In this episode, Lizzie Mintus interviews Kevin Johnson, Director of Development at Double Fine Productions (now part of Xbox Games Studios), about his journey through the game industry and his role in fostering the studio’s collaborative and innovative culture.

Kevin takes us behind the scenes of the making of Psychonauts 2, sharing how the team brought their vision to life while prioritizing mental health representation, accessibility, and deeply immersive storytelling. He also offers insights into the art of thriving within constraints, the power of proactive problem-solving, and what it takes to balance creative ambition with production demands—while emphasizing the importance of avoiding the crunch culture that often plagues the gaming industry.

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

• The Importance of Accessibility in Game Development
• Challenges and Advice in Leading Creative Teams
• Building Games for All Players
• The Role of Empathy in Leadership
• What Makes Double Fine Productions Unique
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Kevin Johnson on Linkedin
• Double Fine Productions
• Double Fine PsychOdyssey
• Take This
  

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. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives, and you will have a chance to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by you guessed it, Here's Waldo Recruiting. We recruit for games and tech and take a thoughtful data driven approach to it. 

Today we have Kevin Johnson with us. Kevin is the director of development at Double Fine Productions. Previously, he was a producer for over 16 years at several studios, including EA and Telltale Games. He also spent a few years doing contract design and programming for mobile titles. 

We are going to talk about Double Fine, Psychonauts 2, balancing creativity and production timelines, and Kevin's journey that got him to where he is today, including starting his own company, teaching, and his overall unique career path.

Let's get started. Thanks for being here, Kevin. 

Kevin Johnson: Hi, thanks for having me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks for allowing me to recruit you at Dice for this. I would love to start by having you share a bit about your role as director of development at Double Fine. I think most people know about Double Fine at this point. 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah. So as director of development, I'm responsible basically for making sure that all our game projects have what they need are on schedule and are going to release at the quality that we want to release our games at. 

Lizzie Mintus: A small role. It's a lot of responsibility. That's awesome, though. Congrats. 

I would love to hear more about Double Fine and the way in which you work and the culture there. So what's it like to work there? Too many questions at once, but how does that impact your games, too? What is Double Fine like? What's unique about it? And how does that translate into the games that you develop? 

Kevin Johnson: Sure. Yeah, so one of the great things about Double Fine is that one of our core pillars is creativity. Creativity is what drives basically everything that we do from the titles we decide to make to how we go about making them, we believe in a very highly collaborative process.

We try to take hierarchy out of things when we can. I recently had to do an updated version of the org chart to put in our handbook, which is on our company website. And the webmaster asked, the first thing he said is, it's really wide. It's like, yeah, it's really wide because we got a lot of people and it doesn't go too deep and that's just how it is.

And going alongside that, another one of our core pillars is that we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere. One of the ways we live that is I tell people, every game project, we use slack as our primary communication means, and so there'll be project name, art, project name, design, project name, programming. And those channels aren't to organize people. It's to organize ideas and everybody on the team is in all the channels talking about all the things that actually pertain to that subject, as opposed to saying, I've definitely worked at places where if a programmer had some feedback about the art, it was instantly dismissed.

Whereas here, we hear all that feedback, we take it all into account because we know that everybody we have is a ridiculously talented person. And we want to make sure that we're hearing all the input we can to make the games as best as we can. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I like that. Do you feel like it's been pretty consistent since you started? The team has probably grown quite a bit since you joined, right? You've been there 6 years? 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah, it'll be seven years in a week, actually. And actually, the studio hasn't grown that much, really. I think we're sitting around 78, 79 people, which may be a handful more than it was when I first started. It's an interesting thing with that because in 2019 we were acquired by Xbox. And that has shifted the way we approach certain things. One of the things other studios, when they got acquired went through this explosive growth, like we've seen some studios grow 50, 60, even a 100%, like just straight up double.

