Renee Gittins is the Creative Director and CEO of Stumbling Cat, an indie studio based in Seattle. With a diverse skill set encompassing business operations, software engineering, and creative direction, Renee leads her team with a unique blend of expertise. Before her role at Stumbling Cat, she served as the General Manager of Phoenix Labs in Vancouver and held the position of Executive Director at the IGDA. Renee is a dedicated advocate for diversity in the gaming industry, actively promoting initiatives to foster inclusivity and empower developers from all backgrounds. She also serves as the Chair of the IGDA alum board and consults for numerous organizations, leveraging her experience to drive positive change within the industry.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Renee Gittins discusses her background and Stumbling Cat
• The evolution of Stumbling Cat and Renee’s Kickstarter process
• Why marketing and community support is essential for company success
• Renee's insights on outsourcing and alternative recruitment methods
• Overcoming social anxiety as a leader and entrepreneur
• How Renee finds the inspiration to persevere
• Navigating ebbs and flows in your entrepreneurial journey
• Renee discusses her career growth and how she honed her leadership skills
• Why Renee is passionate about IDGA
• Transitioning from a large company to a small indie studio
• Renee’s advice for aspiring game studio owners

In this episode…

The journey of launching a video game studio is akin to brewing a magical potion — a delicate balance of ingredients, timing, and intuition. What is the alchemy behind successful game launches?

Seasoned gaming professional Renee Gittins emphasizes the role of marketing and community support in achieving company success. Building a strong community and fostering meaningful connections with players are crucial for sustaining momentum and cultivating brand loyalty. However, the entrepreneurial journey is marked by ebbs and flows, requiring resilience and adaptability. Renee shares that in the face of challenges, finding inspiration becomes paramount. 

Tune in to the latest episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, where host Lizzie Mintus sits down with Renee Gittins, the Creative Director and CEO of Stumbling Cat, for an insightful discussion on her journey in launching an indie studio. Renee shares her career background, insights into Stumbling Cat’s Kickstarter process, her personal journey of overcoming social anxiety as a leader and entrepreneur, and the strategies she employed to refine her leadership skills.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Renee Gittins on LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok | X
• Stumbling Cat
• Rami Ismail on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not. 

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. And every episode we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Today we have Renee Gittins with us.

Renee leads Stumbling Cat, an indie studio based in Seattle, and is a multidisciplinary leader with expertise in business operations, software engineering, and creative direction. Previously, she was the general manager of Phoenix Labs, Vancouver, and the executive director of the IGDA. She is a passionate advocate and connector for developers and diversity in the game industry.

She is also the chair of the IGDA alum board, consults for numerous organizations, and is outspoken about initiatives to increase diversity. both within the game industry and gaming overall to help the game industry grow and improve for everyone. Let's get started. Thanks for being here and congrats on your game launch.

Renee Gittins: Thank you so much. It's a true pleasure. I'm very excited.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you tell everybody a little bit more about Stumbling Cat and your background?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, absolutely. So Stumbling Cat is my own studio that I founded in 2014 as I was actually transitioning into the games industry from my previous career in biotech.

I knew that I needed to create portfolio pieces in order to successfully apply for game companies and I decided to create those under my own indie studio. What I didn't expect is that I would decide to invest 10 years of my life in developing a game called Potions of Curious Tale, which just launched.

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats, but 10 years is wild. Can you share more about the inspiration? You wanted to get into games, you were in biotech and you were making a portfolio piece, but then how did that transition to 10 years later launching your game?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, so when I started creating the concept, as I said, it was just a portfolio piece. And I was looking to address the problem where in games, you are set up to be a heroic character, particularly in action adventure games, but you're rewarded for slaughtering every creature you come across, whether or not it's just like a small forest critter or something that's actually causing trouble.

And I wanted to figure out how to make a design where the players had to consider combat in a new light, where senseless slaughtering of everything didn't make sense. But I wanted it to be mechanics driven instead of just story driven. I know that karma systems are very popular in games, but it feels like an oversimplification of trying to be moral in games. So I came up with the concept for Potions A Curious Tale based around potion crafting. So you have to use resources in order to create aggressive potions, and then you can use those to attack enemies. But there are also hazards in the world, and it really encourages using strategic approaches to combat. And that's actually how you get the best ingredients, which encourages the player to be less aggressive- to figure out alternative solutions, to avoid lower level creatures when they don't need ingredients from them.

