🎮 Wondering what it takes to build successful game franchises or start your own game studio? Join host Lizzie Mintus on the latest episode as she chats with Bill Roper, a gaming industry veteran behind iconic franchises like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.

Starting as employee #17 at Blizzard Entertainment, Bill's journey took him from voice actor and writer to Vice President in just nine years. His impressive career includes roles as CEO and co-founder of Flagship Studios, CCO at Cryptic Studios, and VP GM of Core Games and Head of Disney Interactive Central Creative at the Walt Disney Company. He also served as CCO at Improbable World in London and co-founded Author Digital in Washington.

Now the CEO of Lunacy Games, Bill Roper shares invaluable advice on turning vision into reality. Learn about handling adversity, building strong teams, and creating a lasting impact in the gaming industry.

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

•  Bill Roper's Blizzard Beginnings and the Evolution of Iconic Games
• The Blizzard Formula for Success
• The Importance of Building a Diverse and Inclusive Game Studio
• The Reality of Layoffs and Corporate Culture
• Navigating the Challenges of Starting a Game Studio
• Advice for Aspiring Studio Founders

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Bill Roper on LinkedIn
• Lunacy Games

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: Hi, 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. In 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 video game industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the video 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 Bill Roper with us. Bill has been a leading figure in the global gaming industry for 29 years. He started his career at Blizzard Entertainment where he was a key driver in the success of Warcraft, StarCraft, and the Diablo franchises. Bill's previous roles include CEO and co-founder of Flagship Studios, CCO at Cryptic Studios, and VP GM of Core Games and head of Disney Interactive Central Creative at the Walt Disney Company.

He also spent time abroad as CCO at Improbable World in London, and was CCO and co-founder at Author Digital in Washington. Bill is currently CEO and co-founder of a new development studio, Lunacy Games. Let's get started. Thanks for being here, Bill. 

Bill Roper: Yeah, my pleasure. This is exciting. I love getting on podcasts and talking with people. And it's one of the things, it's been 30 years this year since I've been in games and just the continual infusion of excitement and energy in our industry is amazing. So thank you for having me on. This is great. 

Lizzie Mintus: Good. I know, it gets me excited too. It's fun to hear everybody's stories and have a more positive spin into the industry, which is needed. 

I heard that you demoed your first build of your new super secret game and got some fantastic responses. What can you say that is not super secret? 

Bill Roper: Everything feels super secret. Maybe that's some of my old school, game development and publishing, getting in there, trying to keep things a little under wraps. 

But, yeah, at DICE this year, we had a build available. I was really proud of the team. I was the downing Thomas in the room that said, look, if we can have something by GDC, that'll be great. But I don't have any expectations for Dice. I don't think we're going to have anything for Dice. And they all just said, don't you tell us that we're not going to have something ready. We're going to have something for you to show off. And they did it. They delivered and it went over really, really well. 

It's the first time that we've been developing in Unreal, and we're in Unreal 5. Most of the other development I've done in my career has either been in Unity or even more commonly with custom engines that are owned by the studios. So getting a chance to dive in and use Unreal as a tool set has been incredible. And I will say it gives you just such an amazing leg up, not only in terms of what you can get in functionally in the game, but just how kind of almost like instantly beautiful your game can look.

So for us, it was really nice to get out in front of people kind of finally behind closed doors at our meetings, show them what we've been pitching from a deck standpoint for a few months now, and get their eyes kind of opened up to what it is we want to make. 

Lizzie Mintus: Can you share a little bit more about Lunacy Games and the type of game that you might be making?

Bill Roper: Sure. So Lunacy started with actually, myself and two other people that I worked with at the last company that I was at, which was Author Digital. You can tell what kind of a time it is in the industry because, I will not mention their names, because they have day jobs. And I think it's so indicative of what we've seen in 2023 and now, even as early as we are into 24, just the massive number of people being let go from studios. 

So kind of our arrangement is like, I'm out. I'm the public face. I'm the one who's talking about everything. And you know, until we get funding, they're the secret partners in the background, but we all worked together and during the pandemic. You know, we couldn't get together. We couldn't hang out. We couldn't play tabletop games. We couldn't play board games. We couldn't even socialize. So we started playing a lot of games online. 

And we really got excited about a couple of different genres, started playing a ton of them, spitting up our own servers, and then really starting to pick it apart, like what do we like? What don't we like? What would we do better? And then how would we disrupt those spaces? What our other genres we've worked in that would be, I think, really informative into building something very different in the space?

So we've spent the last probably 10 months doing all the pre production design work. We're a very design heavy group of founders. So for us, it was initially about how do we create a setting with really deep lore someplace that we feel is kind of blue water, in terms of exploration in the genre we want to be in and then how do we start building out the systems. Because for us, it's been about when we actually start putting a lot of people on the team, right, and we can be building something kind of immediately.

I think a lot of studios when they start up spend a bunch of time figuring out what they're gonna make And then maybe how they might make it. And so for us You It's been just as important, in terms of knowing that we have to go out and find amazing people to compliment what we, who we already have in the studio. But I think most importantly, I don't know. It's been about not having all that spin up time. So when we actually have that funding, we're actually bringing people in, we're hitting the ground running, you'll notice I'm not telling you very much about the game itself. Like our genre and setting and stuff, but it's interesting. 

I walk kind of a mental tightrope on how much do I say and when do I say it? And in meetings where, it's not that you're under NDA when you're pitching, but there's kind of that implied, you know, look, we're not going to go talk about it. And those things, and maybe something's going to come out or not come out. And it's one of those things of how big of a splash do you try to make the first time you announce it. But I think what we're going to try to do is, right after GDC, the goal is to be able to then take a video of the demo. And then do a little burst about that, and, even like put up the company website, put up a discord server, release a video, be able to talk a little more openly about it. 

I think it's an interesting challenge that every startup faces, right? It's like, what do you say? When do you say it? How do you say it? So for us, we're being a little more cautious Maybe I shouldn't be, but I don't know. That's kind of where we are now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's the path that you're taking to finding a company that nobody knows what they're doing. They were all just making it up as we go right?

Bill Roper: A hundred percent. And every studio is different. Every company is different. There are these fundamentals we all understand business wise, but then right. Exactly. Like how you get there, it is really, I think, always a unique challenge. 

Yeah, and on how you get there and along the lines of what you do with your company, I think right now it's such an amazing time to be starting a company. It's really challenging for developers and starting up a dev studio just because of all the funding issues that we've seen. You know, the retraction in the industry and all these, but at the same time, we're just seeing this incredible pool of talent. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time now, and I don't think I've ever seen this many incredibly talented developers available and excited to work somewhere.

And they're available for no fault of their own. It's not like we made a really bad game or I was the bottom 10 percent of performers or any of that usual noise. That's why somebody might be available. You've got like gifted people that are out there just because. Big studios have merged, right? Our companies have decided, oh, we need to cut our number of employees to make our bottom line look better for shareholders. 

Lizzie Mintus: For instance. 