We've always, in the past, the size of the company was just kind of driven by how much space we had. At a certain point you just run out of seats. But I think alongside that is also a desire to make sure that we all know each other. I've worked on titles where I'm meeting people on the team for the first time at the rap party just because the team is so big and so siloed. I've worked at places where You know, on day one, it was a certain size where even if I didn't work with everybody, I knew who everyone was. When I saw someone walking down the hall, I'd know their name. And then a couple of years later, seeing people going down the hall, wondering who is that? 

So we don't want to reach that point where it starts to feel like everyone's too disconnected. And I think the fact that we're now a hybrid studio really factors into that a whole lot more. So we're being really mindful about our growth plans to make sure that we're bringing people in and making them feel really integrated. And then another part of that is, we want people to stay for a long time. We have people who worked on the original Psychonauts. There are people who are celebrating their 21st and 22nd anniversary at the studio- like me at seven is actually low. 

I did the average earlier this year. The average is around nine and a half years. So that's an incredible thing in this industry. And so we want to maintain that. We don't see ourselves getting too, too big, but I personally would like to see us grow just a little bit more probably 

Lizzie Mintus: I feel like you're really intentional. I like that, I was listening to a great podcast called Acquired and they go so deep into companies and I would say obviously different genres but Hermes is one of the best legacy brands out there and they have a similar philosophy where, how they make goods. They don't even call them factories. They call them Ateliers, but they only have a certain number of people because they believe that it breaks. 

And people don't know each other and the feedback loop breaks after a certain amount of time. So that's really interesting. And yeah, we've seen companies and teams get larger and larger over the last few years. I would think about how many people worked on Red Dead Redemption. That's crazy. So yeah, nice to see that you're doing it a different way. 

I listened to some. talks you did, but I would love to hear more insights about what went into making Psychonauts 2. 

Kevin Johnson: Okay. I'll use this as an opportunity to plug the documentary. So if anyone hasn't seen the documentary, Psychodicy, it's available for free on our YouTube channel. At this point, I think we 33, 34 episodes. The whole thing is over 40 hours long. It's a lot. But it really does give you an inside look at the good, the bad and the ugly as to what went into making that game, from the genesis of Tim deciding that this was something that we should do, which in of itself is kind of a big deal because Psychonauts 2 and Costume Quest 2, I think those are the only sequels we've ever made. 

So it's not really a thing that we do. So even just making that decision was its own thing. And then, there's a process of how do we build a team to make this long awaited sequel, but also addressing the a big part of it for Tim was coming so long after the first game, there's just kind of a maturity that we've all gone through over the course of that time, and we wanted to make sure that was reflected in the game and how we approached certain subjects.

One of the things we talked about is, in the first game, anytime you deal with mental health issues, it's a sensitive thing and you have to be aware of, and the team was at the time, but again younger people and ideas there so things were represented, but not always in the best light. And that's feedback that we had gotten from the community as they were happy to see the representation, but wished it kind of felt more positive overall. So that's something that we took to heart and made sure that we get into depression, anxiety, alcoholism, isolationism. There's a lot of really heavy stuff that we get into. And so we want to be sensitive in how we portray those things while also telling this larger story.

And so part of that was consulting. We had a great collaboration with Take This. It's a mental health organization. And yeah, they helped us a lot with, again, just understanding the subjects that we wanted to get into and what are the right ways to represent those things. So that was immensely helpful. 

And then also just, Tim writes and it's all this amazing stuff. And then it's like, how do you translate that from the page to the screen in a way that honors what he's trying to do and tells the story that we all ultimately believe a lot in. Because at the end of the day, storytelling is a big part of what we do at Double Fine. And I believe that Psychonauts 2 has a great story to tell. And I think we did a great job of telling it. 

Lizzie Mintus: And I know accessibility was a huge consideration and I know there's talks and documentaries, but for anyone who's not spent 40 plus hours, would you be able to dive into a bit more about how you thought about accessibility and what you did to enable it in your game?

Kevin Johnson: Sure. So accessibility is something that's important to me personally. I'm colorblind and have had instances where I could not play a game because of my colorblindness. And there was no accommodation that I could take, so I just had to put the game down. 

