In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, Lizzie Mintus chats with William Schmitt, the Head of Studio at Proof of Play, a company on a mission to shepherd games into Web3's on-chain universe through uncompromisingly fun games. With over 32 years in the gaming industry, William has held key leadership roles at Disney Interactive, Scopely, THQ, Activision, and more. He has launched 60 titles across 23 platforms, including Tetris Worlds, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Spider-Man, and Madden Football.

Tune in to explore William's "fail fast" philosophy and how rapid prototyping and player feedback shape his game design approach. He shares insights on balancing quality with deadlines, the importance of iterative development, and focusing on core features that deliver “the fun.”

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

• The Importance of Canceling Unfun Games
• Failing Fast and Learning from Failure
• Leadership Tips and Treating Team Members with Respect
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• William Schmitt on Linkedin
• Proof of Play
• Amitt Mahajan on Linkedin
• SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefullyby

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. I'm the 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 about their journey. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by us, Here's Waldo Recruiting. We're a boutique recruiting firm for the game industry, and we value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. Before introducing today's guests. I want to give a thank you to high vibe PR for introducing us. Tiffany, you have been lovely.

So thank you today. We have William Schmitt with us. He is the Head of Studio at Proof of Play, which is a company on a mission to shepherd games into Web3's on-chain universe through uncompromisingly fun games. That is such a good phrase. Prior to joining Proof of Play, William was the director of studio operations at Disney Interactive, executive producer of Scopely, director of production at THQ, and the lead producer at Activision. William has shipped 60 titles across 23 platforms, including Tetris Worlds, South Park, The Stick of Truth, Spider Man, and Madden Football. 

Let's get started. Thank you for being here. 60 games. This is amazing. I want to start by asking you, What does uncompromisingly fun mean to you? 

William Schmitt: Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

Uncompromisingly fun means that there's no excuse. When you put it in the hands of people, they need to have fun with it, right? So oftentimes, you enter a test session where you bring in people to play your game and you provide guidance to them and they provide feedback to you.

The more guidance you provide to the person, the less of a chance that you're actually getting an honest review of your product. There is no compromise. You can't stand over somebody and say, Oh, push that button. Or, what you're trying to do is attack that thing. It just needs to be intuitive and fun for people to be able to pick up and play. And you know, there's no excuse once it gets into the hand of the player. 

Lizzie Mintus: I could see how that'd be a really common mistake. Wait, do this, or you meant to do this, but obviously you won't be standing there when the game is released. 

William Schmitt: I've been in so many tests where, I just want to say, no, no, no, just push that button. You'll get to what you're looking for. And UI and UX in general is such a complicated skill to learn what's intuitive- what's intuitive to you may not be intuitive to other people. So all that testing to say, can people find that button? Are we trying to draw people's attention away from what they really should be doing? Those are honest questions you have to ask yourself when you're making a game or people just get lost, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I guess a lot of it's being honest with yourself. And how are you creating this uncompromisingly fun at Proof of Play? 

William Schmitt: Well, we are very honest with ourselves. We have a lot of great people that have been making games for a very long time at Proof of Play. And so we walk in with a lot of opinions on what we think has worked in the past and whatnot. But that doesn't mean it directly applies to the game that we're making. And that's a secret that people learn the hard way. There's no formula to success, right? 

I was working on a second product at Scopely when I was making the WWE Champions product. And we were like, Oh, we'll just do the same thing we do with champions and with Walking Dead and with other games. And it should be a hit. And, no. That's certainly not the way it turned out. We followed the same process. We implemented similar features and everything, but we didn't get the same results.

It's about the subject matter. It's about how you present things. It's about the second to second interaction with the player. You have to pay attention to that. 

Lizzie Mintus: Do you feel like you were just following the playbook of what you think already worked and ignoring finding the fun, I guess?

William Schmitt: Yeah, it's a great idea to have experience and to come in and say, okay, this is how we've dealt with things in the past. When you identify problems, it gives you a direction to go in, but it doesn't give you an answer, right? The answer is formed through trial and error. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Okay. Tell me more about Proof of Play. And we talked a little bit before, but I met Proof of Play, Mark Skaggs in the early, early days. And I think there's an incredible story about them getting funding and even starting, right? 