Bill Roper: For instance, right? It's a couple of examples off the top of my head. So you just got like ridiculously talented people out there. And that was a thing I really tried to bang a drum on when I was a Dice and telling people like, one of the reasons you should be looking to invest right now, not holding your money, but deploying it in a smart way is just that the teams that can get built almost overnight at this point are incredible. And just the level of people I've been talking with, I'm a Blizzard alum, so I talked to a bunch of ex Blizzard people, I know a bunch of people at Riot, and that's just the two latest biggest companies, right? It's staggering. Like it's really almost hard to get my head around the level of people that are out there that are like, yeah, I'm looking for a job or I've been looking for a job for six months, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: The whole process, the whole thing is an adventure. And from a recruiting standpoint, let me tell you about 2021 and 2022. Like, absolutely out of control. The offers people had, the perks they had, the attitude in some cases that they had was wild. And so there was, you know, things have to swing the other direction, but I think what's so important for studios to realize and what I love to hear is that you are being so thoughtful about how you set up your studio.

And I read online about how you take care of your employees and just the fundamentals you really have down. But I think, like you said, so many companies are skipping all of that and they're focused on their game. And when they go to recruit, it really leaves a bad experience for people that go through the process because they don't have all of their ducks in a row.

But I think a lot of people's attitude right now, I've seen, is that there are so many people available on the market. Maybe they don't have to be as thoughtful because they can land people anyways, things will swing in the other direction. And studios like yours will be at a real advantage because you've been thoughtful and careful. 

Bill Roper: I think so. And that's one of the reasons, other than who we are and how we think about the people we want to have in the company and how we would want to be treated somewhere. It's a big swing. So many people I've talked to feel very disillusioned with major publishers, major studios, because they came to feel crushed by that fulcrum, that shift where, when it was the seller's market and they were like, I can go in and get ridiculous offers and just like unbelievable perks. And I think you're right. There became this level of expectation where it was almost like, oh, I deserve this. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, four days a week. I want this big sign on bonus. I want a bus that takes me to work. This company doesn't have free lunch, all this stuff. It's like, This is not reality. Some companies did laundry.

Bill Roper: It's amazing. But it was because everyone saw the massive profits that were potentially there during COVID when we couldn't go do anything else except watch streaming services and play video games. Right? And get sick of it inside of your house. And so everyone ramped up, everybody overhired that created this frenzy where basically developers could ask for almost anything and get it.

And now it's been the hard pendulum swing the other way, where all that over investment has come home to roost. And it shouldn't then be, what we're seeing, because that's kind of, in many cases, poor long term planning in the realm of the executives that run those companies. But I think the big thing is that we can't then let it be, is now where, well, now it's all on the other side. And so these people are, there's so many available. Yeah. I can pay them nothing and give them nothing. There has to be that, that middle ground. 

For us at Lunacy, it's been, well, how would we want to be treated? We want to pay people a living wage. I show people our budget when I'm talking with funding and I let them know, I said, built into our salary schedule, is every year there's a cola, cost of living increase, right? 

And that's something I've never got at a startup, right? Because always startups are like, exactly how lean can you run? How do you keep it down to the absolute minimum dollars and pennies that you spend? Every penny goes into development, and you commonly have everyone taking less than market value because there's the promise of the big payoff. 

Well, unfortunately, the vast majority of startups don't get the big payoff. But you're there because there's something special about that studio, something special about the people that are there, something special about the game that they're making, and there is that kind of usually hopeful dream that, wow, maybe it takes off and it's huge. And I was here from day one and you want that to be meaningful. 

So for us, we've looked at how we set our budgets for our projects to ensure that people are getting a fair wage. We've built in things like, bread and milk don't understand that you work at a startup, so they cost the same every year, right? Everything goes up. So how do we make sure we put that in?

And then for us, and we talked about this on LinkedIn. We also are setting up an ESOP program, so an employee stock option program, from the very beginning of the company. So anyone we hire gets an opportunity to have ownership in the studio. I think one of the things that you see, is that a company gets acquired maybe down the line, or they make a bunch of money and they get all this infusion of cash. And that's really meaningful to the people that started it, but that all the people that worked there that helped them get there, don't get a share in that a lot of times. 

There are a lot of studios that work out bonuses and try to make those things happen. But we really wanted it to be like an ingrained part of the culture and who we are and even how we legally set up the company. 

So I think that's something that a lot of startups don't think of until later, like when they're going to get an investment, sometimes setting up an ESOP is a requirement of that material infusion of capital. For us, even before we have dollar one in the door, we want to know exactly how we'll set that up, what percentage of the company gets set aside for that, and how we would take care of people.

 And I think, candidly, a part of that is just that we've all been in the industry for a long time, all the founders, and we looked at how do we wish we would have been treated? How do we wish that we could have made things different at studios, even where we've had leadership roles and things didn't go the way we wanted them to go. What can we do to set ourselves up to be able to have that happen from day one. 

So I'm very hopeful that we find partners in the funding and publishing realms that see what we're trying to do, not only just from the game that we're trying to make, but who we want to be as a studio and find some synergy with that, find that to be simpatico with what they want to see in the industry, and will come along for the ride with us.

Lizzie Mintus: I hope so too. Thanks for being thoughtful. I work with a lot of founders and a lot of first time founders and have interesting conversations. A lot about walking before you run, because it can be so tempting to run when you start your startup. But if you don't walk at the beginning, the systems break or you don't even have a system, right?

Bill Roper: Yeah, exactly. If you try to run too fast, you can really stumble. And I think that's an interesting challenge that a lot of startups face, especially when they get VC funding, right? It's so much about building fast, yhving that escalation. How quickly do I get to the hockey stick? I've got to get users. I've got to get eyes. It's just massive accelerated growth tends to be, at least traditionally driven by VC investment. But not every company benefits from that. Not every studio, not every product. 

And I think a lot of times where you see these stumbles that have been happening, especially in games over the last, let's say, five years, is not because of a lack of infusion of capital. It's because the mentality of what you need to do and what's important, I think a lot of times doesn't line up between traditional, I'll say traditional, cause it's not all VCs, but traditional VC mentality and what works in video games. 

I think the hardest thing to get across is that though video games are technology, I would argue we're not technology companies, we're entertainment companies, right? Because you have to find the fun, you have to create that connection with a community. There's so much iteration that goes on to fine tune elements, and just like in entertainment, you can come out with a fantastic game.

And for whatever reason, it just doesn't connect with people. That's very different from building an app that's designed to deliver goods to people's houses in the most efficient way possible. There's just such a dynamic difference between those types of things. 

And I think VCs specifically have brought what has worked for them in the technology sector and attempted to apply that to the video game companies. And I just don't think that's always a good match. Now, I know there are VCs that are out there trying to work with founders, and are starting to have some positive results on understanding that, though we are highly technical in what we do and, you know, digital natives, we're not just specifically a tech company, right? There's a lot of art to what we do. 

