kingdom Hearts.
[00:07:48] Speaker D: Amazing. I have, I have Kingdom Hearts Proud soul. Great.
[00:07:51] Speaker C: We have. We have one very big Kingdom Hearts fan on the team. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: All right. You guys are good people then. You're good people. But going back to school. Let's talk about your experience in the program. Like how was that, how was that experience?
[00:08:06] Speaker C: It was Amazing. I mean, like, I still think that it was probably the best three years of my life.
You know, we even started from like, what at this point we would've started in 2021, I believe. So even at the time, you know, we were fully remote starting the program, but even in those circumstances, we kind of found our teams and we're working together from even then. And you know, it's such a stark contrast from high school where a lot of us, you know, a lot of us came straight out of high school.
And it's such a stark contrast from the way that you operate in a high school environment versus the college environment. And I think just getting to do what we love daily it was. Was a big motivator for us to actually, you know, pursue our dreams and stuff. And the staff were all lovely and the Tim community that we had was just really, really positive. And really it was a great experience overall.
[00:09:16] Speaker D: Well, one thing that I can say it is a huge bonus is of course, I believe our faculty really, really understood what we were going through.
When it comes to industry.
We also got to realize the state of industry itself.
As a business developer, I am the responsible of doing market research as well and realize where the game development industry is as a market standard. And one thing that helped us taking the decision of let's make digital firewood is realizing that game development industry was saturated and saturated of big games, saturated of megalomania games. Let's be honest, our professors knew about this and that's a plus of it. They actually mentored us to do it. And another thing is game development. We in Centennial, we had game art and game code too. We decided to take game development. Game development is a more general.
They have more general classes. Game code is literally for game code and game art is literally for game art. We. We could learn everything from scratch. Game art, we. Wow. Funny enough, I became a jack of all trades, right? And as everyone in the course, that's why we do, we do this very well because all of us can do everything. If Anthony comes up to me, I am the business developer, of course. But if Anthony comes up to me and say, hey, we need someone to do the technical word of this, because I am a technical artist thanks to Centennial College.
Wow. I would be gladly saying, okay, sure, I will come and pick that up.
So another thing is we learned everything and I'm very glad about it. Gives us the notion of everything that can make a success. If we, I would say if we just went to game art or game code, we would know game Art or game code. But we would fail on instances such as game marketing, which was something we learned. Game funding, we learned how to open an Excel and debate something that we wouldn't learn. And thanks to that we took this experience took to Gfarwood and it's working perfectly.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I think everyone has their own kind of niches in the team that they started out with in the program. But just naturally we all just kind of learned to expand the tool set of what we can do.
Which means that even for a small team, you know, we do kind of COVID all of the main bases of game development. Like I started out as mostly a game design person, but I ended up picking up both music and programming. So now I'm responsible for a pretty sizable amount of the programming and pretty much all of the music in our games.
And then just that's one of the many other things that I've learned to pick up. You know, over the course of the program we've found many kind of smaller hidden talents and hidden skills that we've kind of unlocked now. And you know, it really helps having a small team that's as diverse in skillset as we are makes it possible.
[00:12:29] Speaker D: It is even funny to touch this topic. I believe we're going to talk about it later more. But even when we talk on the start of Digital Firewood.
Digital Firewood didn't start a Digital Firewood. We had another name back in the days.
But even I, for example, I joined Digital Firewood on the first year at first and I was a programmer and oh my gosh, we got so much experience from this game. But I can say I coded this game with glue and love. It was not my thing, but I.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: But I learned.
[00:13:03] Speaker D: I learned and I did it.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Learning experience for sure. Learning experience.
[00:13:07] Speaker D: Everyone did what they could to support.
[00:13:09] Speaker C: The team that first year, you know. Yeah.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: So did you have any projects in the program that stood out or helped shape the approach to game development that you found particularly helpful?
[00:13:24] Speaker C: Yeah, every semester or not every semester. Every year we had a big project called Practicum Project Studio Practicum classes.
The way those are structured was just like every.
It was every second semester usually of the year, semester, 2, 4 and also 5.
We would just take the whole semester to basically do one big game project as a group.