William Schmitt: Yeah, I mean, I really should leave that to Amitt. You should bring him on and talk to him about that. He presents it so much better. But Amitt is the founder and he's got a long track record in the industry, starting back with Epic and creating the technology that got purchased and turned into FarmVille. He was responsible for one of the biggest games like on Facebook ever. He's built marketplaces and he started and exited several companies- very, very successfully. 

So he's just got to kind of track record of success. And that comes from him being incredibly honest. And he is just one of those guys that kind of look at his work and not take past, victoriin nd to account. Like, yes, he made FarmVille. Great. That doesn't mean anything on Pirate Nation, right? All the experience that he has and brings forward means a lot, but just because you've made a success doesn't mean your next game is going to be a success.

Lizzie Mintus: People say that's a really common mistake that they fall into. I had Jordan Weissman on, who's arguably one of the most successful people in games, and he said when he failed it's because he said, I know what I'm doing. I've done this so many times and didn't verify. 

William Schmitt: I feel I had the same experience on Spider Man 3, right? We just came off of Spider Man 2. One of the most successful Super Hero games of all time, introduced that beautiful swinging mechanic through the city. And it was just so, so good. And then we roll into Spider Man 3 and we just change the story elements. We don't really advance anything else in the game? There's no advancements to the swinging mechanic or the combat mechanics or anything. And people were just like, yeah, there's nothing new here, right? And the game did all right, but nowhere near the expectation that we thought it would. 

Lizzie Mintus: So what did you learn from that? What was your takeaway? 

William Schmitt: Just don't be stagnant. Always be innovating. A lot of people ask for a sequel. They'll say I had a lot of fun with the first one. I want a second one. But that doesn't mean they want the same thing again. They want advancements on what they've just played.

Lizzie Mintus: But you also worked on Madden Football and the eSports games are pretty similar. Why do you think that works versus Spider Man? 

William Schmitt: The change is different. The change in Madden is the players, right? It has a built in fandom, which is like, I want to play for my team. I want to play these new players that are on my team, right? Or I want to build my dream team. So the feature innovation, which I was there when we were on the Sega Genesis, if I can date myself back that far. And we got rid of the passing windows. 

What a lot of people don't remember is back in the day on the Sega Genesis and the NES, when you snapped the balls, a quarterback dropped back, three windows would pop up at the top, showing your receivers running down the field. And we decided we're going to get rid of that and we're going to pull the camera back. And that was such a revolutionary change to the game. And that's one of the changes that made the game advance, right? Because it was getting stale every year. They look for an advancement like that. 

Now they don't always find one, right? But they have kind of the safety net behind them, which is new players have come in and the fans are going to carry forward from here to here. And I'm guilty. I skipped Madden's, right? I've skipped one or two Madden's and then rejoined it three years later. So, because the innovation is slow, right?

Lizzie Mintus: But it is consistent. That's a good point. 

Okay, tell me more about your game, your studio, Proof of Play, and the evolution of being in this completely new space. 

William Schmitt: Yeah, so I will go on record as saying I'm not a crypto bro. I'm not a NFT holder. 

Lizzie Mintus: Disclosure. 

William Schmitt: Yeah. When I came in, I didn't even own a wallet three years ago. I looked at NFTs. I'm like, I'll just take a screenshot of it. I'm fine. I don't need to own the 70 digit code that says I'm the actual owner of it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. And that is huge. I want to talk about this really quickly. So we did some recruiting for people in this space and the response from gamers- this is my podcast, so I can say what I like, but we sent out some messages and someone replied, NFT, no fucking thanks. And my team's like, oh my gosh, we have never had this response at all. 

So how did they approach you in a way that made you change your mind about it? 

William Schmitt: So I was really skeptical of it. I was actually on my way back to Electronic Arts at that point. I had just interviewed with them for the first time. I came up with my first interview. I was going to go back to work on UFC, which is my home. I did the UFC Undisputed Series, launched it at THQ and ran it through its sale to Electronic Arts. So I thought, Oh cool. I'll go back there and it'll be fun to rekindle that. I love mixed martial arts. And so that's going to be great.