And I think sometimes, and this maybe goes for everybody, but I think there's a lot of luck that has shown up to. Was your idea that you had not only executed well, but did it hit the right market at the right time. So sometimes it's not even all about whether a game is great or sometimes even whether a game's not great, it's just the right thing at the right time.

Lizzie Mintus: Definitely. We want examples. I want to talk about your early,earlyard days, of course. So you started in 1994. How did you even end up there? Did you want to work in games? 

Bill Roper: Ever since I was really young, when I was probably like five, six years old, my parents used games to teach me math. My mom taught me cribbage, because in cribbage, 15 and 31 and, like, runs, and there's a lot of just inherent numbers that you center around in that game. So she taught me that for addition, and my dad taught me blackjack. Cause of course, 21. So they were teaching me card games to help me with early quick additive mathematics. And I think sparked a lot of my early love for games that continued all through junior high school and high school. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, in like probably one of the five most formative years of my life, 1977. So it was the same year that star Wars came out and I saw that in theaters. So, all through my life through college, everything I've played games. 

I was attending Cal state, Long Beach and, I had a good friend that was an artist, at that time, a small developer called Blizzard Entertainment. And he said, hey, we've got a game that they need music for, because our regular sound guy is working on a different project. And we're doing, The PC version of a game called Blackthorn. And one of the things they want to be different there is the music. So I sent in a demo tape. I was a music major at Cal State Long Beach, of music that I'd done and composed. And they said, yeah, sure. We didn't have very much money. And I was like, I don't care. I get to do music. This sounds great.

And then I had to learn how to do all the MIDI programming. It's very interesting just how much things have changed way back then, when you had a sound card in your computer, every, all the sound cards are MIDI cards and every MIDI card was different, meaning that if you were assigning a sound to a certain MIDI number, on one card that might be French horns, but on another card that might be snare drum.

Now I didn't know that. And so I was using the sound card that was in my computer at home, writing this music and I would write a piece of music out and play it back and listen to it. Like, oh, that's great. And I would save it onto a disc drive and then I would drive it from Long Beach down to Irvine, bring it in, load it in there and it would sound terrible.

I was like, Oh my God, what just happened? It's like the classic, you know, it sounds great at home. I don't know what happened here. And it's because I didn't understand that you had to lock your MIDI channels to say, no, this one is always going to be French horns, find French horns on your MIDI card and make it French horns, basically. 

So I kind of learn all this stuff on the fly. And once I did that during that process, they also were going to be debuting their first game, Warcraft Orcs and Humans, at summer CES and they wanted to have a video to show. And so they said, yeah, we've got this video. We want to do some voiceover for it.

I said, Oh, I do voiceover. I'm a vocal major. And I recorded this tape. And my buddy who worked there who was an artist said, Oh, they're thinking about it, they're not sure if they're going to write their own music yet or not. They're looking at like post the planets and I was like, Oh, great. So I floated in the background music of Mars bringer of war and did some voiceover and use that as an audition.

And I think it was because I was more so maybe because I was cheap and they already had a contract written up with me. They're like, yeah, sure. Come on in. Do some voiceover. And so I got into their office. I sat down with Glenn Stafford, who was the audio guy there. He brought up this cinematic that was like a fly through, through this forest of trees, and then the camera came up and rested on this castle gateway and then the door would open. 

And now it's maybe like, I don't know, Roblox or Minecraft quality, but back then it was amazing. It was staggering how cool this thing looked. And I was like, oh, this is incredible. I said, do you have a script? And they're like, no, they're like, we don't. We just know that there's like some orcs fighting some humans and we need to talk about this big battle that's happening.

So I. sat and wrote a bunch of stuff right away. We sat down. He's playing the video, uh, of the fly through so I can see it. I'm like in the age of chaos, two factions battling for dominance. And I went through and did what became the intro sequence for the original Warcraft game. 

I got done with my contracts. And basically realized that I want to do this all the time, like I want this to be my job. I was working graveyards, doing desktop publishing at Kinko's Copies. And while trying to make it as a musician, I was like, you know, if I got to work a job, like I want this to be the job. This can be, maybe a career? I don't know yet, but I at least want to do this as a job. 

And so I wrote this big impassioned letter to Alan Adham, who was the president there and Mike Morhaim, who was the VP at the time. And I was like, I'll do anything. I'll wash your car. All here's the job stuff I can do. I'm like, Magic, the Gathering had just come out and I was like, Oh Mike, I'll give you a rock Hydra. And I think I promised to watch Alan's car. I'm like, I'll do this, this, this, like anything to work there. And they hired me. And interestingly enough, I took a pay cut from working at Kinko's to go work at Blizzard back in the day, but I didn't care. 

And, the first day on the job, I went to talk with Alan and he said, so you can write. I said, yeah, yeah. And he said, 'cause he wrote all the intro stuff. I'm like, yes, I did all that. And he said, I'm great because we've got this Warcraft game, and really all we know is that there's orcs and they're fighting humans and the bad guy's name is Blackhand. So, go fill that in

. So the first thing I got to do as a full time employee was basically lay all the foundations and plant the seeds for the Warcraft universe, which, thinking back on it now, is absolutely bonkers that that was the job, especially in what it became. And because I had been doing desktop publishing, as well as creating this fantasy landscape, then had to go and do all the layout for the manual. So, it was kind of that, I get to be super creative and it's like, okay, how do I cram all this into a manual that ships with the game? 

But yeah, that was the start and I felt really honored and a little blessed maybe to be at Blizzard. I was the 17th employee there. Um, it was very much a meritocracy. You got to just try stuff because everybody had to wear a lot of hats. And if you did well, then you gotta do more of it. And if it wasn't something you were good at, no harm, no foul. We'll find someone else to do it. You know, move on to the next thing. 

So, I came in doing voiceover and writing. And then I got to do game design. I got to do production. I started from, you know, those like contractor beginnings. And after I was there for nine years, I left as a vice president. So I think it was an amazing opportunity that, I think we still see in the industry usually at smaller companies. But man, watching video games grow up as an industry over the last 30 years has been incredible.

And I still remember to this day when I got a full time job there, And started working and I'd been there for maybe like three or four months where it felt like it was going to be real. Okay, this is going to be a real job. I'm going to have this job. 

I remember calling my parents and I was on the phone with my mom. And I said, oh, I just want you. I left that Kinko's thing and I'm not playing music as much now, but I found this new job. And I don't know, I think it could be a career. I think I could actually do this for a long time. And my mom was excited. She says, what are you doing?

I said, I'm going to make video games. And there was this pause and then she said, your father and I love you very much. And that's always stayed with me. It always will, just how ridiculously supportive they were. And I always credit them both for being the earliest influence in my life, I think, for finding something of value and joy and just playing games. So I was glad they both passed and that I was able to have different levels of success. And they could see that, like, that whole thing worked out okay. 

Lizzie Mintus: They trusted you. What a sweet story.

So you worked on Warcraft, Starcraft, and the Diablo franchises. Okay, question. What goes into making so many successful franchises one after another? What's the secret there? 