And those I think were the most. The biggest learning experience out of maybe all of the classes. You have your classes for each of your specialized topics and they definitely were useful. But just in terms of putting it all together and really applying what you learned that Class was.
Nothing really was like it. And it gave us the opportunity to grow as a team, make a couple different games, try succeed, also fail, you know, try different things, learn what our strengths are, learn what our weaknesses are, learn how to work with each other, learn not to step on each other's toes and how we kind of work as a dynamic, as a team. And those projects were really, really fundamentally influential, I guess, to the way that we operate as a studio.
[00:14:54] Speaker D: Anthony, why don't we give some actual examples if you're okay with it. I'm thinking of. I talk about Quantum Shift and you may talk about Illico because we have to talk about Illico.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: Yeah, that was our original name, I guess, before we donned the Digital Firewood moniker.
[00:15:13] Speaker D: Oh yeah, it started with Ellie. Cool. Let's start chronologically.
[00:15:16] Speaker C: Right.
So our first game was Lily. It was a small visual novel that we made in our first semester as one of our projects for.
I believe it was game development one. I don't remember exactly, but we were.
[00:15:34] Speaker D: Just learning about narrative. I think the goal of the class was narrative.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Learning about narrative and making small little dialogue systems in unity and putting them.
[00:15:42] Speaker D: Together for a context. A visual novel, it's pretty much a game where you take choices. It's only a text game. It's pretty much a text game. We had images, we have characters, but it was. Can you remind us what it was the whole trauma about? Just a little context.
[00:15:59] Speaker C: It was a game about a grandfather and a granddaughter kind of learning to live with each other after the death of the original character's parents. And it was kind of a short but emotional, maybe 30 minute or so visual novel that really resonated with a lot of our class. And it was, I think our first chapter in this studio just cause it was the first time that we worked together on a game.
The core members of Digital Firewood that are still here today.
And that was our really first major project and we worked together for the first time and we really enjoyed working with each other. And from there, whenever we could, we would stay in the same group for a lot of group assignments like this.
So then we would go on to our next semester project which was Quantum Shift, which was a top down little puzzle shooter that we made. Jack, you were the programmer on that one.
[00:17:06] Speaker D: I can recover. Yeah, well, I think on this point, one thing that I joined them at this point, which was a Quantum Shift and they were named themselves Ilico. Right. Because Lily plus Cove and then lilyco, Lily Company.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: That's what it was.
[00:17:24] Speaker D: And that was the old name of the company back when it was just. It was literally the company quote unquote.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: It was a group. It was a group.
[00:17:31] Speaker D: It was a group.
[00:17:31] Speaker C: Yeah. It was not a company at the time.
[00:17:34] Speaker D: And then we had our first. Our first studio practicum where practicum was like literally you gotta make a game in six months and let's see how that goes.
That's when they needed a coder. And in the first year, first here is always. Let's try your waters. Let's see where you find yourself out.
So you learn the basics of code, you learn the basics of art, you learn the basics of animation. And you figure out what you want to do for your first project. It's on the second semester. So you have a grasp of what you want to do. Right? I didn't by the time. So I was like, okay, I can at least be logical. And I decided to do the code of the game. Of course, by that stage, no one was great at doing it. No one was a huge programmer. It was six months of coding experience, six months of designing experience, six months of art experience. No one was a genius. But we, we. We were a group and we decided to do Quantum Shift. Quantum shift was a 2D top down shooter. So. And you. It was a. You were you. Was it the janitor? It was the main character?
[00:18:35] Speaker C: No, it was a. It was a different character at the time. It was just a generic like space captain guy.
[00:18:39] Speaker D: He was a generic space captain. But you are in a spaceship and you have a teleport gun. The whole team about the game. It had to be a shooting game. One of. So of course we cannot. We. Our professor said you got to do a game. And to avoid anyone saying I'm going to make DTA 7. You gotta. You gotta specify the scope. One thing we gotta learn is scope. You're not gonna make GTA 7 by yourself and not in a group of five people in six months. So it was a very simple top down game. And 2D, you had a teleport gun. We decided that we want to do something different. And here. Here comes digital Firewood is the essence. Because we decided to do something different shooting game. What does each other group came of the idea a normal shooting game. We decided that a shooting game does not necessarily mean killing. We decided to give a portal gun. You were still shooting. And at first the game was about just passing the levels.