That idea sparked so much interest that I decided to run a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. The game was successfully funded, but only with $64,000, which was enough to pay for art and audio contracts, but not enough to pay my rent. Part of the reason that development took so long is I'm the main developer. I write pretty much all the code, do most of the design, and the writing of the game, as well as marketing, business, all those other sorts of things. But I also had to work full time jobs throughout the majority of development. So it's only been this last year I've been full time, made leaps and bounds of progress. And yeah, it's finally shipped.

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best story. It's your passion project come to life. So congratulations.

Renee Gittins: Thank you.

Lizzie Mintus: What games inspired your game?

Renee Gittins: Ah, there's so many games that I found inspirational. One of the ones that I looked towards was this game called, Recettear. Recettear and Item Shop Tale. It is where you play an NPC running an item shop in a traditional RPG style game. And I thought it was a really interesting new perspective of a different character in one of these RPG or action adventure games.

While that was oriented a little bit more towards economy and commerce, I really enjoyed the dungeon diving aspects and trying to get good ingredients and turn them into even more valuable things. And so I decided to make a game inspired by that. In fact, originally, I had even considered of having sort of an economy system where you'd run a potion shop and sell potions. But as I experimented with the design, I decided I really wanted to get into the strategy of combat and puzzles in the world, because that's what I find most magical.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's the game that you would like to play a little bit too.

Renee Gittins: Absolutely.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk just about the evolution? You have this idea, and then how many years later do you start the Kickstarter?

Renee Gittins: It was two years after the initial conception, a little under two years, that I started writing the Kickstarter. When I first started working on potions, I was still looking at other careers in the games industry. And so I was poking around with potions as a portfolio piece. I actually in fact started it in C++ just to learn C++ but potions itself is built in Unity and C#.

And then about a year into the project, I was getting so much interest that I decided I wanted to do a Kickstarter. So over the next year, I spent my time researching Kickstarter. This was in 2015, 2016. And it was past the Kickstarter heyday for games. Getting a game funded on Kickstarter was not so easy in 2016, so I wanted to make sure I was approaching it with a good community, with strong marketing, with backer rewards that were going to be compelling, but not leave me in financial straits when I actually had to fulfill them. With all of that research, I finally came together with a campaign, and thankfully it was successful. At the time I published the campaign, 2016, I think only 5 percent of video game Kickstarters were successful. So it definitely took a lot of work.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you, how did people even find out about your game? How did you think about marketing and building a community at that point?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, certainly marketing was a lot different in 2016 than it is now. I actually relied a lot on other game developers. So I had been networking pretty aggressively within the game development industry, a lot with other indie game developers, and they helped me get the word out to their communities who are, of course, already passionate indie game fans.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think everybody's probably amazed you shipped your game on this budget. Like how did she do it right? Just like advice for other people that might want to take a similar path or learnings from your journey. Did you get involved with Tim Collins organization or Indie Megabooth? Was in person? Were they online communities? How did you find them?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, so I'm based in Seattle and Seattle actually has a very rich game development community. Even prior to the start of Seattle Indies, there was IGDA Seattle, and then other less formal indie development events held by local, indie studios. I really got my start there, going to these weekly and monthly events. There was even an event called, Beer Wednesday, where a bunch of game developers would get together on Wednesdays, over a beer, talk about game development. Since I was living in Seattle proper, I was able to attend pretty much every single event that came by. Even if I wasn't feeling up for the socialization, I still forced myself to go out there and network. And I made such wonderful connections, not only for the promotion of my game. In fact, it was more for mentorship, advice. I met really wonderful people who helped me really hone my skills and become the game developer I am today.

Lizzie Mintus: Sweet. What specifically did people help you with the most? For me, at least what people don't realize about entrepreneurship is that behind every successful or any company at all are so many people that have helped them with every single aspect. So where do you feel like you found the most help from the community?

Renee Gittins: I would say that it has to do with indie game strategy, both around marketing and just general presentation of the game itself. There's some really great resources out there online now. How to Market a Game, for example, is super valuable. There's all sorts of wonderful newsletters that have different bits of information.

