I am Jerry Riley. I am currently a part of my studio's dev ops team at Gree. In the past I founded a game studio called Hero Interactive. And Hero Interactive was an indie studio founded in 2006. We made flash games, they're basically just video games that were made with the software Adobe Flash. And you just play them in your web browser, usually small, little games. But, as they grew, they kind of became bigger and more featured and then, eventually, became very popular on Facebook. The company grew to eight people. And we relocated to about Southwest Michigan. So, we were located in the St. Joseph, Michigan area, which was great. It was right on Lake Michigan. It was beautiful. Hero Interactive, we did a lot of really successful things overall. We got about 500 million plays, made 35 games on our own IP which is really braggable to this day. It was really fun getting to work on a large number of diverse projects and we had a lot of successes, and we had some failures. Hero Interactive isn't around today as it was back then, even though it's still technically around, and you can still go play our games on herointeractive.com. But there's a lot I got out of it and a lot I learned, and I hope that you learned some. How Hero Interactive got started. Hero Interactive got started before I even thought about Hero Interactive. Basically I love games, and I knew that I wanted to do video games. But back when I went into college around 2001, when I was first getting ready to go into it, there was a lot of scandal going around. There was a number of studios in the industry that are having a lot of work-life balance issues and that kind of scared me. And so I decided to go into computer science. And computer science gave me a lot of background stuff and different areas I could go into, and I worked as a software consultant for a small company that did a lot of consulting work for small businesses. That was really great, because I worked on a lot of accounting software, and I also got to see a lot of companies get founded and see how they kind of grew, and so that gave me a lot of confidence to go and form my own company. At first I didn't really think about it. It just kind of fell into it. After school I started just consulting work and doing web work kind of then turned into finding contracts for Flash games. And as I started just getting more contract work, I just needed a company to get better organized and set things up financially. So It just kind of came together. And forming a business kind of made sense. The process involved buying a lot of books and just reading a lot of books, trying to get into it. A lot of what Hero Interactive was was just me kind of stumbling through it. And overall, that worked okay, but there are a lot of advantages, things that I'm really glad now to work in some bigger companies that actually have some best practices that I can learn from other people who have done things. So, that's nice. Hero Interactive in the beginning was brutal. Through no fault of mine, my clients lost clients, so that eventually results in lost work. I broke my left hand in a freak racquetball accident. So for a month, I was typing in a cast, one-handed. I'd have a bounced check from a client and that could be a month's worth of money. I remember for three months or two months, I made negative $200. And so it was really rough, and so, there were definitely times where I thought about getting out of it and not keep going with it, and it was almost just a four month company. But I decided to look into a plan B and that was look for a job and also while looking into plan B, I looked for a plan C. And plan C was looking into this new this business model that was coming out where people who are making little Flash games could get them sponsored by a big web portal. And basically the portal would pay to put their advertisements and links in the game that redirect traffic back to that website. And so your goal of your game was to get it stolen by other people who would just take your game and steal it off your website and put it on their website and spread it around virally on the Internet as far as it could go and get the most plays. And that resulted in the most traffic being driven back to your sponsors, so it was going to be an interesting business model, and that was just growing around 2006 and 2007. So I looked into that. And after a mediocre start, eventually I made Bubble Tanks and that exploded huge and turned into a massive, massive thing and really kickstarted Hero Interactive as it is known today and kickstarted those 35 games my own IP. Hero Interactive had successes and it had some failures. Success wise, we released over 35 of our own games. Like I said, most of those can be played herointeractive.com, on the website. Many were insanely popular games. They garnered hundreds of millions of plays. And it was really fun. You'd go onto a website and on the forums and people are talking about the million played club. If you had a game played by a million people and how prestigious that was. And very few game developers got into there. There are many of our games that got as many as 30 or 40 million plays. And so, that was very exciting and it brought with it a little bit of fame. I had my 15 minutes, it was to the point where I could just wear a Bubble Tanks t-shirt or a Hero Interactive t-shirt and walk into my local Staples and feel good. I've played that game. And that was very exciting to know that you made something and maybe did everything in the game, including