In today’s career insight, CEO of Popcannibal, Ziba Scott, widely known for the indie game, Kind Words, tells us about his start in the industry.
If you told me thirteen years ago that I would have been self-employed and working on the busiest game ever, I wouldn’t have believed you, yet it happened. How I got into the industry isn’t the only way, or the best way, or possibly a good or direct way, but it worked for me.
I started university for computer science and it was a time where I wasn’t dead-set on games, my first passion was programming alongside theatre. What I found interesting about games was that it was a beautiful intersection of theatre and programming.
Even so, I didn’t apply to any gaming companies after I graduated, I actually ended up working at Linux consulting.
It might sound boring, but I actually really love open software and Linux in particular.
Spending years working for them gave me much of a technical foundation that’s different from the technical foundation you learn from game programmers. In fact, fast-forward to the present, it manifested itself to Kind Words that requires a huge amount of back end data.
Half of the program is not even the game that you see, but it’s the server, it’s the moderation website, and that’s not something a lot of game developers have experience writing.
Now, how did I get into games?
Well, besides Linux, I was also doing a few temporary jobs and one of them was working as a web master at university. That was basically running their emails, when one day I heard a radio ad for a masters degree programme at a nearby university in ‘serious games’: a course about studying games where the primary focus is not entertainment.
I found that fascinating, so I applied for it and got into the program. Throughout that time, I was already with my wife and working full-time, so I was commuting to night classes. The intention of working in games wasn’t there yet since I still very much loved Linux.
Once I got my masters degree, my wife, who was a doctor, got offered a job on the other side of the country and that’s where everything changed. The American system is weird about the medical system, but we knew she got the job, so I quit mine. We put our house up for sale and we got rid of a couple of our pet turtles before we found out that her job didn’t start for another year.
So I had a new degree, no job, and a year of uncertainty before I had to move across the country. With nothing else to do, the following weekend I filed paperwork to start my own gaming company, Popcannibal, and that was 13 years ago.
It surprised me that I wasn’t scared, but I think it’s because I approached the whole ‘building my own company’ business from another angle.
The initial plan was to be self-employed until I moved from Michigan to Massachusetts and found a new job in another company, but thanks to the Boston community I found myself linking with, which also gave me many opportunities to learn from, I ended up doing a lot of contractual work whilst working on my company instead of applying for another full-time job.
It’s safe to say that I was in a position to be able to take that risk because of years of experience I had in hand, but I definitely had not planned it to go the way it did since it was only supposed to last one year.
I just wanted to make games, that’s what I thought. Nothing else. So at the beginning of this new path, I was doing lots of contract work and a bit of focus on games until the first game got released and it was well received, which allowed me to decrease my workload with the temporary jobs, until it got to a point where I completely stopped doing them and was able to only focus on making games.
Focusing on it is also the reason why I’ve kept my team so small with only me and Luigi, an artist, working within the company. The two of us work really well together and the skills we have are essentially what we need to create games.
A lot of our dreams aren’t as big as these giant gaming companies–I enjoy playing them, like Grand Theft Auto, but not necessarily making them. Luigi and I have a lot of
ideas about exploring a players’ relationship to games so finding out what this game or that game makes them feel doesn’t really need a big team since the experimental project behind it is a small one.
I also don’t like managing people. I’ve seen friends who are doing very well having a small company and hiring more people and their day-to-day life became more about managing those people.
Keeping the team small allows me to focus on what I love doing which is programming and working directly with games, which I hope I’ll keep doing for a long time.
Top tip for students wanting to get into the gaming industry from Ziba Scott
If everybody goes to college for video games, and that’s all they study, the only thing that will be on their head is the same thing as everybody else. All the games they make will be the same, so I would like to encourage students to find things that are unique to them. For example, my career gave me skills of database management and web development that I was later able to fit into the games I’m making.