Game Discover Co., How to Market a Game, Rami Ismail's newsletter as well. Those are all really wonderful. Rami Ismail's one of my best friends, so I get to talk to him about his strategy for indie game marketing and approach. One of my other really good friends, Jakob, the head of Unbound Creations, is a nearly solo, independent game developer who has managed to be successful, and I love his marketing. He is always so hilarious in his marketing videos, and so I take a lot of inspiration from him, and advice about how to find streamers. There's great tools that can help you find streamers that have streamed other games that are similar to yours, which are more likely to cover your game than, there's event lists, so I apply for every festival that I can manage.

A lot of online festivals have actually been very successful in getting additional attention. Made sure to really min max when it comes to my participation in Steam Next Fest. It's always best to participate in the Steam Next Fest right before your launch. I was seeing about 300 wishlists a day during that participation. I think the most difficult thing, and the thing has actually been most successful, is viral social media. So I've seen a lot of success on TikTok and Instagram, with my most popular video, receiving over a million views on TikTok and over 800, 000 views on Instagram.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. What's the secret to getting a viral video?

Renee Gittins: Be very snappy. I think you need a really good hook within the first three seconds. You need to have extremely short cuts. Something that I've noticed about TikTok is that if you pause, like normal speech pause, people will leave your video. You have to cut out any gaps in between sentences and words that you can, which feels very strange when you're editing it, but it really helps draw attention.

Same with having things that are happening on the screen. I found that just having animations from my game on the screen, the main character walking, throwing potions, drinking potions, gathering, flying on her broom, helps provide additional visual interest so that if someone for a second their attention lapses on what I'm saying, there's something else to keep them engaged in the video.

And then you absolutely cannot be too forward with marketing. As soon as someone thinks that you're trying to sell something, they will immediately leave your video as well. It's a combination of all of those and then trying again and again. I think I did maybe 15 videos about the same content and approach, before one of them hit and when it hit it went massively viral.

Lizzie Mintus: Right before Dice, because I saw you at Dice.

Renee Gittins: Right before Dice, yeah, right before I got on the plane, actually, I was heading to the airport going, I think this one's going viral, I guess we'll see.

Lizzie Mintus: And then from that virality, are you able to track conversions? I'm always so curious about what platforms convert in what way? Or at this point, it's obviously thrilling to have a viral video, but is there a certain avenue of virality that would be best, or are you still experimenting?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, I'm definitely still experimenting. I know that generally wishlists from TikTok and Instagram are weighted a little less heavily in terms of their potential conversion than from some other platforms. I could see Steam seemingly treating it that way as well. There is not as much analytics tools to track how you acquired a person and then how their wishlist potentially converted. Usually when you're looking at Steam wishlist conversions, you expect 10 percent of your wishlist to convert in the first day of launch, 10 percent in the first week, and then another 10 percent over the next month to year.

Really starting strong with wishlists on launch is important, but when you have those slightly weaker wishlists, you can see different numbers. Again, it also matters on reviews, general reception, your target audience. There's lots and lots of variables here, so there's no hard rules.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's all an experiment.

Renee Gittins: It's all an experiment. Yeah, you really mean the best thing to do with marketing, particularly as an indie on a low budget is to just try as many things as possible as frequently as you can while maintaining your own sanity.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's clearly working for you. Congratulations.

Renee Gittins: That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Not losing money on an indie game is a true success. Really?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Getting out the door outta 10 years is getting out the door.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, it is. When I designed this game, since I was never intending it for it to be a commercial product, I did not keep it to a small scope. In the future, I think I would like to do games that have more multiplayer content, because it's a lot easier to have high replayability without having to generate so much scripted and custom content. Or some other sort of hook. One of the reasons that Roguelites were so popular is because, if you created a good random generator for your content, it allowed for a lot of replayability. So you could really focus on just tuning the mechanics and focus less on creating lots and lots of content.

Lizzie Mintus: If you were to do another game. What you, that's what you would do differently. What else would you, what else would you take away from this?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, it's so hard to say because when it comes down to it, the types of games that I like are story heavy, content heavy, action adventure games.

So Potions is absolutely in that vein. But it is not a small project to do that kind of game. There are additional games in the story heavy realm that I'd like to try out, but what I really am going to be focusing on after porting potions to consoles is doing rapid prototyping to either find interesting mechanics that attach well. Or I actually have dreams about doing some party games. I feel like there's a really good space for fun and interesting party games that are compelling to people. So that's what I'm gonna see if I can play with.