Well, semester went on and our professor realized we needed enemies. And then we realized, okay, we actually gotta do some killing. We added enemies. But the enemies were just there to be there. Our vision was another one. And by God, we learned so much on this. And at that project, I wouldn't, at least for me, that's my perspective is when we learn as a team how to help each other. We worked nights and nights and nights. I remember, imagine, remember it was like a Friday, Friday, Friday morning, 8am we had to deliver a capstone of the project. So it means we had to deliver levels. We had to deliver something solid. We had to deliver Progress. It was 4am of a Friday when we were working on that, we made the entire levels in the night. It is a game. It is a game development in a nutshell. It is what we do, it is what we love doing.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: Lots of issues coming up at last minute and being like, oh, you know, we did. I do remember staying up till like 4 or 5 in the morning on that night, making that.
[00:20:43] Speaker D: Well, but I think when you stay up at 4 or 5am doing video games with your friends, that's when you got enough to say, okay, we're gonna work this out together. Let's do it.
[00:20:52] Speaker C: The, the way I learned that I loved what I do is that, you know, working overtime on a project until 5am didn't make me hate it. You know, like I, I still had fun and I was like, okay, you know, this is, this is what I want to do. If I can enjoy, if I can enjoy the pits of it like this, then, then yeah, this is, this is what I need to be in.
[00:21:15] Speaker D: Wow. And just to finish up the subject after this, we, we had a couple of projects together, school project and as a team, it's a college and a quantum shift. And Lilly, I would say, are cases that did work. We also had cases that didn't work.
We had games that we just realized it's not our style of game. And one thing that gave us a nice grasp of industry is we realized what is our style of game.
I am from Brazil. Brazil has. Oh, soccer.
[00:21:47] Speaker C: Soccer.
[00:21:47] Speaker D: Soccer, Right. So I'm going to give you an analogy based in soccer. In soccer, you have 12 people on the team. One of them is a striker, one of them is a defender. Each one have their own styles. If you put them out to do something they're not used to do, they're not going to do the greatest job they do. And we realized our games are in the 2D games. That's what we like to do. We experience with 3D, we experience with 2,5D. It didn't work out the way we wanted, but it Gives us the experience of working on the projects we are right now and saying, okay, we did it before. We know we're good at it, we know we're not going to fail.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Yeah. I think such a big part of that is playing into your strengths and not your weaknesses. You know, there's a lot of people that would chase 3D games as like, you know, like, whoa, you know, it's 3D games that are the thing. Right. But sometimes making something that's smaller scope that you know, that you can nail and you know that you can do well is better than getting in over your head and trying something and making it really look and feel like an amateur project.
So, you know, like, even though we could probably scrap together something in 3D, it would not be of the quality that we really aspire to have. So we're just like, yeah, let's, you know, just stick with what we're good at, you know, and we all have plenty of 2D games that we love too. And we don't see it as really like a lesser, lesser half of the medium or anything.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: So for sure, kind of taking those lessons from Sonic and Sega. Right. Like, you know, he's great in 2D, but try and go 3D.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: And he's had a little bit of a rocky history. Yes, yes, he's a little bit of a rocky history.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's talk about your games.
[00:23:31] Speaker C: All right.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: And let's, let's talk a little about Breach the Abyss. Like, what can players expect? What is this game?
[00:23:38] Speaker C: Yes. So Breach the Abyss is our latest release, really our first release professionally.
It is a top down wave based shooter that takes a lot of roguelike elements. If anyone's ever played a roguelike. It's a game where you kind of play the game over and over again in runs, and there's some randomized elements throughout each run and you kind of start over every single time, but you get further and further unlocking new things, upgrading your yourself over the course of runs. So in Breach the Abyss, you play as a janitor in a space facility that is being overrun by weird mysterious aliens. And a mysterious deity may contact you and entice you with a deal.