Lizzie Mintus: Quick question. Do you know what percent of people are colorblind? It's much more dominant in men, right? 

Kevin Johnson: It is more dominant in men. The number should be, I want to say it's somewhere around 15%. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, so a good amount of players. 

Kevin Johnson: It's quite common and a thing that you would hope more media would be accommodating for, but unfortunately isn't always the case. So again, just something that was very personal to me and something that I wanted to make sure that we took on and did well. 

One of the things that was actually very helpful for us was, the Xbox accessibility team runs these things called inclusive design workshops, where we actually get to sit down with gamers that have a range of disabilities and just talk to them, just hear about what they like to play, how they like to play what kind of accommodations they need what they wish they were seeing from games.

And then we go as a team and kind of ideate on, how can this apply to what we're doing now? How can it apply to what we're doing later? And it was just really eye opening to hear, because you have ideas about things, but then you actually just talk to the people. And they're eager to share their experiences which is great.

And the understanding that you get, especially in terms of how simple things can mean a lot to a lot of different people. You know, an example I use is just a toggle for turning the vibration on a controller on or off. For us, it was generally just a, do you like it or not kind of thing, but for someone with chronic pain, it is literally the difference between can they play your game or not, because that vibration can cause them actual pain that makes them put the controller down and not play your game. 

That's another part of it is recognizing that that's an accessibility feature, the ability to turn off vibration. And not a thing that we had thought about before. It was very helpful. And so really it was in conjunction with the accessibility team at Microsoft. You're just looking at the game, thinking about what we'd learned in those inclusive design workshops. And then just asking the question, okay, how do we make accommodations for someone who might have this?

And the way I kind of did it all, I talked to a bunch of people, grouped all the ideas into three buckets. One was just got to do it, this is just table stakes not really thinking about arguing this. Like these are just things we have to do. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, wait, what was in the bucket?

Kevin Johnson: Oh, these are things like controller vibration, subtitles, and we've actually implemented not just different font sizes, but two different fonts. So we had a more readable font that took into account the types of things that can trip up dyslexic people.

So we had the more legible font, things to address color blindness because that's always going to sit with me, audio sliders and just, again, the kind of settings that I feel like are very boilerplate, you have to do them. And then there were the things that might be a little bit tougher to do, but it would be really great if we could do it. And that starts getting into things, something like remappable controls, I think kind of straddles that line, although nowadays I'd put it more in the, you kind of have to have it. But at that time that was kind of in that, it would be great if we could get a really robust solution there.

And then there were things I felt were, we could talk about them, but I wasn't really expecting to get them and for right, whether it's implementation or perhaps creative vision, and one of the things that I was actually super proud that I didn't really have to fight for was the invincibility mode. Because one of the things that we recognize is, like I said, telling stories is a lot of what we do. And there are people who are far more interested in telling and experiencing the story, then perhaps doing all the platforming and fighting and everything. 

And I'm not a fan of an easy mode, per se, or to use the very terrible example of Wolfenstein, where if you chose the easiest difficulty option, it shows the main character with a bonnet and a pacifier. The goal is never to belittle someone for the choices that they make. But we want to create those accommodations. And so through a combination of, we called it narrative combat. So just basically, Raz hits a lot harder, enemies have fewer hit points. It severely reduces the difficulty of the combat.

So if you just want to take emphasis off of that, you can. And then we just have straight up invincibility mode, where because not only can you lose health in combat, but, in the platforming, if you miss jumps, that can reduce your health as well. But if you just want to remove that stress. You can do that. And it's a thing where we feel it opens it up to a much wider, wider variety of people. And then even just in the sense of we'd have people tell us that it's something that they were glad because they hit what they felt was a difficulty spike. So they could turn that stuff on, get past the part that was really frustrating them and then turn it back off and have the experience that they wanted to have.

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. Something for everyone. How do you go about incorporating and figuring out what players want? At what stage did you do that, and how did you go about it? Not from an accessibility standpoint, but just from a, do people need this? What do people want? In general, what's a resonating standpoint?