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, I'm excited to see what you do next. You mentioned so you did all of the programming for the game and all of the design and writing.

Renee Gittins: I got a bit of help with the design and writing. My mother actually got her master's in literature and did a lot of the research. Potions uses fairy tales and folklore from around the world. So she helped me find fairy tales and folklore to bring in. I designed a lot of the game. I would say maybe 80 90 percent of the game. But particularly when I was working as the general manager of Phoenix Labs, I did not have much creative energy left at the end of the day. I worked with two designers, Kristen and Gregor, who helped me particularly with the last couple boss fights and dungeons. So their contributions there were really invaluable. But when it comes to the other 76 levels, that is definitely my work.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you decide what to outsource and what to do yourself?

Renee Gittins: I think it's important to understand your own skillset and bandwidth. While I can do art, I am not very efficient or particularly great at art. So art is definitely something I outsourced same with audio. I wouldn't even want to try attempting audio. I'd probably have leaned very strongly on libraries myself. While I did all of the art and audio implementation in the game, being able to rely on people to create those assets and content certainly lifted a lot from my plate and allowed me to focus more on creating the levels, scripting events. There's actually over 18,000 words in the game as well. So it's about the same size as a young adult light novel.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. Okay. For me, from a recruiting perspective, I'm so curious about how did you find the right people to help you? Where did you locate them? Are there people in your network, people from the community? And how did you manage to do this with your budget?

Renee Gittins: Almost every single person that has worked on my team did not have a previous role in game development. So nearly everyone who contributed was either at the very start of their careers or near the very start of their careers. A lot of people were still working another full time job, whether that was at the grocery store or at another game development studio.

So another part of the slow progress is not expecting a lot of hours. Seeing 10, maybe 20 hours a month was not uncommon on the contracts that I was able to get with these other contributors. I also focused a lot on providing opportunities and mentorship to the people that I was working with so that they could explore their interests and passions while working on the game. That allowed them to get more than just the financial benefit of working with me, but also to get personal career growth. Though doing so also meant that I had turnover because people would get a full time job in the games industry after contributing to the project. I've seen a lot of people come through the team without game industry experience and now have a successful professional game development career.

Lizzie Mintus: That's great. And they'll have a ship title too.

Renee Gittins: Yeah. Oh, and then in regards to recruiting them, it was really all over the place. I met a couple people in the local community when I was networking at events. I posted job postings online on the Unity forums and on Reddit. Got my environment artist through that, and then I had some people come to me through recommendations as well. My character artist and animator, the one who at least had done the most content in the game, Atlas Lyn, came through me by recommendation of somebody who had met at the previous DICE. So networking can be very great for finding that talent.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, plus one to that. And you never know who is going to introduce you to the right person. It could be somebody totally random.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, exactly. Actually, I believe it was someone that it was in a mentorship program that I was assisting with, who provided me that recommendation.

Lizzie Mintus: I think the common denominator,

though, in all this is that you put yourself out there. You signed up for everything possible. And if you sign up for everything possible, then you'll meet people and stuff happens.

Renee Gittins: I understand it takes energy. I wouldn't consider myself the most extroverted person. Getting myself to go out to events requires some personal investment. It's not something that I do purely for fun. But it definitely has paid itself back because of all these connections, mentorship, marketing support, advice. It's all been truly invaluable.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's great to go to events and force yourself to. I'm a really extroverted person, maybe that's obvious, I don't know. I get so much energy from being around people and I love that, but I know that many are not that way.

Renee Gittins: Most people think I'm quite extroverted. I talk a lot of conferences. They always see me being outgoing. I'm a bit of a recluse when it comes down to it. I have social anxiety as well. So when it comes to the longer events like GDC, I am totally burnt out, completely burnt out by the end of them.

Lizzie Mintus: How do you combat that?

Renee Gittins: ,Lots of like mental health care techniques and tricks. I grew up with martial arts because my parents met through martial arts. I rely a lot on meditation. Of course, I've seen a therapist in the past, which was helpful. I've done a lot of self reflection. I'm pretty good at preventing myself from getting into anxiety attacks caused by social anxiety these days. But it took a lot of practice of working on ways to get myself out of those spirals when I was getting into them. You just need the mental energy to reorient yourself when you're falling into one of those spirals. And then the more that you get to practice getting out of that, you build a new pathway in your brain to steer you away from those spirals.