Bill Roper: Oh boy, a lot of hard work. Anytime we tell people we make video games, Oh, that's great. So sit around and play games all the time? Like, Oh no. I mean, yes, I do play a lot of games, but not because that's my job. And even people whose job it is in the industry to play a lot of video games. pretty much quality assurance testers, right? Yeah, it's still not like it's just fun all the time. 

I think that if there was a, any kind of secret we had, certainly in the Blizzard days in doing that, is that we made games we wanted to play. Because the company was pretty much top to bottom gamers. We all played when we were not working, making games, we were playing games. We'd sit around, on the floor in the common areas and play Magic. There was multiple tabletop RPG games going. And there was tons of competitive street fighters and samurai shodown. There was always something going on gaming wise.

So it was, it ran deep with all of us in terms of just something we would do, even if we weren't lucky enough to be at a company in an industry doing that. For us, I think the big deal was looking at all of that and saying, well, what would we want to do? What's the kind of game we'd want to play? And trying to use ourselves as kind of our first customers. I think the next thing is that we really had it ingrained that we wanted to make games that were accessible, right? That people could play it everywhere. 

Alan used to talk about his donut theory, which is you've got the center of the donut and then everything else, you know, around the outside. And he's like, you should shoot to make sure that you're hitting the center of the donut. So that's like your core user. If you're making a strategy game, make sure there's deep strategy and make sure that you've got compelling units. Make sure that there's a great story there that's going to hook players. That center is important, but you've got this whole other giant donut, this ring around it, right? And so that's kind of the broader audience, right? The greater people that you can reach. And so when you're doing that, don't make things so complicated that you can't understand them, right?

Show people, don't tell them, have really easy ramps. We used to talk about easy to learn, difficult to master. Like we kind of had these little mantras that came out of this mentality. So we would focus on what kind of game we want to play and then how we make it so it passes the mom test.

That was another thing we had, which was if you sat your mom down, could she play through the game, right? We would set percentages of anyone who starts the game, what percentage of people do we want to have that could finish it? Without, going like, Oh, I'm too frustrated, or I've got to cheat or whatever it is to get through. We always had a very high, what we would call a finish rate. And that was because we wanted people to ramp up. 

But I think the Diablo games are maybe the best example of that, where we worked very hard to make sure, if you wanted to, you could play the whole game with one hand with just the mouse. Then as you started to play, you'd realize, Oh, I'm going to put some potions in the hot bar. So I'm gonna use my left hand and I'm going to use maybe one, two, three, four. So I can trick a potion more quickly. And what would start with you just simply clicking to move your character using one mouse button after a couple hours of play, you'd see people with their left hand on the keyboard, the right hand, they're using both left and right, mouse keys. You've got hotkeys set up on their keyboard. They've become this, they've gained a level of expertise because we really slowly ramped people into it. 

And so I think those were having those basic kinds of precepts that we always built to really paved the way for us to be very successful.

There was a lot of work. And there was a lot of technology that got built. I mean, there's a lot of the nitty gritty of making video games that all went into it that they wouldn't have been successful without that. I mean, even just looking back at the things that we did, just the introduction of multiplayer, into the Warcraft games, even from the very beginning. 

I think every game has this moment where while you're building it, something happens where you realize, this could be great. You get that moment of potential. And with Warcraft, Orcs, and Humans, it was the first time we had multiplayer working. And Ron Miller, who was Head of Design, and Alan Adham were playing in a game with each other. And it was the first time we had people playing against each other.

And it's really fun. They're playing as each other and their offices kind of butted up against each other too. And after maybe like 10 minutes or something, they both come running out of their office. Like that was incredible. Oh, I kicked your butt. And there was a bug that happened where their game de synced and they actually ended up both completing the game against AIs. So they both won, which was pretty funny. 

But we knew at that moment, it was so exciting because they knew there was somebody on the other end that they were playing against, right? I mean, this is when that was still pretty unique. And the fact that we were going to be doing with the local area network was just like, Oh my God, I played against you. That was awesome. 

With Starcraft, I think it was the first time, one of the big things where we had that realization of having three very distinct sides play against each other and how that so dramatically shifted the balance. of the game, and how it was like, wow, when I play Zerg, that's nothing like when I'm playing Terrans.

It's just so different, because the Warcraft series was much more like chess, equal sides with equal pieces and how you use those. But the strategies and the complexities that were there with Starcraft just really exploded. 

And with Diablo, the wow moment was the first time, cause the game originally was turn based and then it changed to real time. And the first time that Dave Brevik got that in and working, and he talks about the first time he clicked. He had a fighter and he clicked on a skeleton. And right when he clicked the fighter, walked across the screen, swung his sword and the skeleton just kind of exploded and fell apart. And the sound, he was like, that's it. Because it was so immediate. It was so visceral, right? It wasn't the go do this thing. Then watch my character move. Now attack. It was the immediacy of it. It was like, Oh my God. This is it. 

This is what the whole thing should be. And I think every game that ends up being a great game, you can talk to the developers and they'll have that watershed moment that happens where something clicks. And you're like, wow, this is incredible. And a lot of that, with the Blizzard stuff was not just design, but was technology that had to get built. Having to build an online gaming destination when that wasn't a thing with Battlenet. Having to do tons of work on graphics engines to do things that just weren't able to be done back in the day when people were like, you can't move that many pixels across the screen. You can't have eight players and multiplayer. 

And I think that was maybe the last big thing on this is that design always led technology, right? It was never the other way around. I think when you look at a lot of what's happening today, and just to pick one, like in the realms of web three, they're like, we have this technology, here's blockchain, here's NFTs. And then somehow that was supposed to drive creativity and create games and that's never the way it works, right? It's always, here's a vision that I have. Here's the kind of gameplay we want to have. Here's a kind of world that I want players to exist in. And then you create the technology that allows you to realize that. I think that's where success lies. 

And I think that's some of the challenges we've had in an industry and to circle back to our, what we're seeing in terms of how that's impacted, in a lot of ways, very negatively, kind of the business of games is that so much got invested in this idea of this tech, right?

It was like, but there's no great gaming application or more importantly, push for it. Like no one was asking for that in games. But then this tech was there and excitement was there and investment was there and then they realized like, that didn't net out to any great games because that's not what was driving it.

So I think that was maybe one of the other big secrets for that success. It was always about the game first and then you created whatever you had to, to realize that game. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what would you say for studios that are still searching for their aha moment? How do you go about finding it? Just trying all kinds of new things, creating something brand new. 

Bill Roper: Yeah. Have your vision for what it is you want to make, right? Have that belief in it and then just get something up and running as soon as possible and then play it and iterate. And, we talk a lot about finding the fun, build and iterate, fail fast, all these kinds of different terms to get used to.

But if you have a gameplay system right now, it's easier than ever to get something up on screen, right? Try something out, whether that's, I have an idea for what I want this to look like, or how I want this to work. If you're a game designer and you've got an idea for a system, if you can paper prototype it, do that first. Like anything you can do to try your idea out or your mechanics out or your systems, and just like to iterate. Make it, play it, fix it, play it, fix it, play it, fix it.