And then I get a call from Amitt and he's like, Hey, have you ever considered this? And I'm like web3, NFTs. I don't know. And he's like, well, it started as that, but I don't think that's the game we actually want to make. We want to make an actual game. So I explored the space a little bit.

I played a couple of games or tried to play a couple of games. I will go through the friction of what I went through real quick to get into a game. I tried to get into a game and, the first thing they said is, okay, you need this coin. So I'm like, okay, I've got to go to Coinbase, try to buy the coin, can't buy it on Coinbase. Oh, okay. Well, I gotta go through a different app to buy this coin. So bought the coin and they're like, okay, you got to bridge your money over to our network, right? Our chain. And I'm like, okay, and that takes time and it costs money. So I'm already out of money going into the game. Then I need to set up on the network and I get into their game.

And then the first action I take in the game that's meaningful. A receipt comes up and says, Hey, we're about to charge you a penny for this action. And I'm like, well why is that? And sure enough, I'm paying what are called gas fees. Every time I make a meaningful transaction in the game that costs gas to validate, I'm getting charged for it. So my experience keeps getting interrupted time and time again by saying, you're about to spend a nickel. You're about to spend a penny. This is going to be three cents. I'm like, I don't want to be reminded of this and I don't want to be paying for this every time this comes up.

And then the actions that I'm taking are actually pretty meaningless. Like as a player, my choices don't matter. I felt more like I was flipping egg timers than playing a game. And it was like, Oh, this is now the state coming back in a week and collect it. I'm like, you want me to go away for a week? I'm going to forget about your game in a week. What are you talking about? So it was such a bad experience. And so I got back on the phone with Amitt. I'm like, that was horrible. I do not want to make a game like that. And he's like, neither do I. I'm like, all right. 

So we got into a conversation. I think it lasted like four hours where we were just going back and forth about what type of games we like. And we really connected our RPGs and the idea that we can't break the immersion. We have to get rid of all those friction points, no technical friction getting into the game. I want to go to a webpage, click on a button and play the game. Or go to the Apple store and click on download the app and start playing the game. I don't want any of this extra friction to get into the game. And he agreed. He said, yeah, that's what we're trying to build here.

We're trying to pioneer a space that other game makers can come to, right? And he hearkened back to Epic and how they were building the Unreal Engine so that other people can get in and make games and so forth. So that got me interested and. I was like, all right. Let's talk more about what type of game we want to build. And they were just coming off of a, back when Mark Skaggs was there and everything, they said, Hey, we're going to build a Mafia War style game. That evolved over time, and after Mark departed along with a couple other people, including the main designer, they said, What type of game do we really want to make?

And they decided they wanted to make a real 3D world game where you walk around the world and you actually interact with stuff. And it kept growing and as I joined it only grew even further and I was like, Oh, I love RPGs. Let's talk about what else we can do. And our game is kind of like a mini MMORPG CCG in that you're playing with a lot of other players in the same space. You're making decisions that are story driven. And the combat mechanics are based around these cards that come as you level up your pirate and level up your ship and build ship items and attach them to your ships.

So yeah, it's evolved over the last two years from a very menu driven experience to now a 3D world where you're going around. And here we are in October and we're about to release, not only are you playing in the shared space with everybody else, but now we're going to turn on the, you can see everybody else in the space. So it's going to be very exciting this month. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's really exciting. And have you solved the friction points that you encountered? 

William Schmitt: Yeah. So those were challenges. So the first thing we got to was having to have a wallet, right? I'm going to metamask and set up my walls for that. No mobile gamer is going to do that, right? Like, when we get to mobile, that's a death wish. It's not going to work. So, what we did is we created a custodial wallet system where it's like, Hey, we're going to create a wallet for you, and you can take possession of it anytime you want.

But just accept that we're going to create the wallet for you, it's one little prompt at the beginning of the game, and that's the only remaining friction to deal with wallets. Of course, at that point, you could also say, no, I have a wallet. Let me just connect my wallet. But if you don't have a wallet, then it just says, we're going to create a wallet. You can take possession anytime you want. So that was the first item. 