Kevin Johnson: Yeah, so that's interesting because there's a lot of different approaches to it. And this is one of those things that's kind of tricky to answer for Double Fine in particular only because the joke I like to make is that the next game we make is something completely different from the last thing we made. And it's kind of true. And so the right timing for that's going to be different for every game. Sometimes we'll do it pretty early and there's things that we can test very early and start to get that feedback on. And then other times, especially if you're talking about a very systems based game, you kind of need to get a lot of it up first, because that incomplete picture is going to give you data that may not be as helpful as you need it to be. And so if we kind of churned out the same kind of game over and over again, we'd have that lockdown for sure. But given the variety of games we vary that timing based on what the game actually is. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. And in your role as Director of Development, I would think a lot of your time would just be figuring out what are the different risks that the game could have and how can you mitigate all of these risks. Do you have a framework for thinking about this or how do you approach that thought process? 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah, so I think this is where kind of my production background comes into play because it's kind of being a producer for the whole studio as opposed to just a producer on a game. A lot of the techniques are the same as you've got your timeline. You're creating work back schedules. There's always the things that just come up on the fly. I lean on my producers a lot to help me understand what's going on with them so that I can take that forward view of things.

 I trust that they're handling the day to day and the milestone to milestone so that I can kind of take a step back and understand, okay, from a project perspective, from a portfolio perspective what are we looking at. And a thing that I've tried to embrace more and more is you do only the things you can do. And so for me as director of development, there are certain things that only I can do because that is a key part of my job. There are a lot of other things that I could be doing that others, but other people could be doing them. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Kevin Johnson: And so making sure you're having a clear understanding of those two different things and delegating as much of the other things so you can focus on the things that only you can do, I think that's where I end up. being most effective in helping the teams get to where they need to be. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's a good life hack. My very smart friend Colleen told me one day when I was overwhelmed, why don't you list out everything that you do for the week? It's going to be annoying, but list it all out. And then why don't you circle the things that you could personally not be doing and that you could do something else. It's a super helpful exercise and it's really simple. I like that you think about that. 

I have the question for any seasoned producer. How do you navigate between production timelines and finding the fun and making a creative game that is enjoyable. The biggest question. 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah. That's always the big one because you want to let the creativity flow and you're going to get a lot from your team when they really feel like they hit their stride. One thing to remember with that, though, is that creativity needs constraints. Like it needs constraints, right? If you ask an artist, if you just give a blank page, then they'll ask, what do we do with that? But as soon as you start drawing, even just the faintest borders around something, now you've got the wheels turning. So just recognizing that dynamic is there is always useful. You have to have the constraints in mind. 

But I think for me, there's kind of two philosophies that I have there. One is the, "Yes, but", and I say that if someone's got an idea and it's, yes, but what are the implications? What are we trading off? And then is that something you want to do? Because we can do the shift and we can do all that, but understand all the things that it's going to take. And then sometimes it's like, yeah, we really want to do it. Okay, cool. We'll make all those changes. And sometimes it's, you know what now that you put it in that context, yeah, we'll walk it back.

 And then the other one that I have is, and it's a little bit flippant, but, that was a great idea six months ago. But it's sometimes just something you have to say, right? You acknowledge that is a really great thing. And we're kind of past the point of being able to do those types of things. 

At a certain point it is just about executing on what you have in front of you and getting to the finish line. And you know, finding that transition point where you go from yes, but to that was great six months ago, I think it's going to be different for each team and each project. You kind of just have to feel that one out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Any tips for fleshing out the, that would be great six months ago to when it could actually be implemented and it can be a " yes, but"? 

Kevin Johnson: Well again, a lot of it does come from just breaking down. If you were going to attempt it, what would it take?

They're just sometimes off the bat where you're just like, we're past the point. Even if we shift a whole bunch of stuff around, it just wouldn't fit. And that's usually the biggest constraint is just the amount of time. But then if it's going to present risk to things that are core to the title, every title has its pillars that you're delivering on. And if you start presenting risk to those things, then that becomes a place to push back as well. 