And from there it's up to you to find your way into the abyss and to discover your fragmented memories of your past self. And you'll kind of find pieces and bits of your backstory as you progress through the game. And overall, I would say that it's a pretty arcadey but narratively serious top down shooter. And I would say there's a lot to discover and there's a lot to find and we're really, really proud of how it turned out.
[00:25:08] Speaker D: I would say the player should expect a hell of fun.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of fun. A lot of fun.
You know, we really spent a long time refining the game, refining the game feel, refining the game mechanics, taking it to playtesting, lots of playtesting, lots of iteration, you know, really just working, working, working to try and make the best thing that we possibly could make. And for what it is, I'm very proud of it. The team is very proud of it. We launched on Steam just last October and it's done pretty well and we're really happy with just the reception of it. And seeing everybody have fun is such a rewarding experience.
You know, seeing this, this thing that you've worked on for two years finally leave your hands, you know, and people get to experience it, it's kind of like, kind of like a child leaving the house for the first time. You know, it's like you're on your own now.
And we're really happy to see how it turned out.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's awesome. So, Jack, I'm going to focus in on you for a second. And as the business developers, can you take our listeners through what your role entails and how you see digital firewood expanding and growing in years to come?
[00:26:31] Speaker D: Very well when it comes to business development. Right. It's a very interesting question. It's a question that a lot of people ask me. What does a business developer does? Right? Business developer. It is a modern way of calling a producer, but not only a producer. It is a globalized world. We need partnerships. We need a person that is actually focus on looking for funding. Funding is a huge plus on video games. We need someone that actually can take digital firewood and elevates from a student project to a natural company. Someone that goes into conferences and professionalize it another level. We are game developers and I love the buys from Digital Firewoods and I think that's what differentiates me from them. I am not in the production team. I can understand every single topic they say I join on every single meeting they do. And if they say of a mechanic that I don't agree, I would say I disagree. But my biggest point here is if they say a mechanic that I don't agree and it's not going to sell well on the market, I'm going to go to them and say, why? Why are you doing this? Because I love video games and video games are in my Everything. I wake up and think about video games. I wake up and think about our next projects that's coming up soon as same as all the boys. But we, we need someone that can actually have a focus on the product which is the video games are product and we have to make it sustainable. My job is to keep everyone in focus off. Let's, let's make this happen. But let's remember we are a company, we have to keep the lights on.
But at the same time I go to game development conferences. I speak for digital firewood. When someone has to come up to reach us for a possible partnership, for a possible sponsorship or for a possible podcast, they usually come for me and ask for the availability of the team. What can we do? What can we help each other doing this? And that's what I do. And how do I see digital firewood on the upcoming years?
We are working on a new project that is coming up soon. We are on the stages of. Oh, here comes the business developer. I can give a perfect example. We're working on our next project and I joined recently, I didn't join for Breach the Abyss. I joined very late on production of Breach the Abyss and very early on the stages of this game we're working on and we're looking, actively looking for funding for the game because we need to keep the lights on. It's our focus, it's our full time job. We're not getting any money from it yet.
So I went to conferences, I headed to Montreal recently where it was a big, big, big game development conference. It was not public, it was business to business and I pitched our upcoming game to those companies and unfortunately did not reach the expectations they have. We needed to work out the way of seeing the game development as a product. We forgot, we forgot to realize we need to sell this game. So what can we make to make it unique? And now we're going to process of refreshing our mindset. What can we make to make this game unique? There's a lot of games outside in the market.
We need a reason to convince the players to buy ours is not theirs.
When you think of a 2D game yourself, you think about Sonic, you think about Mario. What differentiates us from those games that's going to convince you to buy it? And that's going to be my job.
Of course. A game is a game, a good game is a good game. You always going to have a reason to buy a good game if the game is good. And that's the production team job. And they're doing awesome at it. They're doing awesome. We just got to make sure we innovate. We've got to make sure Digital Firewood keeps the fire on in the industry itself. We're going to be developing for the next two to three years. That's our go.
And what's going to happen on those two to three years? Right. We need someone that can go actively on the, on the game development industry game development scenario and keep this flame on it. If we forget about the game, if we forget about showing people the game is existent, we are working hard on it, no one's going to buy by the end of the day and if no one's buy by the end of the day, unfortunately the company doesn't keep going.