 And I think the other corollary to that is, don't be afraid to get rid of something that doesn't work. At Blizzard. We always use the very harsh term, kill your babies. Specifically harsh in the way we set it, because it's like nothing can be so precious that you can't be willing to get rid of it, if it doesn't work inside of a game.

And it doesn't matter where I came from. Same thing with great ideas. Doesn't matter where a great idea came from, whether it's the CEO to the marketing guy who showed up, saw something in it. This actually happened on the original Diablo. We were showing off a build. One of our marketing or sales guys was there watching the demo we were doing for the studio. And he asked, Hey, it's really hard to see, like the items when they drop. Is there a way you would like, I don't know, hit a key and it would show you where all the items are? We're like, yes, yes, we could do that.

And that got into the game because we realized it is really hard. You hear all these sounds going off. You know, and you'd listen for certain sounds, like the sound of a ring dropping. I think any Diablo player will say, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that one. Because we wanted to give you these cues that something really valuable just dropped. But then certainly in some of this tile sets, it was almost impossible to see anything. So we were like, Oh, well, what if I hit the Z key? And then it'll just tag everything. I'll see the names of everything come up, not as immersive in the world, but it was like this necessary accessibility option.

And that just totally came from a question that one of the marketing sales guys asked. So, you know, great ideas can come from anywhere and conversely. Terrible ideas can come from anywhere, right? Just because, the chief creative officer said, Hey, this should go in the game. If you play it and it's not good. Everyone, including the person who came up with the idea, has to be able to say, you know what, this isn't working. 

And maybe you have to change it or tweak it. Or maybe you just have to say like, nah. Just abandon it. And the sooner you can get there, the sooner you can realize something's working so you can build on it, or something's not working so you can get rid of it, the better, which is where that whole fail fast mentality comes from. But it's all about getting something on screen, getting something that you can test even if it's... 

We used to paper, prototype, all kinds of stuff. Like here's a combat mechanic. Can we boil it down where you can do it with cards? What does that feel like? Here's how maps might lay out. Can we simulate that cutting stuff out and how would we build levels before art can get a chance to actually do it? Or before, the engineers can program that algorithmic generation system. Just doing that and doing it as much as you can.

And then what I think goes along with all of that is then have everybody in the studio play. Like no one on your team should not be playing. Everyone should play. 

Lizzie Mintus: Everyone should be playing, yeah. 

Bill Roper: Everyone should play. Everyone should pause there. Everyone should pause, yeah. Cause it's weird. To me, it's weird. I'll talk with people and they're like, yeah, I get done with my job and then do play tests and I've handed it off. It's like, wait, you're not in the play test. You're not playing it. Like, how do you know what works or what doesn't work, if you're not in there playing it.

So I think that's where a lot of times this concept of like, Oh, you've got to have passion. You've got to have passion to be in the games industry. I think it's important. I love working with people that are passionate about games. I don't think it's a straight up like requirement, but even if you're not passionate about games, which gets, I think abused a lot, candidly by employers. But you know, even if you're like, look, I really like games and I really like working in games. And let's be honest, most people that work in games are pretty passionate about them because it's a pretty rough industry, right? 

They have to at least be able to let go. Yes, I'm going to get in and I'm going to dedicate myself. I'm going to play. And look, if you're running a studio, don't assume or require that your people are going to play after hours, right? If you're going to have play tests, which I think is essential to building your products, schedule them as part of the work day.

We're like, Hey, on Fridays from two to four, we're all playing, right? Don't have it be like, Hey, can everybody stay after work? You know, we're going to start a play test at six and go till nine and we'll buy you pizza. I think that that's, if that was something where everybody wanted to do that, or you were like, Hey, we're just trying to get this last bug out, maybe you can make that kind of agreement with your studio. But I know so many studios where that just became their norm, right? And then it's suddenly it's like, Oh, well, you just got, you just asked three extra hours a day, a week, sorry, three extra hours a week out of your people that should just be incorporated into your schedule. I think that's the one thing we have grabbed onto as what I think is a positive, if we can look for the positives out of COVID, is that because we were all home so much, right, we started realizing how many hours we give up to work that aren't actually work.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I used to commute so many hours. I calculated it. I'd commute two hours a day. 

Bill Roper: Right. You're like, that's 10 hours a week that I'm just in my car. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's a work week per month. I remember I wrote it all out to my boss. I was like, why should I be able to work remotely? Here's what I could be doing. 

Yeah. Exercising, spending time with my family, doing other things that will make me a better employee. 

Bill Roper: Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's one of the things. And at Lunacy, we talked about, we are absolutely going to be a remote studio. There's no way we're going to make anybody have to go into an office. I'd love to have the ability to have that as an option for people if they wanted to do it, if they came to me. Because I know that I function better. If there was a couple of days a week, I could be at an office. 

Because for me, we have a young kid, he gets home early from school. Sometimes that could be super distracting. There's times when I'm like, oh boy, if I just had a place I could go a couple days a week and just have that pure focus. That'd be amazing. 

But the vast majority of people that we work with, are working with as contractors in the studio now, they get so much more done because they're at home. They don't have this extra work week a month that they're spending in the car driving someplace, right? They don't have to then think about, well, how early do I have to leave? How late am I going to get home? I've got to put all that extra effort, like money into gas and eating out.

I'm like, it all adds up. And what we do is digital, right? Even though it's art entertainment, in a lot of ways, like it's purely digital. There's no physical reason you have to be someplace. There's not a line where we're producing something right, or physically building a thing together.

And so we've really applied all of the learnings we've had over the last three years now where, COVID, we couldn't leave our houses for two years. And we've had another year of something like, Oh, you know what? We really learned how to run a studio well and how to work well in that environment.

And then, I think about the upside. For people that are building studios, for employers, is the fact that it so greatly broadens your talent pool. 

Lizzie Mintus: Let me tell you about that. I used to try and relocate graphics engineers to Bend, Oregon. Like, that's laughable today. That's not going to happen. One, you can't even find the person. It's very challenging to find the person. You can't find them. We do, but it's a whole adventure. 

Two, they're not going to relocate. And then for me, the best part, I have two little kids. I can't mom and commute somewhere and say goodbye to my kids all over FaceTime. That just doesn't work for my life. So studios are able to find people outside of their community, outside of being a white male, no offense to white males, and can join their studio.

And you can look at all these amazing talent pools with people from all different backgrounds, all different personalities, ways of life, religion, age, sexual orientation, everything. You can truly build such a more diverse studio versus if you're trying, let's say you were going to build a studio in Portland, Oregon.

It's not very diverse there, right? 

Bill Roper: That's a great point, lizzie. Diversity is so important. 

If you're trying to make a game that you want everybody in the world to play, represent everybody in the world as best you can in your studio, right? And I used to think of, I mean, when I got started in the industry, right? Look, it was all white guys. 