Second item is, acquiring a token and, and, moving that token, bridging it over to the chain that you're actually on so that you can actually make purchases and pay for the gas and stuff like that.

Paying for the gas is easy. We just create our own chain. We bounced around. We started on Polygon, we went to Arbitrum Nova, and then we worked with Nova to create our own chain called Apex. And recently, we did something that no one's done yet, which is we created a second chain that interacts with the first chain. So Apex and BOSS are working together in what we call the multi chain. And we can actually expand that to a C chain, a D chain, as many chains as we want, which makes our game infinitely expandable, which is another problem we can talk about in a moment.

But getting rid of that friction of getting a token and bringing it over, we still have tokens on the L1, which are your pirates. But we don't want you to have to bridge them to the game to play with them and then bridge them back if you want to sell them. So we created a technology called mirroring, where we just recognize that you had it on the L1, and then we mirrored it on our chain.

And we have one little verification that goes back and forth and says, nope, you truly own it. Cool. You can play the game. So no more bridging. No more purchasing a token and bridging that over. And so with that, both of those friction points are gone. And just one by one, we go through and we say, what is a possible churn point in this chain of getting into the game? And we've eliminated all of it. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what is your bigger vision? So you have this game, . Have your own chain. Will you bring other games to your platform to play and why would they do that? 

William Schmitt: Well, we want to solve all the hard problems, right? And once we solve the whole problem, we want to bring other game makers into the space. So we're going to share those solutions with those game makers so that they can get to making games quickly. 

The thing that Sony found out back when they kind of took the market away from Sega is, games attract players. Players are going to go to the platform that has fun games. If we're the only fun game on the platform, it's unlikely we're going to have a lot of success. So we have to bring more game makers over with us and get them involved in this. And there are game makers that are making full on chain games along with us. And, you know, again, we need to solve the problems, share those technologies, share those solutions, and bring more people into the fold so there's more content to come and experience.

Lizzie Mintus: And why would somebody want to play an on chain game versus a traditional web 2 game? Where do you feel like the real advantage is there? 

William Schmitt: Excellent question. So first off, it doesn't matter where the game is. It just needs to be a fun game, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

William Schmitt: So, I don't want people to even know it's an on chain game, honestly. It's just like, this is a fun game. I downloaded it on the app store and I've been playing it. At some point in their lifetime of their game playing, they're going to realize, oh, wait, I have a wallet. I can do something with this. Oh, look, I own everything I've made in the game, which is a huge allure on chain gaming movement, right?

When you get assets in the game, they're yours, right? And you can do with them what you want. You can trade them with other players. One of the ideas that we're going to be pushing for is if you have an asset in one game, it counts towards something in the other game.

Marvel Avengers Alliance did this in the form of, we call it the armory back then. And so you would get these things from various quests and everything, and you put them in the armory and it would add general buffs to your team. So when they went out and did stuff, they did better.

So you want to have the best stuff in your armory to basically, fortify your team. We can do that cross chain very easily. So if in pirate nation, you own a frigate, and it has a cannon on it, and we launch Space Nation, or we launch Ninja Nation, or whatever, we can say, okay, that's part of your armory. It's gonna help you with combat. You get to do 5 percent more damage because you have a frigate and a cannon, right? So, easy to do that. And if it's a natural fit, like if it's Space Nation, maybe your frigate turns into a space frigate, right? And so you have that in your game. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I like that concept. And how do you, like you said, this game wanted you to come back in a week. It's already so challenging. You're not going to do that, but you've shipped 60 games.

People are really struggling to acquire users and keep their attention now more than ever because players have so many games that they can play and they go back to playing that game that they love and that they played for so long. So how do you intend to keep players engaged in your game? 

William Schmitt: So, without a doubt, retention is the number one goal of games. Growth is only good if you keep the players, right? Making a sticky game means making a fun game. Something that they can come back to. 