the art and the engineering and all the game design and then know that that many people played it and loved it. Bubble Tanks 2 won the best shooter game of the year, so that was pretty cool. So I have lots of awards and that's kind of cool. Two years later we were finalists also at the Flash Gaming Summit for best strategy game of the year for Bubble Tanks Tower Defense. That means we were in the top three. Many times we were included in lists of the top Flash game studios in the world and that was very exciting. What else did we do? Other accomplishments, in 2007, we really beat most of the world in getting micro transactions, in getting extra downloadable content into games. So we had that in 2007, and we were one of the first people to get it in the Flash games where our game sort of went as you could play in any of 5,000 websites, but still be able to make purchases and download extra levels at the end of the game. So even after you beat the whole complete base game you could still buy additional stuff, which is cool. And obviously, that's something that stuck around, and it's very mainstream today. Let's see, what else? We grew to about eight people, which is exciting, which was very unheard of in many Flash game studios. So most companies, or most Flash game studios, when they're putting out their games on sites like Kongregate and Armor Games and Newgrounds and stuff, most of them are like one or two people. There are a lot people who are just doing it out of dorm rooms, or out of their apartments, and we've grown to an eight person company with our own office, and that was very big. Very big, and we also had a lot of interns that came to the company. I think we had about 16 people and almost everyone, with the exception of my artist, almost everyone started out as an intern. So it was very exciting as people kind of came on and became lead engineers. People really grew. Not just myself but I know that everyone else, it kind of kickstarted a whole bunch of other careers so that was very exciting. Other things were that we built a huge game for Facebook, called Zoo-Opolis, and that was very exciting. It was a project that we spent over a year working on, and the whole company worked on and it did some cool things. Without advertising, we got 50,000 players into the game and it had a lot of features and it was, you had a lot of MMO features. You could build your own zoos and go visit other people's zoos and it had some Pokemon elements to it, which was very cool. And it was cool. I did a lot of networking. I built a lot of relationships, built a lot of friendships. And I got to speak and present to a lot of different schools, and speak in a lot of different groups, and that was a lot of fun. So there was definitely a lot of things I learned. Failures, we had those, too. We tried things, and sometimes we succeeded with those things, sometimes we succeeded with gambles, sometimes we failed. And sometimes they weren't stunning failures. Sometimes it may just be a game that wasn't as successful as we needed it to be. It's very competitive. On a site like Kongregate there were 14,000 games that came out in a single year. And in order to be competitive we needed to be in the top 100 games each year. So that meant that almost every game had to be a huge success. And when a game was just a success and not a huge success that impacted us and that was difficult. And as we grew that became a harder thing to balance. We had to keep feeding the beast to use the words from Creativity, Inc. We had a brief stint where we tried doing a publisher gig thing. That was a failure. Both us and both the other developer we worked with didn't know what we were doing. So that didn't really work. It was a lot of not knowing what we were getting into, how we're going to best serve each other, so that was frustrating. We overreached on Zoo-Opolis. Zoo-Opolis, hadn't done much project management, hadn't done projects that were over a year long. And we also went all in on it, and that was something that ultimately brought Hero Interactive down, is that we put all our eggs in one basket, and when that project didn't do very well, that kind of brought down the company. But we still learned a lot from Zoo-Opolis. It did some amazing things. It was an amazing experience. And even though Hero Interactive isn't around as it was then, it's not the same thing it is today, it was still great. It catapulted my career and it pushed me as a developer and it pushed me as a person. And I think it really gave me a really good start in my career. All right, so a lot of people ask me, what is it like being on the team? And being part of a small studio or owning my own company and stuff. Obviously it was awesome. [LAUGH] Yeah. My favorite part was the people and we had great relationships. Everybody who worked there was amazing and there's no other way to say it, I loved them. And I still have amazing friendships that are still super strong today. And I still work or see a lot of those people and we're always in touch. People also ask what made us successful, and as far as what made us successful, I think it was three key things. I think the first thing was the people. Really, Hero Interactive, we put people first. So it was relationships. And it was investing in people, making sure everybody was happy and had their needs met. And investing in people, so they learned. It was mentorship. And it was trusting people that they would do a good job. Make sure people could voice their opinions. And everybody could get