So over time, it's gotten a lot easier. It's much less common these days for me.

Lizzie Mintus: Good. I think that's something that so many people struggle with, really. So it's nice to know what techniques that you use. So you would practice mindfulness, meditation. Those sorts of things, and then put yourself in situations repeatedly?

Renee Gittins: Put myself in situations and be kind to myself. If I was starting to panic too much, I would remove myself from a situation and go calm down. There's only so much that you can do with pure fortitude. You have to be already rested and have energy in order to steer the ship when it's curving in one direction.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about how your game evolved over ten years? Did you have anything that you changed a lot at the end?

Renee Gittins: I wouldn't say there was actually too much that changed. In fact, one of my community members in our Discord, recently found my dev blog videos. I started doing dev blogs, when I came up with the concept of potions. So you can watch me the very first day, talk through my idea for potions and they commented, wow, you must have a really strong vision because the game that you described in that first video 10 years ago is the game that I've played today. I would say that there's a lot more in world puzzles, than what I first described.

 I was actually very surprised, not many action adventure games or action RPGs have a lot of in world puzzles. I hadn't actually played any Zelda games before I started creating potions, but there's a lot of similarities in regards to exploring the world, running into enemies, but as well as other like puzzles and things that you have to solve and figure out. Definitely the in world puzzles and focus on them is something that's new. And one of the things that I created in order to both encourage solving of puzzles and to bring in more fairy tales and folklore, there's actually 56 collectible cards in the game that all feature art and information about real world, fairy tale and folklore characters. A lot of the characters I thought were really cool. The Raven and the Coyote from Native American lore, I couldn't figure out how to get those into the game. So instead, there are collectible cards in the game, as well as the Chilean lore, and Japanese lore, and Islamic lore. There's all sorts of things that are brought into the game through those cards. And the player has benefited with permanent upgrades through collecting them.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm so excited to play your game. This is fun. What inspired you to keep going through all these years? Was it just that you knew that this is what you needed to do for the world?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, I'm a really stubborn person when it comes down to it. Unfortunately, yeah. Certainly once I did the Kickstarter, I had promised a community that I would deliver. That has always been my intent. Certainly I missed my original deadline by a few years. So the Kickstarter backers have not always been happy with me, but I have always wanted to deliver on that promise. And I was certain that I would, no matter what. I wanted to be true to my word, but I also didn't want to cut corners and make a smaller or less complete game than I had originally intended. A large part of the game development was just in content creation, and that's certainly what took the longest. I really wanted to see it through to the end.

Some of the biggest struggles have also been the most motivating. One of my very best friends and the graphic designer who actually created the logo for Potions, as well as many of our Kickstarter assets and some of the other assets we use in game, unexpectedly passed away five years ago. And, originally, his passing was really hard for me to deal with. But it also gave me the motivation to see it through to the end, to share his work with more of the world.

Lizzie Mintus: So he designed the logo for your game?

Renee Gittins: Yes. And he's actually an NPC in the game. His name's Jason. You can find him in the world and then do a quest for him. And then he'll be recruited to your town and provide you mini quests and some really useful rewards.

Lizzie Mintus: So sweet. I like that you brought them in. What has been the biggest surprise in your entrepreneurial journey?

Renee Gittins: Ah, the biggest surprise. That's hard to say. I think at the start of my journey, I had no clue where I would end up within the games industry. I was thinking of three potential roles. I could either be a game developer, an engineer. My degree is in engineering, but with a focus on mechanical engineering, so I didn't get too much programming in college, but I did teach myself programming and actually switched over to software in biotech before entering the games industry.

I thought I might want to be a game designer, and that's actually one of the reasons why I designed potions, was to practice game design and see if I felt it was compelling. I do like game design. I don't think I'm very confident in myself as a game designer though. And the last role is as a producer. I tend to be very organized, very good at getting groups of people to pursue an objective to the best of their abilities by empowering them and connecting them with the tools and resources they need.

I didn't expect to really be going up the production path, but that's actually where a lot of my career really grew. If you are a producer that is also an engineer, you will make engineering teams very happy when you're working with them. However, I never expected that to lead to executive management. I never expected to be the executive director of the IGDA or a general manager of a 255 person studio. But as I gained skills and as I practiced over time, I found myself compelled to that route because it allowed me to empower the most number of game developers to succeed. Those roles. are very much about helping others with success. And certainly you might help define a direction or expectations, but really like in order to be a successful manager, it's about providing others with the tools and support that they need in order to execute well and to pursue the things that they're interested in.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you get your management training? Was it on the job? Did you take a course?