I think social collaborative, social competitive, is the way to do that. If I'm playing with my friends, and we can all do something that's fun and we can compete as a team, we can compete with one another, that's going to help to retain players. Now, obviously, there are some fantastic games out there. I keep going back to Clash of Clans and like restarting and playing it because it's such a great ramp experience. It does reach a plateau that I get unhappy with eventually and I kind of churn again.

But the idea with us is we want to have that kind of similar stickiness where it's like, I get in, I ramp up, hopefully that ramp is nice and long. It's World of Warcraft long, where it's like, I played for eight years, getting the best gear and everything. But yeah, make a fun game, period. Make a fun game. I can play with my friends. So I've got that kind of social camaraderie going on as I'm playing it. And then, continue to expand it. A live operation of the game is incredibly important. 

Something we learned on WWE champions is always have something going on, right? Have a world boss, attacking the Infinite Isles, have the Royal Navy join the game and start levying taxes on people and you have to defeat them to drive down the taxes for everybody. You know, big events are important. Keeping that world alive is important. 

Lizzie Mintus: You want to see if people like it when you launch, but how do you plan the right amount of content, because people go through it so quickly for your launch?

William Schmitt: There are two types of content. There's the one and done content, which are like normal events, right? So we did like a world boss event where the three kaiju sized sea monsters came and attacked the infinite aisles and players had two weeks to basically defeat as many of them as they could. They ended up taking down the megalodon we called Bruce. 

It was a fun event, but it was a one time event. It was one and done, right? We haven't run it again. That was like a two week event. Now it's set up a system that we will take advantage of in the future. And we will run it again with different sea monsters and whatnot. But those are good. Sprinkles on top of the donut. But what's the donut? What is the big thing that you always come back for? You have to have systems in the game that are compelling and I don't want to say grindy but something that you're going to repeat doing.

And this could be in the form of competitions like a rotating competition. This week's competition is, we call them star based leaderboards, and the reason why is you collect stars by doing these actions. The more stars you collect, the higher up on the leaderboard you go, and then every two weeks we reset that leaderboard to something else. 

So the stars for week one will be like combat, like how many little kelplings and stuff can you beat this week? And then next week it'll be crafting. It'll be like, how many ship parts have you created this week? And next week there will be mausoleum runs. 

We have this question in the game for the mausoleum where you have to play through a very hard gauntlet and you get a key, you have a chance of getting a key, if you get that key, you sail the seas looking for the mausoleum. And if you find it, you can actually unlock the mausoleum and you get a chance of getting this thing called the spiteful spirit .And the spiteful spirit is used to make things within the crafting system. So we can say, how many spiteful spirits did you collect this week? So we can keep rotating this competition and always have a changing up.

That's pretty important, right? Because you don't want to be doing the same thing. I'm just doing combat over and over again for six months. It doesn't matter how fun the combat is, eventually it's going to get old. 

Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. Okay, I want to talk about canceling unfun games. I just came back from Dice Lake Como, which is excellent and always in a location that you want to visit. So it might be a questionable business expense for some, but it's small, it's intimate, you get to talk to people and had really insightful conversations. And Rice from Strategic Alternatives was talking about how not enough games are canceled and he believes this is part of the reason why we are here in the, survive until 25 2024, whatever it is that you want to call it state of the industry and that people who are in leadership roles in studios are not incentivized to cancel their game because that means their project is shut down and their studio closes.

So can you talk about how do you know when to cancel an unfun game or figure out when you can just improve it to find the fun? 

William Schmitt: I have a couple examples I'm going to go to here. First example I ran into, I was very young. It was back in the nineties, they put me to work on a game called Shaq Fu. They sent me over to Paris. That was the good part of it. I got to spend a month in Paris with Delphine Studios, a legendary studio. And they did smoke at their desks, it was really not great in that regard. But, they don't work on the weekends, so I got to travel around Paris on the weekends, it was great.

But Shaq Fu is a game that should have been canceled, honestly. It was a terrible, terrible game. We knew it was gonna lose money. It was not well thought through. There was no design for it. That's warning sign number one. We don't know what good looks like, right? That's a phrase I use a lot. Know what good looks like. 