We were a bunch of white dudes because we only knew other white dudes. We went to college with white dudes and that's who were predominantly in gaming. Right? And then, when women would start coming in, it was a lot like marketing and sales and HR. Like running the studio right from a logistical standpoint. But I think there's a lot of challenges around even today, how women get pushed out of STEM programs, right. It's something that I can be talking a lot about professionally.

My wife has her doctorate in HCI from Carnegie Mellon, so she thinks about this stuff a lot. We talked about a lot and how important diversity is. And it's not just, but then over time I realized it's not just gender, right? It's also your ancestral background, like where you grew up. 

And then when I was at Improbable, I worked with someone on my team who actually opened my eyes to a different diversity, which was economic. And I'd never thought about that in terms of having people on a team, but their viewpoints on everything of content that went in the game, how we approach producing a title, how we would look at our budget, when we were budgeting out projects was very much driven from their upbringing in a very low income setting. It really shaped who they were. And I realized that I was very fortunate and got raised in almost a non-existent thing we have now, which is like a very middle class, in the U.S. setting. 

We weren't rich, but we could take a holiday every year. I didn't get everything I wanted, but I got a lot of stuff I wanted as a kid, right? Because both my parents worked. And so it was this really interesting, eye opening moment for me, like a wow moment. It's like, oh, like diversity is all these things and more. And how do you account for all of that? And I think when you pay attention to that and you make it a focus of how you're running a studio and how you're approaching bringing people onto a team that you can get a much stronger studio out of it.

Lizzie Mintus: It is. The ROI is there. You will make more money. 

Bill Roper: And there's one other thing that I'll tag on to that. That's not exactly diversity, but it's a way of thinking about teams. I have specifically stopped and we've had conversations about this at Lunacy that, we're not a family, right? I think that's a term that gets used a lot. 

Lizzie Mintus: Abused a lot. For a family, you do this. 

Bill Roper: Yes, exactly. 

Lizzie Mintus: You do this for your family. Your family's not gonna let you off. That's the thing. 

Bill Roper: Right, yeah. Your family's not like, Oh, sorry, times are tough. See ya. 

You know, um, It's, maybe originally I got used to trying to create deeper bonds amongst teams and like, Hey, we're all in this together. You know, we're trying to do something hard and big. And we've got each other's backs, you know, we're a family, but that. A, this isn't true. And B, as you noted, just gets abused where suddenly it's like, look, you need to do this. Come on, we're a family. You're like, you know, I don't even know if I would do that for my brother, right? The fact that you want me to do it because it's going to increase corporate profits? Let's at least be honest about that. 

I think it's important to build deep relationships. I've made lifelong friends. at places that I've worked. I think it's really important, for example, I always tell people, have a best friend at work. Have someone that you know, that you meet, you bond with, that you can have as a confidant that when you come to work, you're like, Oh, Hey, you know what? I don't have lunch with that person. That's great. Like building those kinds of bonds and friendships could be really meaningful, especially because we spend so much time, such a large disproportionate amount of our time in life working. 

But let's also be candid with each other, right? Let's be honest. Let's be truthful that we're not a family. I'll do a heck of a lot for people that are on my teams that I work with. I definitely have gone out of my way a lot, probably stupidly at times to do things, to my own detriment, but at the same time, like they're just not actual family, right? And I think I learned that the first time I worked at a big company where I had someone come up to me and say, look, I need you to understand something, HR is not your friend. And I was like, but I really like my HR business partner. I like who I'm working with. And they were like, yes. And they're an awesome person and they do fantastic work with you. And they're not your friend because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, they're here to protect the company. Like that's their job, literally their job. And you want them to do it compassionately and you want them to do it, with a way that respects the people that are involved.

But I think this is the really hard thing in the midst of all the layoffs we're seeing in the industry right now, right? Some of these companies, especially the smaller ones, are doing that to try to survive as a company. I get that. I don't necessarily like the way it's being done. I don't like the fact that, everything from blind investment to hubris to just not maybe knowing what you were doing led to these things, over investments, where suddenly it's like, Oh gosh, I guess we hired two times as many people as we really needed and you know, the parade didn't go on forever.

But in that you hope that you have HR people that do their absolute best to take care of those folks, right? But ultimately, if they have to, that HR person is not going to then be like, look, I'll go back and like totally fight for you because I think the company's wrong and I'm going to get you that extra whatever it is, right? That's not their job. So I think one thing I would say is that if you find yourself in that terrible position, and I've had it happen too where someone's like, look, this is the way things are. This is what's happening, right? 

The person that's delivering the message actually isn't, I'll use huge air quotes here, the bad guy. Right. Or the bad gal, right? They have a difficult job. A lot of times they've been brought in specifically to do this job. They're not where the systemic challenge lies, right? But then also realize their job isn't to go to bat for you. Right? And look, I'm not defending what's happening.

It makes me angry. I don't like seeing it, but at the same time, it's one of the things that as humans, we're supposed to be able to do, right? Like look at something and say, it really upsets me. And I can understand why it's happening. Right? I mean, I got let go from a job one time where it was nothing I did wrong. This studio just faced big funding challenges that they did not see coming. I don't even necessarily look at that and say that the CEO, there was a fault. And they said, look, I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I have to do this big reduction. And I was like wow I wish I would have known about this earlier. Maybe I could have helped figure out, if there was any way you saw this coming, we could have figured something out.

Well, I'm kind of in a lurch now because I'm just getting let go, but I understand you're trying to keep your studio open and you are being candid with me in this moment. So I'm not happy, but I'm also not going to come at you for this. And certainly the HR person that was on the call, you know, half the time. And I think this is the hardest thing. And then I'll move on from this. But, it's that though they're not your friend, a lot of times they're also not intentionally trying to be unfeeling, just because they're reading something that's canned. Right? It's because they have to. 

Lizzie Mintus: People don't understand that. Yeah. That’s always how layoffs work. 

Bill Roper: And it's horrible. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of us are finding out firsthand what layoffs are like, right? And there's a lot of righteous anger around that. I don't think even that's misplaced depending on where it's aimed. But the one thing I'm just gonna say is, don't take it out on the HR person. And in the same breath, I can say like, HR is not your friend. HR is also not your enemy. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, they're the messenger. 

Bill Roper: Yeah, they are also people, just like you are, doing maybe one of the hardest jobs in a company. I mean, I can't think of a job, day in, day out, that's a bigger rollercoaster than HR. Because think about it. When a company is doing really well and they're hiring, they get to bring candidates and like maybe get someone their dream job and they're there, look at this amazing company that you're in. And like, it's all ups. And then if something goes wrong, then they have to be there on the other end of it too, saying like, Hey, we have to let you go. This is what's happening, you know?