The good news is though, is in the age of digital releases, patches are almost expected at this point. And so we definitely do talk about things certain things in terms of post launch support. Hey, let's put that in the bucket for when we're looking at the first couple of patches and see where we can fit that in.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. It is a beautiful thing. So what motivated you to go to Double Fine Productions? What is the story behind you ending up there? 

Kevin Johnson: Oh man, I wanted to work at Double Fine since the first Psychonauts. I was a huge Tim Schafer fan. I played Day of the Tentacle when it first came out. I played Full Throttle when it first came out so I had the LucasArts titles there. 

 I had my early career at EA. My wife was active duty in the Navy for 12 years and that took us around the world and I had to put my career on pause a couple of times. But then when we were back in the States and knew that we would be here for the long haul that's when I decided I'm going to go for it.

And I applied. Double Fine never really had a producer opening when I was trying to work there at first. So I was just kind of putting my resume out there in general. Nothing really materialized there. I was fortunate enough to land a production job at Telltale though, which was right there as as a close second, with a lot of connections, a lot of the people there are tied back to LucasArts as well. So there is that link between the two. 

 Then the timing worked out. So I met Carol Shaw at Telltale, she ended up leaving Telltale and going to Amazon for a bit, and then ended up at Double Fine, and she's the one who recruited me to be able to go there. She told me she had an opening for a producer and that's something I'd want to do. And I said, yes, I would. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's my dream. This is why I work in the game industry. Congrats on living your dream. That's so exciting. And it's totally all about who you know. A little bit of timing, right? The role had to be open. The right person had to be there. But clearly you left a great impression. She recruited you. She handpicked you. 

Kevin Johnson: It's funny you've asked about accessibility. That's actually kind of where the two of us work the most at Telltale. We both, coming out of GDC one year, had gone to some accessibility talks and wanted to implement what we had learned into our titles at Telltale. So she and I were working together to make an accessibility push at Telltale. And that's where our working relationship took off. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, from something that you're passionate about. That's awesome. 

How did you end up in games in the first place? Was it also always your dream? 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah, actually, I'm one of those people, I guess, lucky enough to I was eight or nine and loved the games that I was playing. And then one day it dawned on me, Hey, people make games. I want to be one of those people. 

Back then though, you were either a programmer and you were an artist and I was definitely not going to be an artist. So I went down the programming route and I taught myself to program and made little games on my own. And in high school, my best friend, who was also a programmer, wanted to go into design, so we worked together and made little games on our own. 

And then in college, I ended up... first it was a QA summer job. And so I spent the summer as a tester and kind of having that as my first taste of the industry properly. And then the next summer through my school, I was able to get what started as a design internship at EA. And in the middle of that internship, someone pulled me aside and said, Hey I think you'd probably make a great producer. Is that something you're interested in? To which I responded, What's a producer? Then once I learned more about it, I decided that sounds like something that I would enjoy. And then it just went from there. 

Lizzie Mintus: It was kind of a natural fit to production. It came to you. So you studied programming and, but you didn't go into programming professionally ever. It was more of a study at an entrance. 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah. Again, being eight or nine and not knowing much about how games are made other than, like I said, just you make art or you program it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Kevin Johnson: So I was rolling with that. But yeah, once I got to college, the idea of being a professional programmer, that spark had faded a little bit. And so that's kind of when I shifted to design and what could I do there? And I had the opportunity to actually work on some games for education back before that was more of a formalized thing at the time. So that was a great opportunity as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. What did you make? 

Kevin Johnson: We were making physics based platformers before that was a thing, but with the goal of actually kind of teaching the principles. And so, the one I enjoyed the most was, you had an ion that you had to move across a space, and you place positive and negative charges to attract, repel it, and have it navigate through different spaces, which was weird because I honestly never enjoyed learning electromagnetism, but playing that game was fun. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, it's a huge Sector now. I think it's exciting. I work with a couple educational related company and it's super rewarding and just a new way to learn. There's tons of applications for games in the real world. 