That's what the business developers.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Wow.
I liked when you said you had to keep the fire on the fireplace on. I was like, I like that. I like that analogy.
So Anthony, as the CEO and co founder of Digital Firewood, can you share a bit about your experience in these roles and what your leadership approaches has been so far?
[00:31:21] Speaker C: Yeah, so I am a lot more directly involved with the production of the game. I'm actively developing games. I am one of the core developers.
So as well as I guess being the CEO on paper, I am kind of at the ground level with everybody else, you know, developing the games.
But as far as leadership goes, you know, I try to make sure that it is a space that is not, is not oppressive or not. Kind of like there's a balance for, you know, we have to get our work done, but we also need to not make it feel like a very suffocating environment. It can't be too stuck up. We can't be, you know, we can't be like having no soul here, you know, and we can't lose sight of why we're doing this in the first place.
So as well as keeping things on track and getting, you know, getting our games done, you know, at the end of the day we're a company but we are also all friends and you know, we will have days where we're doing development and working hard on development and then we'll have some days on weekends where we're playing games together or watching movies or TV or whatever, just kind of like just hanging out. And I think that maintaining that relationship with each other is such a important, important thing because without it you start to drift apart from each other and without it, you know that you can kind of tell in the games, you can tell in the final product, you know, a team that can Work well together and a team that understands each other is a team that's going to produce better quality content.
And at the end of the day, we're all passionate, we all love what we do.
You know, being on the ground floor of game development myself, you know, we're often just iterating, improving our games, making new stuff, constantly showing each other progress. You know, we do weekly meetings, have kind of a structure set up where we have our kind of sprint review at the end of the end of the week, show progress, check in on things, make sure everyone's on the right track. A lot of these things are just very, very important overall to the quality of the games. And I try to make it so that the environment is productive, but also not impressive.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: So what kind of advice do you have for those who might be wanting to get into game development and might want to start their own studio someday? What advice would you have to those people?
[00:34:06] Speaker C: I have mainly one word of advice and it might come down as simple, but just do it. You know, the best thing, the best way to do things is to just kind of hit the ground floor running. And, you know, a lot of the times you may have an impression of how these game companies are run. You may have this impression of an outsider viewpoint of these companies are very professional, very kind of rigid, they work in a very certain way. And while that is true for some companies, there's the truth in a lot of game development and in a lot of just companies as a whole is, especially when you're younger and you're kind of growing up and seeing these things in the world, you don't realize that people don't know what they're doing as much as you might think that they do.
So my advice to that is to just figure it out as you go. There are things that you will only learn by getting the experience.
You know, a year ago, we knew very little about running a company. You know, we'd spent three years doing game development and learning a lot about game development. But just as far as a studio running a company goes, you know, we, we had to learn a lot through that process of just doing it.
There's a lot of things that you'll only really learn just by, by not, you know, not, not wavering on that first step and just, just doing it. You know, the way that I tend to learn things is, you know, seek out the experience. When you have problems, just look them up, Google them, talk to other people, get their insight on it, and kind of come from a place of not trying to understand everything before you take that first step. Because a lot of people get caught up in that kind of mindset of like, I need to understand what I'm doing before I do this. A lot of the time you really do just need to put your foot on the ground and just say like, I'm going to start and I'm going to learn as I go. And a lot of times you'll be surprised at what you can do.
[00:36:15] Speaker D: What I can also say is game development is also something that you can just try the waters and see if you can like. Game development is something that you can actively do research online. Of course it's not going to be the same as actually going to college and doing three years of college. But there is some basic research you can do figure out. Because game development has. Here comes the business developer. I am fortunately the realistic person of the team.
We have a very. Our cohort was different. Our cohort was very unique when it comes to that. But we have a very high rate of dropping off because when it comes to video games, a lot of people confuse playing video games to making video games. It can be frustrating as. But if you love it by the end of the day, it can also be reinforced.
It is not an easy path. You're not. You're not going to do. You're not doing anything related to, for example, basic economy. So it is also a job that is also very related to economy too, right? If the economy of the country is not going well, unfortunately game development is not going well. But I think the resilience of not giving up is what differs us here. Because we started a company and realistically speaking, we're not looking into making any money for the first three years of company.