I think maybe, hmm, I just thought, maybe that's also another reason, not just functionally, that they're not your friend, but I think I'd have to build some level of distance if I worked in HR, right? I could be cordial and friendly with people, but I could see where it could get really hard to build deeper relationships because you'd never know, right? Your boss just shows up and it's, by the way, we're letting X percentage of people go. Here's the list of names. You would be like, Oh man. I formed a really close relationship with somebody that sucks. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, you'd be distant. One of my friends, a mom friend in my life, works at a large company and told me she's laid off thousands. Thousands of people. That's been one of the primary functions of her HR leadership role. And different people across that there's so many different reactions, but there's a few common ones. People have obviously gone off the rails, different countries have different laws they have to be aware of. So it's a hard job, but I think that there are studios that are doing a really poor job at layoffs, go see their employees and shock everybody and make really long term bad decisions for their personal brand and those around them. 

But there are also companies like Hidden Path, who wrote a really open letter about what happened, shared the list of all their developers proactively with people, wrote them recommendations. That's an incredible way of being honest with a situation, being honest with your team, and doing the right thing. So I think people have to do, like you said, layoffs for a lot of different reasons. Some. are poor management, poor executive leadership, all of this, but some are just wonky situations that are out of their control. 

Bill Roper: Yeah, I mean, I think a big thing, and I think you really really nailed it there, right? Is the fact that it's how you handle adversity as a studio. One of the things we talk a lot about at Lunacy is this concept of radical transparency. Unless I am morally or legally obligated not to share something, I'm going to just tell people in the studio about it. 

One, it's a heck of a lot less work, right? It's like when you tell your kids, just tell the truth. It's easier, right? If you start lying, then you got to keep track of all the lies, right? It's the same thing, if you're like, okay, what did I tell them? Can I divulge this now? Even things where, and this is an age old developer trick where the producer's like, this is actually due on March 15th, so we're going to tell the team it's due on February 20th, because I'm going to pad some stuff in because they're never on time. Well, guess what? They're all professionals and they figure out you're padding. And then they go like, eh. If he told us this is due February 20th, it's really probably not due in the middle of March. So whatever we'll get it done by then. So then the one time you tell them like, no, no, I really meant this date. You've messed everybody up, right? You've screwed it up all the way around.

I think the same thing is when you're like, respect the people that you're working with, give them all the information you can, right? Like I sit down and say, look, this is where they are. Especially if you're in a startup, right? And if you're running a studio, let people understand how long your runway is. Let them understand where the money's coming from. 

One of the biggest problems, and I have been in my career, I think the first time around, with Flagship, it was my first time in a CEO chair and we got to where money was running out and everything. And it was like, we can't tell anybody. We can't tell anybody. They'll all leave. We can't tell anybody. Now I look at it and it's like, the earlier you can tell people, here's where we are, we've been having trouble raising funds or, hey, our funding partner just defaulted or something happened. And saying like, so you know, that 18 month run we had? It's six now, right? 

But if you tell people that ahead of time, you also then can say, if you've built up that trust with them in that respect and say, like, and the reason we're telling you this is because, here's what we're doing, here's how we're addressing it, right? I don't want any of you to leave because, you know, the fear is always a domino effect. But like, what can we do together to get this to And I have been at studios where it's almost always too late. It becomes like the desperation play at the end. It's like, we've only got another two months or a month and what's going to happen? Can anybody help? But if they'd have known ahead of time, you'll find that, and you should never expect this or require it, but you might find that some people are like, Hey, you know what? I'm a double income household. I can take half the pay. For a couple of months, right? Or hey, I could go on sabbatical, right?

I'm not doing anything that's essential right now. So like, why don't I take some PTO or where you can maybe get that lengthening of the runway or you might find, conversely, that there's someone who's on the team is like, Oh, look, I've been struggling here anyway. Maybe it's a good time for me to move on. And from a purely running a business standpoint, that's a headcount now that I don't have. Maybe this was the impetus for us to part ways, not that that person was bad or anything, but I'm getting that little cost savings that's helping me and maybe helping everybody else in their career. Or you might even find people that are like, look, if you're open with them and saying, candidly, here's the thing, we've got a conference coming up or I've got a pitch meeting coming up. And it's like, we got to crush it. We've got to smash it here. This is our chance. If we can have this right showing or have this right meeting, this is like a money meeting, right? Like we can get this deal signed. And if the studio knows that. It's not just that it'd be a good thing, but maybe that's an essential thing at that time, right?

People are going to lean in maybe more than they would, not because you're telling them they have to, but because they see the stakes and they see the value of doing it. When you're hiring people into a studio, you always are trying to hire the best people you can, or you should be. Always hire people that are better at what they do than you are. I think this is super essential for leads as well, like if you're an art director or an art lead and you're hiring an animator, hire an animator who's better than you are at animating. Hire a concept artist who's better than you are at concept. Hire a modeler who's better than you are at modeling, right? What you should be the best at is getting talent and keeping them together and directing them. Right. 

I'd be in really bad shape if, as a CEO, I hired people that were no better than me at their jobs because I'm not an artist, I'm not an engineer, right? So if I was like, oh, well, I don't want to hire an art director who's better at me than art, like, that'd be ridiculous. I don't want to hire a business person who's better than me at business, right? Because that's where, as a leader, you're successful when you build that team around you. 

And so I think that's the same thing when you're looking at how you're going to approach those people, once you've hired them in is to be candid with them, be transparent with them, like they're professionals. You brought them in because you believe in their abilities. And you believe in what they can contribute to your company. So I think it's important that you put that same belief in them that, if you're saying like, look, I want you to understand the journey we're all on, especially in a startup, that I think your end result is going to be much greater than if you're trying to kind of keep everything hidden.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's definitely a theme I've heard from many people, a lesson. I have one last question. For anybody that is thinking about starting their own studio, do you have any last words of advice? 

Bill Roper: Strap in. Ha ha ha. It's a lot. If you're going to do it, um, start small, start fast. I'll speak to games specifically, it's a very different environment now than it has been, in like 2021, 22, or even earlier than that. It very much used to be, you can come in with a team and a dream and a great deck and get funding. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yep. 

Bill Roper: Right. So when we started going out and talking to people last year, that's the mentality I'd always used and where I'd always had success. So I did all that. I had a team, we had a dream that we can articulate very well on a pitch deck, went in and what we tended to get was, Bill, love you. Love the studio you're building. Love what you want to do. Love how you're going to try to be disruptive. Man, I like everything about this. Come back when you've got a demo.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Bill Roper: Almost to a person that we talked to. And it was a huge shift that had occurred. Now it's like, show us something, right? Because I think a lot of investors and publishers got burned during the last three to five years when someone came in and said, look, I've got this great idea. And I was a data analyst at Riot. And they're like, that's great. Here's 5 million bucks. Go start a game studio. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's always Riot. Ex-Riot. 

Bill Roper: Right. It's the easy one to pick on, because they were so successful. But it's the kind of thing where they now realize like, Oh no, that's not nothing. The pendulum is swung hard the other way. So they're like, Oh no. Show us something, prove to us you can get something on the screen. Show us that you've got the ability to do these things. Give us a level of comfort. I think it's gotten challenging. If you're starting a studio right now, also realize the fact that the pendulum has swung hard the other direction. And I think there's more and maybe too much, borderline too much that's getting expected of startups to come to the table with before you can get something, right? There's a couple of people we showed the demo to that said, this is great. When is this thing going to be in? And I'm like, that's going to be in when I have money, because they're asking for something big. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Right. 