And then you had your own company for a while. What was the story with that? 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah. So again, kind of born out of where we were and my wife's career, I was working at a animation studio that made cut scenes for game studios and they had their own motion capture technology and that's what their selling point was. And really, it was at the point at which mobile gaming was really starting to take off. 

And I don't know, I just got the itch and I told my wife I'm going to go to school and learn how to do this. Fortunately, we had the savings to accommodate that. There was really nothing wrong with the job that I was doing. I just kind of had this desire in a way that I hadn't in a long time and just wanted to chase it. So I went to UCSD and learned, took their mobile development program and from that started my own company, just contracting myself as a programmer and project management and made a number of 3D storybooks. 

At the time, storybook apps were kind of just 2d swipe to go to the next page. The premise here was that, each page of the book was actually kind of a 3D diorama space that you could actually explore and tap on things and the characters would speak. And so the story was narrated and then you could just explore the space before you went to the next page. So that was fun to do, especially cause my children were the perfect age to test it. And so I could see kind of how things were going before I was checking in code. 

Lizzie Mintus: And where are those projects today? What ended up happening with that? 

Kevin Johnson: We put out a couple and then the client that I was working with wanted to pivot to productivity. He had an idea for a productivity software, and that was out of my wheelhouse. So at that point we kind of parted ways and I worked on a couple smaller things before deciding, well, maybe I'll go back to studio life because, I'm sure as you can attest, it's a bit feast and famine, and you kind of have to have the right mentality for it. And I think at a certain point the stability of studio life was more appealing.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Especially with young children, I can relate to that. And I think when you're doing your own thing, you have to really be so sure that's 100% in, because it's rather unpleasant a bit of the time. There's highs, you can pick your schedule and you can make something from nothing. If you make all the decisions, it's wonderful. But there are high highs and low lows.

Kevin Johnson: Yeah, exactly. Yep. I can absolutely agree with that. 

I would say probably for me, the biggest thing too, was just you're running a business and there's just the business things that you have to run. I think if I'd been able to find a business partner to kind of put more of that to, I think maybe could have gone a different way.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I remember when I first started, it was just me. And I remember taking a call and I was telling the person about my company. It's kind of boring because I'm such a social person. And then I hired my first employee and we'd have like one meeting a week. She was just working part time, but when there's more people and more momentum. Sometimes it's you doing it, and then I think it's easier to quit, but then it becomes this whole thing. Like Double Fine, it's whole, it's a creature, it's a creation. It has functionality, it's doing something, so yeah it's just a transition.

I would love to hear a bit about you. You've worked for 16 years. You've worked for a while in the game industry, you've worked on many different titles. What is the most memorable, is the right word. What is the most memorable title that you've worked on? And do you have any stories from all that went into creating it?

Kevin Johnson: I think one of the bigger moments for me was working on Minecraft story mode, episode five, while I was at Telltale. Episodes one through four was a very stressful time. We did a lot of... it was just a very short timeline. So we were all working really hard, um but we got them out and it was great and we had a bit of a break before we took on episode five. And one of the things I wanted to do was just kind of definitely not get back into the super high stress situation that we'd gotten into before. 

And particularly with the cinematic artists at Telltale, the animations get made, the design is made, the writing, the programming, and it all kind of converges at the cinematic artists who actually put it all together to camera placement, character placement, and do all that. And they were routinely crunched, unfortunately. That's something that I just really wanted to avoid in every way possible. We had the benefit of, because it was Minecraft, things like animation- you can only take those characters so far. 

So I want to just be really mindful about that. Because usually what would happen is, any other department that kind of fell behind schedule, they wouldn't shift the schedule. It would just squeeze the people at the end. So just be really diligent about helping the other departments, hit their cadence, so that the cinematic team had the time that they needed. 