in there. A lot of people, just be one or two people that would make a game. So you really had to trust each of the developers to do an amazing job. I mean many of the games, some of them were just products, entirely products of themselves. They're almost a work of art because it's just one person's self expression. The second thing is a thing that is a huge topic. That goes outside of here, but something that I call fundamental fun. And fundamental fun, basically the underlying principle was that we put some core concepts, some core underlying things I think what people would call today pillars. We really focused on those and made those the underlying, gave our games a good foundation in those pillars of things that are fun, so it could be something like cause and effect or exploration or growth or creativity, whatever it is. And then we would build on that and push it to the extreme. And rather than just focus on art, we would focus on that, and then we'd focus on some of the game mechanics, and how we keep people in flow state. And then not until all that when we started thinking about the setting, and the art, and all those things that we layer on top. Because if the core underlying game wasn't fun, then it doesn't matter what art style, whether you had circles or squares. It's still not going to be a fun game, so we focus on that. And I think something else that made us successful, the third thing is that we brought the whole package. And that's something that I think that really helped because in my very early days before I even created Hero Interactive, having done accounting software, and seeing a lot of companies get started with business, and seeing them found new companies and getting them started, we were able to bring a whole package. So not only was I a decent engineer, but also, I love business. I love doing sales, and I was good with contracts, and I was good with talking to people, and pitching, and making sure that we followed up on projects and delivered as we promised. I think that was something that gave us a big air of professionalism over a lot of our competitors. And being that reliable and really focusing on those relationships, again, where we were dependable and trustworthy, I think was something that really helped us and gave us a big edge over other people. The final big question that I get asked are what are the pros and cons of working in a small indie studio? And I've worked in small companies like Hero Interactive which were I started out just by myself and then we grew to eight people. And I've worked in big studios, I would say even what many people would consider to be mega studios of 550 people or more. And there's pros and cons. In the small industry view, you'll learn a ton. And you really grow as a person, a lot of it by necessity. I always kind of after the fact, I joke with my friends, I use to work with them. I apologized to them and say hey, you were my guinea pigs when I was learning to be a leader and learning to do management and stuff. And sometimes I made good decisions, sometimes I made bad decisions. For better or worse, they were along for the ride with me. But, I learned a lot. On the flip side and just to go hand and hand with that, all of that learning was by trial and error. So in a bigger company it's nice because there is a lot of subject matter experts. And there's people who are way more talented at a thing than you are. So you get to learn a lot of best practices. Something else that's great in the indie thing is you have huge impact. And going back to some of those awards, for the game Bubble Tanks 2 where it won best shooter game of the year. There were 7,500 games nominated across 11 categories and winning in that game category for that game, primarily it was just solely myself who made, developed Bubble Tanks 2. And so it was very exciting knowing that millions and millions of people have played this and really enjoyed it. I had a huge impact. Every enemy they fought, that was my work. And everything they did was my work. So that was very gratifying, I could control every decision. On the flip side, while you can't necessarily do that in a bigger company because a lot people have input on lots of different things, you have to work with lots of different people. In the bigger companies you can focus and become an expert in a thing. And you can't really do that as an indie person because largely you're spread so thin that you can't like just focus and go all in on architecture or engineering or all in on art. You really have to be a jack of all trades. And a master of none thing. Whereas in a bigger company, if you want to focus in UI, and UI is your passion, you can just focus on that. And finally, with an indie studio, you have huge rewards, but you can also have huge penalties. Either you're all in, either win big, or you lose big. And there's a lot of exceptions to that, there's caveats. But that's a double edge sword. For every, like I said, 14,000 games came out on Kongregate a year. Even though we were very successful, that means that there were a lot of other games, tens of thousands other games that were not very successful. And you can win very big but you can also, it can be a very stressful thing. And going from game to game, whereas with the bigger companies that have proven success. You can have a little more runway to experiment with things and not be so stressed out. So that's really cool. At any rate, I hope you'll consider the different pros and cons of an indie studio and I hope this helps.