Renee Gittins: A little bit of everything. When I was in college, I did take engineering management and cost estimation and modeling, which were very helpful bases for me to start that. It was actually my senior year of college that I realized I could be a game developer, so my final, project for my engineering management course, I wrote a paper on combining work breakdown structure with a waterfall approach to Agile. It was A waterfall step down with agile loops, and it's to ensure that you're iterating and going on the right path, within a relatively measured timeline. Outside of that, I definitely have had a lot of mentorship. I've leaned on the advice of a lot of people in the games industry, and I've read a lot of books. Creativity, Inc. Is probably my favorite leadership book, but I've read all sorts of books. Crucial Conversations, Extreme Ownership, I have devoured many books trying to find the best information possible. But Creativity, Inc. Is my favorite one. It's one I read and reread frequently.

Lizzie Mintus: I'll link it for everybody. Thank you. So can you tell me about your career growing it? You came up through production. How did you end up at Phoenix Labs outside of your own company?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, so I started volunteering pro bono as a producer for an indie studio in the evenings while I was working at Biotech, and that helped me pivot into the game development industry. They had also actually lost some of their back end engineers, so I both did server development and production of managing, I think it was 36 or 40. Indie devs were not being paid, because it was a small project with a lot of people. So that was a very interesting introduction to online project management of large teams.

Beyond that, I found some contract opportunities, some in production, some in other areas that allowed me to build up skills. I've actually been a freelance journalist in the games industry. I was also the marketing coordinator for Xbox Games with Gold, prior to it becoming the Game Pass. So I got to see how Microsoft assessed games and that provided me a lot of information. I actually worked a lot in VR, both through working for friends companies and for mentoring students at Gabe Newell's non profit. Foundry 10. And with the skills I built up in virtual reality, I wrote some white papers and gave some talks, which led me into a position as a technical product manager at Within, now known as Supernatural.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Jane and Dave.

Renee Gittins: So I actually got mentorship from both of them. Truly wonderful. I really loved that role was able to rapidly grow both as a producer and game developer. I had some other indie production roles. That was my first full time job actually in the games industry, which led to several other opportunities. And then shortly after that, I had been volunteering for the IGDA for several years. So when Jen McLean stepped down as executive director, I was already on the board of directors about to finish my term and applied for her position, which led me into executive leadership, which I've been doing now.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk more about the IGDA and what you brought a year later?

Renee Gittins: Absolutely! The IGDA, for those who are not aware, is the International Game Developers Association. It's a 501c6 non profit organization, and it's the largest membership organization in the world that represents game developers. Its mission is to support and empower game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable careers, and it does that by providing educational resources, supporting communities such as local chapters and special interest groups that provide additional resources and events to support game developers, and then other opportunities to network, give talks, and, be connected through the community with potential opportunities.

So when I came into the executive director role, I believe that was in 2019. The organization had been around since 1994, actually. ,Being a non profit, the IGD is actually a lot more scrappy than people realize. And over those years, a lot of, say operations debt had built up. So I spent the first six months at the IGDA, just completely going through all of the documents, all the processes we had, figuring out the processes we didn't have documented, and bringing it all into Confluence, because we had been using Microsoft OneDrive for a bit, and then Google Drive for a bit, neither of which are particularly navigable when it comes to looking for resources.

And so I was able to build out a whole new set of operation procedures. I really focused on training and mentoring staff and ensuring that their objectives were clear. And it was working like a fine tuned machine after those six months, which is when the COVID 19 pandemic started and completely ruined our 2020 plans.

That was a good lesson in pivoting since the IGDA focuses so much on in person events, the pandemic and the financial uncertainty that it caused was really stressful for many non profits. We were able to focus on providing support to game developers who are looking to successfully start working from home when working remotely.

 In April, just a couple months after the pandemic started, we actually hosted a free conference online around how to successfully manage teams remotely, both from a technical aspect, a leadership aspect, as well as like a mental health and community aspect. And that was quite successful, and then over the next two years, we focused a lot on online events and resources, as well as, ramping up our efforts to better support, game developers around the world, instead of just in more of the areas with more established game development communities.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, what a pivot to make. Any highlights?