We are very glad that we had the opportunity to start this up and still live not having to worry about actual rent on the day next.
But if I have to say is don't give up right away but realize what is the state of the industry and where you stand on it.
Why did I decide to do a game development? Because I realized those guys over there, they get crazy on what they do. Anthony is a crazy game designer. He's a crazy musician. Our team, we have crazy artists. We have. We have some people that they are the great on what they do. And for example, look at Anthony. He says, oh, I am happy that I am able to do overtime and I am happy with.
Is sometimes the reality of making video games.
So just I wanted to, of course, I'm not saying give up, but I'm Saying, come ready, come ready to join us.
It is not playing video games. It is making video games.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: So we talked. Jack, you talked a little bit about what's next for digital firewood, but what kind of games are you interested in exploring in the future?
[00:38:58] Speaker D: Well, exploring. Right. Just so I can have some context, like what we're working on. What more specifically?
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Yeah, what would you want to work on in the future? Or what are you working on in the future, if you can talk about that.
[00:39:12] Speaker D: Yes, of course.
We're actually working on our next project. It's called Electrify. Electrify is a 2D platform Speed precision platformer which you take control of. Fi. Fi is a teenager girl which gets herself stuck in a power plant. And by doing this, she gets powers, but at the same time, she needs to escape the evil corporation that leads the power plant.
Electrify. It is a 2D game, as we talked about it before. Anthony, I believe you want to take the floor better.
[00:39:46] Speaker C: Yeah, of course. Yeah. We've been pretty hard at work on Electrify for the last year or so.
Being a precision platformer, it is very different from the project that we just released, which also was an interesting experience, kind of working on those at the same time. Two very different projects with also two very different tones.
Just generally kind of dipping our toes in every little aspect of. Just like, maybe this is different from what we're doing over here and your job can change kind of from day to day. But working on Electrify has been very.
There's been a lot of challenges, but we've enjoyed it a lot. That kind of threw out the way. Right now we're working hard on getting that game into a shape that it's ready to be demoed and ready to be shown to publishers to pitch and stuff like that.
You know, it is. We're very proud of what we have so far, and we're. And we're thinking it's shaping up really well. But yeah, we're. There's still. There's still a lot to go as far as that game goes. And I guess just in the future, I want to say, like, no door is closed. You know, there's no thing. There's no genre that we won't tackle if we're. If we're given the opportunity. There's lots of games, you know, obviously, heavily depends on the market and heavily depends on what people are looking for and what the. The market is. But, like, given. Given a chance to make a certain type of game, I don't think that there's many that we would say no to.
Being such a diverse. Having such a diverse range of video game experience throughout our lives, all of us, you know, with different genres. I think there are a lot of genres that we're confident that we could probably make a really cool take on.
Again, it comes down to the opportunity.
[00:41:37] Speaker D: I believe the only thing we can say for sure we're not tackling anytime soon is 3D.
[00:41:42] Speaker C: That's true. Besides that, until we have an opportunity to expand our team or find someone more specialized in it, then we will probably be sticking to 2D games. But, you know, given the opportunity.
[00:41:57] Speaker D: But I would say on the coming two to three years, our focus is our upcoming project and we're working really hard on releasing it.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. We're working really hard to make sure that that is a very fulfilling experience, and we're excited to get that into a state where we can start showing it more.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Awesome, guys. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
[00:42:21] Speaker C: Of course. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you for this opportunity.
[00:42:24] Speaker D: Amazing. Thank you.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:26] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: And, you know, hopefully in a couple years, when you guys become more prolific indie artists or indie game developers, we'll have you back on the podcast and we can chat about the beginnings all over again.
[00:42:39] Speaker C: For sure. For sure. We're always going to be open for it. Of course.
[00:42:47] Speaker D: Foreign.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Learning about digital fireworks Journey. We can't wait to see what they do next now, if you liked this episode, please share with a friend and let us know on our Instagram storyartcenter. Until next time, I'm your host, Pat Quigley, and this is Storyteller in Depth.