Define early what it is you're trying to do. And then be honest with yourself. Did we actually reach that goal? With Shaq Fu, we did not. And eventually it was like, hey, we pre sold X number of units, you have to get over there and just make sure the game ships. And it was definitely a business decision to ship that game. And we fulfilled the orders and whatnot, but also created too many carts. I often joke that the Redwood Shores Campus of Electronic Arts is built on the foundation of Shaq Fu because they had that many cars left over.

So it was not a great experience, but it was a great learning experience, wow. Sometimes we need to track the game much earlier on. We need to find the fun very early in the process with a small team that gives us the best chance of success. Don't start building out all the auxiliary systems, those tertiary systems until you find the fun, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: You don't think you found the fun, but you continued to scale and ship to hit a deadline, or why was that decision made? 

William Schmitt: Yeah, it was made because it was, the game was being made on a formulaic format that Electronic Arts was stuck in back at the time. And that was back when they were shipping, like, a hundred and fifty games a year, right? It was just like, throw everything out there, something's gonna work, right? 

I also worked on another dud called, Jordan Chaos in the Windy City, where you went through it. It was like a platform leveler, but you had different basketballs that had the elemental things like fire and ice and stuff like that. So you'd hit the enemies with it, but it was again, not well thought out. They kind of just like me to a game based off of another game. And it was like, it was just not great. 

But the sports games are great. And the SSX Tricky was amazing. SSX and SSX Tricky was amazing. So how come those worked, but Shaq food didn't, right? It's because they actually found the fun in those games early. SSX Tricky became incredibly fun the first time you went down the slope, right? Then you know you can build on top of that. 

I think Bungie was coined to find 30 seconds of fun, right? The Halo team where they're just like, It's so fun to run around as a Master Chief and just shoot things that we can build anything else onto this game and it'll be great, right?

Most of my success in the games that I've shipped, it's been a fun game within the first 30 days before we tacked on everything else. UFC Undisputed was the same way, right? When we worked on UFC Undisputed, we were in a pretty bad place in that we started working with Yuke's, and Yuke's was a great company at the time. They'd been making the WWE games for consoles for a long time. 

We went over there, and we said we want to make a mixed martial arts game. They instantly just slapped Chuck Liddell and Rampage Jackson's skins on wrestlers and put them in the same room. And, you know, they were stomping their feet, when they were throwing punches and whatnot. We're like, that's not MMA. 

So we focused on getting what MMA felt like. And we actually took the team to Cobra Kai gym in Las Vegas and worked with Mark Lyman, who was the director there. And he taught us Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and what it is we're trying to do on the ground. And it's all about transitions. It starts with a standing game, and as soon as you can get the person to the ground, here's what you want to do. You want to take them through these positions to achieve full mount, to pound them out, right? And, that kind of sank in with them. It's like, oh, that could be a fun experience. Let's prototype that.

How quickly can we get that into the game? We got it in very quickly, and we played it, and we're like, that is a great experience. Not only do we have a good striking game, like we can do kickboxing, and everything, which having worked on Knockout Kings from long ago before that, I was like, okay, this is comparable. This is a fun experience that we're having. 

But now I want to take you to the ground and I want you to be able to resist me taking you to the ground and transition to a half guard and go to full guard or you know, you try to get him back into full guard. I try to get around to side control and into full mount.

And probably the most genius thing was, I listened to a lot of Joe Rogan at the time and Joe Rogan is really knowledgeable when it comes to Bruce Wayne Jiu Jitsu and explaining how to shift weight and what the transition should look like. And if I get a hold of that arm now, I can pin it behind the guy and do this. And it was so eye opening.

Before then I would watch mixed martial arts. I'd be like, Oh, he went to the ground. I'm bored. I'm going to go get a beer. But after hearing that explanation, after going to Vegas and going to the classes, it all started making sense. And what I think the beauty of it is when Rogan was doing the announcements, announcing with Goldberg, these guys explained what action was happening on the ground and brought you into it. And you started to understand these things. 