Renee Gittins: Oh, as I say, of course, this all happened when GDC was canceled, I think two weeks before the event. So yeah, there was a few additional contracts. I was glad that I held off on with the uncertainty or else it would have been much more financially impactful.

Lizzie Mintus: It's crazy to think about the early pandemic days. Another time. So you helped a lot of studios transition into remote and I know a lot of companies are transitioning out of remote as we speak, but what tips did you highlight in the conference for how to have people have ideal mental health when you're running a remote studio? What are best practices from that?

Renee Gittins: I think that the best advice that I can provide is providing clear expectations and communication around those. Humans communicate a lot in person and when we're communicating digitally there can be miscommunication. Obviously there can be miscommunication in person too, but when you are working in an office together there's a lot of passive communication that happens.

You can see what somebody's working on, you catch up with them unexpectedly over lunch or when you run into them at the coffee machine or water cooler. Those infrequent passive communications don't happen when you're working digitally, so you can set somebody off on a direction and they're going in not the direction that you thought and you won't know for days or weeks if you're not maintaining good communication practices.

So I think that setting clear expectations is not only good for ensuring the success of the team members, but it also provides a lot of reassurance. If somebody knows what they're supposed to be doing, they can focus on that. And if you have good communication pipelines so they can get feedback and support and have a sense of community despite working at home alone. I think that is really healthy. Even something as simple as ensuring that meetings start with five minutes of people catching up on how their weekend went or what's going on in their lives can help bring humanity back into working remotely.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Was your team all remote?

Renee Gittins: My team has been all remote the whole time. I've had lots of experience with it prior to the pandemic, which gave me a lot of firsthand experience that I could share.

Lizzie Mintus: When you were at Phoenix Labs, where did you start in the pandemic? Or did you make that transition there as well?

Renee Gittins: It was not really during the pandemic. I started in 2022. That winter had been a little concerning, but most people were getting comfortable in 2022s, especially during the start. Phoenix Labs definitely believed in having people on site, but wasn't enforcing it.

As the general manager, the expectation was that I was in the office, however. So I spent, most of my time in the studio. And unfortunately, I was actually the first person in the studio during the whole pandemic to contract COVID at work. So I broke the record there. And then we had to ensure that our COVID policies were up to date. So that was a fun, I think that happened two months in actually.

But it actually turned out fine. There were very infrequent COVID cases during my time there. In general, we focused on things to encourage people to come into the office for a sense of community versus forcing them to. One of the things that I spun up was a club program. So if you had at least five people who would sign up because they are interested in a topic, then the studio would fund that club with a monthly stipend. And that actually increased the number of people in the office quite a decent amount because people were excited to share their hobbies and interests with others.

So we had a magic gathering club, a ukulele club, a tea club, a tabletop club that mostly focused on painting miniatures. It was actually really great because not only did it encourage people to come into the office, but it encouraged people to be more social across teams and to share their interests. It brought a lot of liveliness into the culture of the studio, especially coming out of the pandemic after people had been separated for so long.

Lizzie Mintus: And forgotten how to socialize.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, I know. And it's, honestly, it's providing a monthly stipend to clubs is probably one of the most financially efficient ways that you can encourage people to bond with each other and share their interests. It's really healthy. I recommend that any studio of the size to support clubs, looks to pursue it.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you come up with that idea? That's brilliant. I like it.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, I guess I was just thinking of positive ways to encourage people to come into the office and clubs seemed like a really clear direction for me. I had been playing Magic the Gathering at lunch with a number of the other employees and that certainly also helped me think of, this brings people together. I know that there are people who come to the office, just to play Magic the Gathering at lunch. So maybe there are people who would come to do other things as well.

Lizzie Mintus: Play the ukulele.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, the ukulele stuff was quite passionate. It was really cute.

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. They should make a little video. Anyone who's listening to it.

Renee Gittins: I think they played ukulele at one of our company parties.

Lizzie Mintus: What takeaways did you have from working at a 250 ish person company to working at an indie studio?

Renee Gittins: I think at a larger studio you have to be much more proactive at promoting work life balance because you don't want there to be unsaid expectations or people to assume that their expectations that they should be working beyond usual hours. So we were very careful, like all the club events had to happen during work hours. All of our company events and parties happened during work hours, because we didn't want people to feel pressured to do social events during times where they should be at their family with their family or resting or doing chores.