And we were able to do it. That was probably, I'm not going to go on record and say no crunch, but it certainly was one of the least stressful, least crunchy things that we had done at Telltale, and kind of showing that it takes a lot of work from everyone along the way, but we can do it. But being able to do that for those cinematic artists who always worked so hard, it's something that I will personally remember as kind of like one of my wins. 

Lizzie Mintus: And you worked with so many people throughout your career, who have shaped you into the game developer that you are today. And is there any advice that they have given you that has really stuck with you? 

Kevin Johnson: Yeah. So, I mean I can start off in my earliest days when I started at EA. I was on the Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers game team. My manager, Arcadia Kim, very early on- and I do mean very, just the very start of my career sat me down and said Hey, you, you see, I can tell you're smart, full of enthusiasm, your follow through sucks. Just laid it out like that. Yeah, I kind of had that same reaction. You're like, Oh, okay. And so that was the thing, really focusing has been something that has definitely stayed with me since. 

Another thing I learned on that project was just the importance of having pillars and being able to tie ideas and features back to your pillars, because it doesn't matter how good an idea is. If it, if you can't tie it back to the pillar, then it doesn't belong in the game. And so that's something I kept with me as well. 

I definitely have to give a shout out to Alyssa Finley. She was the head of production at Telltale, which was an interesting thing because we had worked together on Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers. It was developed by Stormfront and published by EA and we had an EA team embedded with the Stormfront team. And she worked for Stormfront at the time. And so then it was a decade later when I showed up at Telltale and there she was. But I definitely learned a lot from her. 

Probably one of the biggest things though, is that it's not real until it's real. There are things that can be talked about as possibilities, but you have to make sure your plans are actually for what's in front of you. And you can pivot when the time comes, but it's not real until it's real, because I got bitten hard by banking on something that wasn't real. And it turned out to just not be real. 

Lizzie Mintus: Good advice. Yeah. 

Kevin Johnson: And then also Mark Dickinson at Telltale. Probably one of the big things he told me was to always be making decisions, because you can rectify your decisions, but the inaction is usually more damaging than a wrong decision.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. That's the Amazon core value too, for sure. Is this a two way door or a one way door? If it's a two way door, you can't make the decision. Yeah, that's great. And I like that you worked with someone 10 years later. That's how the game industry goes. People always show back up. 

Kevin Johnson: Oh, yeah. I think that's one thing I just learned on my own over time. You'll see everybody again. So just keep that in mind when you're having your interactions. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, absolutely. I have one last question. Before I ask it, I want to point people to the Double Fine website, doublefine. com. The last question is, what advice would you give someone who's on the production track and is looking to grow their career in the game industry? 

Kevin Johnson: One, follow through. 

Lizzie Mintus: Make a decision. Yeah. 

Kevin Johnson: I think the biggest thing is to understand that you are there in support of your team and trying to understand what they need to be successful. Being proactive is one of the major things that you can do. And if you wait for things to happen, things will happen and you might be able to adjust to them and that's fine. But I think the most successful producers are the ones that are clearing problems before the team ever knows that they were problems. 

And so staying ahead of that and I think it's that service mindset that I think is the most important thing, just understanding that you're there to help everybody else be as awesome as they can be. And then through that is kind of how you exhibit your awesomeness. 

Lizzie Mintus: Good leadership thoughts, too. 

We've been talking to Kevin Johnson, who's Director of Development at Double Fine. Kevin, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you, or maybe talk to you about accessibility? 

Kevin Johnson: I'm on Bluesky, and I'm not going to pretend to know my handle off the bat, but Double Fine has one of the starter packs and my name is in there. And so, if you go through the Double Fine website, you can find me there. 

I'm also on LinkedIn. Kevin Johnson's a very common name, but I have my PNP and I have it in my title. So it's easier to find me if you search for Kevin Johnson PNP. And honestly, I'm always fine to chat over email. It's very easy. Kevin at doublefine.com, so people shouldn't hesitate to reach out. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you, Kevin. 

Kevin Johnson: Thanks for having me.

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.