Sorry, I'm getting away from the point, which is finding 30 seconds of fun. Those transitions were the fun part. Like me struggling against you to get into the next position was the fun part. And we had to make little twitch mechanics. And at the point, we called it the shine. You would like to try to use the thumbstick and you'd rotate it. And however many contact points you made within a period of time, like 10 seconds would be your success or fail ratio, whether or not you transitioned. It was a very simple action, but it was so rewarding when it happened on the screen that it was just, it was fun, right?

Lizzie Mintus: You think it's fun and your team thinks it's fun, but then you have to validate. 

William Schmitt: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Have you ever had an instance where you're like, yes, we found the fun. We love this. And then you have a lot of play testers come in and they're not finding the fun that you found? 

William Schmitt: Only about 75 percent of the time. Especially when working on something like your 1st first person shooter or your first RPG or something, you're like, this is what I remember from playing RPGs that I really liked about it. But then you're like, this is actually pretty boring when you watch somebody else do it, right? 

So usability testing is great. And I suggest people do it very early. Disney had a great saying, which is to fail fast, right? That's where I learned the whole fail fast theory. And it's, build a prototype, just get it operational. Don't worry about the bells and whistles. Don't even worry about the look of the game, right? 

Put it in front of people and see if it behaves the way you expect it to. And then make the changes with that small group of four or five people until you lock it in and say, yeah, that works. Everybody seems to be having fun with it. And you know, it's fun because they start asking if they could play it again. Or we were working on a Marvel game and at lunch, we'd go into the break room. We had a paper prototype. We laid out on the table. And we just saw people pick up and start playing it. And they kept coming back the day after, the day after day. I'm almost like, all right, that, that looks like mechanics working. Cool. Let's, let's introduce a couple more rules and see if we can push this further. 

Lizzie Mintus: Someone at Dice said they knew their game was fun because somebody broke their hand or their arm, but they couldn't stop playing the game. 

And then what about dealing with team morale? I mean, I'm sure there are some instances where you're further than you would like, and you have to make major changes. Cancel the game. Something goes wrong inevitably a lot of the time. How do you deal with that for stakeholders in the team? 

William Schmitt: That's rough. I think it's about setting expectations early, right? Telling people that we're doing something hard, telling them that we're going to fail. And here's how we deal with failure and teaching people that. Especially young people that come in, they don't understand that failure is a great learning opportunity. They just say failure is failure, right? But failure is only failure if you don't learn from it. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. I think that's a good rule of life. One of my good friends has a severely autistic son and always talks about how she makes all these systems for him. Hey, I'm going to pick you up from school tomorrow and after that, we're going to go to the store and do this. But she said she just translates that to everything in her life because everybody wants to know what may happen so they can eventually prepare for it. So I feel like that's a good rule for hiring for anyone on your team, anyone in your life you're dealing with. 

William Schmitt: Yeah, I've raised a daughter and a son and it really helped with that too. I mean, people laugh when I talk about potty training my son and we had a scoreboard and you would earn stars if you did it right. And he can apply those stars to a toy chest that we had that had hot wheels cars and monster trucks and everything in it. And he would look at me like, I really want the gravedigger monster truck. That costs 40 points. That's like a week of perfect behavior in the bathroom. So I tend to gamify a lot of things in life. Because it just helps get through, it helps motivate people and it helps get through stuff. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I just read a book at Dice called SuperBetter, and they talk about gamifying your life to feel better. And they give an example, somebody's going in for an interview and they know the interviewer is super harsh and super rude. So to prepare, the interviewee makes a bingo card of all the worst case possible things that they think could happen. And then when they start to happen, it's a game and you kind of get a reward. You're like, yes, they did that thing. And so it kind of takes away the horribleness of the situation. 

William Schmitt: That sounds really interesting. That's cool. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's a great book. I'll link it in the podcast and we'll send you a copy. It's good. But yeah, I think there's a lot of ways that you can gamify. 

So you have shipped 60 titles. 

William Schmitt: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: What game did you ship, and maybe you already touched on it a little bit, but that did the worst in the eyes of the critics? And obviously we've talked about finding fun, but what other takeaways do you have from the games that have done the best or the games that have absolutely done the worst? Because you've seen both sides. 