Bill Roper: And I totally get it. I see why you want to see that, but I can't get to that point without some level of funding, right? Be prepared for it to take longer than you think it's going to take. You might go in and say, look, I think we're going to do this and get a team. And we're going to build this thing in three months. And then we'll go out and talk to people. And in six months, maybe a little bit more than we'll have some money. No, everything's going to take twice as long or more than you think it is. As best you can be prepared for that.

And then understand, lastly, how much of your time you're actually able to commit to that. So I think we're going to see a lot of studios, startup coming out of this last wave of layoffs that have happened in the industry. Because people that have been working together, in some cases for years on projects, are going to be like, you know what? Because they made those friendships. They made those connections at where they work. They're like, we're going to go out and start a studio. 

Understand, if you're going to do that and you're saying like, this is going to be our full time focus, part of it's like looking at your finances and looking at what you have to do and how long can you go without having an income, right? I'm not saying how long you're going without working, because you're working every single day. Like right now, I work every single day. I don't have an income. 

Lizzie Mintus: Right. 

Bill Roper: Cause I'm trying to start up. And understand what that means to your situation, to your family, to you individually, whatever that is. And you have to kind of time box that and be realistic around the time boxing. Like I can do this full bore, not having any kind of income for X amount of time. And plan that out. Treat that as much as you are writing up your business plan. But then also realize it is nowhere near as easy now to then say, okay, once I get to the end of that three months or that six months or whatever it is, then I'm going to get a job. Because there isn't really the, like, I'm just going to snap my fingers and go get a job, like it was a few years ago. Right?

If you doom scroll through LinkedIn, you know, don't do it. You're right. But you'll see, you're going to see people post. I've been looking for a job for three months, six months, nine months, a year. Right? So for every job that goes up you would know the actual numbers, but it feels like there's probably a thousand people, maybe it's actually a hundred or a couple hundred, but there's a lot.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. There's a lot. 

Bill Roper: Yeah. It depends on the job. 

Lizzie Mintus: You just have to put in work now. Like before you just the only applicant and waltz in and you get an offer and you get a sign on and you get all this stuff. You actually have to work, which people I think are upset about. And there are companies that ask you to do 120 hour art tests, right? That is inappropriate, but you also need to be like, okay, the market's not great. I need to get a job. What can I do to differentiate myself? And how can I take my job search seriously? 

Bill Roper: But build that into your scheduling, right? Realize that it's not what it was. And if you're looking at it and saying, okay, well, what am I going to do when I need income? If it's go back into the full time job market, so now I'm taking a startup and I'm working evenings or working whatever on it. Know that's going to happen, build that into your schedule, right? Or last thing I'll say is, figure out what your other thing you could be doing is, right?

We live in a side gig world now, right? So like, hey, if you're normally a 3D artist, and you're like, no, you know what? I'm going to be the art director and go to the startup with some friends or something like, what could you be doing on the side? If that isn't going to get another full time job, like a 3d character artist job or environmental artist job. Could I be doing props or character stuff and selling them through the UE marketplace? Maybe you're also a great illustrator. Can I be doing character art commissions for the 80 billion people playing D&D right now, whatever it is, right? 

Because sometimes, to keep the dream moving forward, you find a lot of other small things, or the other thing that fuels that, right? It's like the classic actors, where do you meet all the actors in Hollywood? At the restaurant, because they're your waiter and waitress, right? You have the thing you have to do, to try to do the thing you want to do. 

I think there is the ability for a lot of folks right now to potentially look at that they just got, especially for some of the bigger companies, like pretty good severance packages and they're like, Hey, I can last for X amount of time. Maybe the thing I want to do right now is pursue that dream. But while you're doing that, be realistic at the same time. It's the hardest thing to do. Candidly, it's a thing that a lot of times investors don't like to hear. Right? Because they wanted to be like, Oh no, you're all in. You're only doing this. This is your passion. This is your life. And you're like, yeah, you know what, I don't disagree that it should be. This is my passion and this is what I want to do all the time, but I don't get to go to my bank and say, Hey, you know, that mortgage? Well, we should just hold on because I'm pursuing my passion. Right? They don't care. The bank's not your friend. So it's how you find that balance of maintaining the requirements you have in life while doing that. 

So if you're doing a startup, like those are the things you have to put into that as a personal level and you have to talk about really openly with your talent, your co-founders. I probably talk more about my personal situation with my co-founders than I've done in past, not current, past relationships, where it was someone you're like, I'm dating this person. They're really important to me, but I would never tell them what my financial status is. We talk about it between the three of us all the time. How are you doing? Because we're having to put cash into the company. So it's like, Hey, can you do this? 

And I think a thing that, the last thing I'll say is that knowing you're doing that, actually in having to do that, gives you good discipline for when you're running a studio, because let's say you come up with that team and that dream and you build that demo and you find someone who's like, yes. We love what you're going to do. We're going to back you. Here's a hundred grand, 500 grand, 10 million, whatever it is like that you've raised. Right. You will be doing yourself an amazing long term favor if you treat that money like your own. And when you have to start by only using your own money. 

Lizzie Mintus: Forces you. 

Bill Roper: It forces you to look at every expense, right? And balance like, do we have to do that? Is there a better way we could do that?We know that it needs to get done a lot of times, but what are my alternatives around it? And it's not to then be like, Hey, be really cheap and don't do the things you don't need to do and underpay your people and all that. But having that discipline get baked in when you first start and think about that, I think there's nothing but help you down the road when you're actually getting investment dollars.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's been interesting to see all the big companies and crazy stuff they spend their money on. And now they're laying off. So there you go. We've been talking to Bill Roper, who is the CEO of Lunacy Games. Bill, where can people go to find out more about you? Work at your studio? 

Bill Roper: So right now, because we're still super stealthy, I can't even send you to a website, but where I will send you is to check in via me, right now on LinkedIn. So if you go to LinkedIn, and you go to B. I. Roper- B. I. R. O. P. E. R. That's where I'm posting everything about the studio right now. I would say that in the next month or so, we're going to have a website and a LinkedIn page and all that other good stuff. But, to that point of keeping things tight and lean, no one wants to see the websites that I build. So I haven't done that. And we literally have been kind of pushing off. 

It's like, we have a dollar to spend, where are we spending it right now? Are we standing up a website? No, we're putting it towards the demo we're building, right? So, it's just been the kind of thing where again, you get a lot of errors, you can be shooting where you're putting the wood behind. So, yeah, if you want to learn more about what we're doing, announcements are coming up. Right now the absolute best place to do that is on LinkedIn. And just look for Bill Roper and I'm that friendly face that pops up. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks so much, Bill. 

Bill Roper: My pleasure. This was great. Thank you.

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