I think that one of the difficult things about working at such a large studio is, we had multiple projects going on between five and seven, usually at a time. Understanding what talent we had at the studio that would work well in the slots needed was actually very difficult. We actually had three to four, depending on how you count them, studio locations. And we had teams that were cross studio. So figuring out which members would perform best on which teams during the needs of that project could be difficult because there was 360 people at the studio. Intimately knowing the skill sets of 360 people is very difficult. So we worked on ways of fleshing out how to record people's interests and full skill sets, not just the current title that they had.

When it comes to an indie studio, you know what everybody is interested in and likes because it's basically like working on a pod team at a larger studio. These are people that you interact with constantly, communicate with constantly and get to know intimately. But when you are trying to run a 20 person team in a 360 person studio, and suddenly you need five more teammates, figuring out where to get those teammates from can be very difficult since you're not as intimately familiar with everyone else.

Lizzie Mintus: That sounds like a good chat GPT problem.

Renee Gittins: Yeah, for sure. You always have to be very careful when you are creating databases with information about people because you don't want it to Unintentionally be seen as grading them in a way that's outside. Because especially in different countries, there are different rules around that as well.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's one of the most fun things about having a business where you have remote workers. I bet that was a much bigger challenge at Phoenix Labs versus your own company because you have contractors, right?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, I have just contractors at Stumbling Cat. I get to talk with them every Sunday. We have a stand up meeting and sync. I get to have one on one conversations with all of them to be aware of their current interests and passions and ensure that the work that I've assigned to them aligns. I'd like to think I'm a very, like a very amiable employer when it comes down to it. So those conversations have been really wonderful and I try to make sure that people feel that they are listened to and empowered and get to execute on the things that they are most passionate.

Lizzie Mintus: You sound like a great boss. I have one last question. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to start their own indie game studio.

Renee Gittins: The most important thing is to understand the direction that you're going and how you'd like to get there before you start bringing on other people. As soon as you're responsible for someone else's livelihood, it becomes a lot of pressure and you want to ensure that you're setting them up for success by having clear expectations and direction to provide them with.

It can be very tempting to be like, Oh, I want to get somebody else on board as soon as possible. Unless they are actually a co founder, I don't recommend that. I recommend, if you can create prototypes on your own- prototyping, tempering your ideas, figuring out how you're going to compensate people, your overall business strategy. And then start considering bringing people on. If you bring people on before that, they can feel directionless. They can feel not valued if they're not giving things that they can really sink their teeth into. And you might be wasting funds because you aren't able to get productive work out of them because you haven't defined what productive work is.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, I also want to add that I see a lot of studios, they don't have a clear hiring plan and they don't have a plan for how they're going to decide who they should hire or not. They just think they're going to rely on their gut or something. So I think having that, like you said, compensation, but also who do I need? What is the profile? How am I going to analyze them and setting up all those systems? So when you get bigger, you actually have something and you can look at people objectively and not, do I want to have a beer with this person? Do I know this person?

Renee Gittins: Absolutely. And an onboarding plan as well, right? How are you going to get them ramped up and teach them about the project? And are you getting them access to all of the software and other things that they need as well?

Lizzie Mintus: And maybe an offboarding plan too, like plan for everything, right?

Renee Gittins: Very important.

Lizzie Mintus: How am I going to deal? Lots of fun.

Renee Gittins: Even though I just have contractors, yeah, I still have basically an exit interview anytime someone decides to leave for another opportunity. And it's not necessarily like, why did you leave? It's how did you feel about this? Like, how could I do better in the future? Are there any areas that you see that we can improve? There's so much valuable information that you can get. from another person's perspective.

Lizzie Mintus: I feel like you could make a starter pack. Okay, maybe this is a TikTok idea. If you want to start an indie company, here are the things that I recommend you think about for your next viral video.

We've been talking to Renée Gittens, who is the CEO of Stumbling Cat. Renée, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you, or play your game?

Renee Gittins: Yeah, so you can find my game, potionscurioustale. com. Potions Curious Tale Anywhere will bring you there. As for me, I'm probably the easiest to find on LinkedIn, Renee Gittens, but you can find me across social media as RikuKat, R I K U K A T.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from His Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.