William Schmitt: Well, again, learning how to fail fast. Learning that failure is not the end. It's the beginning. It's an iteration process. Iterating to success is a great saying. I truly believe in it. And we use that at Proof of Play, where we say, look, we're going to put out a very early version, that is, we tend to ship once a week. And some of these are like, we had a four week period where we shipped a major feature every week.

And the way we can do that is we ship the basis of the feature. We don't ship a fully fleshed out version of it. For example, seeing other players is about to release, right? So when it first releases, players will be able to see each other and they'll be able to do a couple of emotes to each other, but that's about all they're going to be able to do. And we'll iterate on that. 

Okay, now let's add. Emojis and let people actually communicate with each other through the emoji system. That'll be fun. That should only take a few extra days to put in, but we don't want to delay the initial release. Let's get feedback on the initial release.

Then we'll put in the emoji system. Then we'll put in an advanced trading system or something. We can click on the person. Maybe you can initiate a trade or go to their island or other parts of the future. So put out what's critical first and then iterate on that. Still have a plan for what you want to do, but don't let perfect stop you from shipping. That's important. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's a good one. 

William Schmitt: Especially nowadays. There's a lot of difference when we were pressing a disk or burning an EEPROM and it's like, okay, it needs to be perfect cause we were not getting a chance to iterate. But nowadays every platform allows you to iterate. So, there's no reason to allow perfect, you know, to stop you from shipping, you can always iterate on it. 

Lizzie Mintus: What do they say? Perfect is the enemy of good? 

William Schmitt: It's definitely, my producer brain basically says perfect never ships, right? Because you're always going to say, we need to take another pass at it. We're going to take another pass at it. 

The reason why I've shipped 60 products is because, we either have a hard deadline, like, Oh, the movie's coming up, like with Spider Man. So we have to ship this. 

So, let's work backwards. Let's say what's most important. Locomotion is most important for Spider Man. Okay. Let's make sure we have content for him to deal with. But let's make sure we prioritize that backlog. And draw the line that says we have to get to this point. Or the game just isn't worth shipping.

And then we draw this other point which is where we think we have enough features in the game That people are going to say this is a really good game. And then here's all the bonus material, right? Don't work on the bonus material until you know, the stuff ahead of it is ready, right?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, find the fun, do the fun then you can add on. I like your donut and sprinkles. You can add sprinkles. 

William Schmitt: I love donuts 

Lizzie Mintus: You love donuts. Maybe I'll get a donut later. That's a good idea. 

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, proofofplay.com. My last question is a little different. You were employee number seven at Digital Eclipse. You started, and within 12 months, the company was earning more than 7 million. How did you accomplish this? How did your team accomplish this? 

William Schmitt: Yeah, so what we did is we found a niche in a market that didn't really exist. We were doing an emulator for the ARM processor and that allowed us to emulate a lot of old arcade games. So we started creating combo games like Defender Joust and putting them on one cart. And shipping that for Game Boy Color. And we can turn those around in six weeks. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. 

William Schmitt: Because it either worked or it didn't, right? When it was on the emulator, sometimes Nintendo would come back and actually quote a bug that was in the original code. And they're like, you need to address this to ship on our platform. Those became longer slogs to get through. That was some nightmares with tubing and stuff that we did. But still in the end, I think in a 12 month period, I shipped personally like 14 games in a 12 month period there.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. Yeah. I was curious. Like, I mean, you've shipped 60 games in your career, but that's a lot. 

William Schmitt: At that point I was working like 60, 70 hours a week every day. I remember getting a call from the owner at one point saying, you can't take Sunday off. I'm like, there's football on, I am going to sit down and watch football for today. And I'll be in tomorrow. He's like, No, you know, Mortal Kombat has to go out and it's got to go out next week. 

And this is where I learned a lot about how to treat people in a company. And not surprisingly, I started my own company directly after Digital Eclipse because Digital Eclipse turned out to be quite the grindhouse. And it was, it was an experience of how not to treat your employees. 

Lizzie Mintus: I think that is a great experience. I've had similar experiences and that's how I started a company. But it sounds like you did work in France for a little while and France definitely has very different work laws. All of Europe has different thoughts on work. 

William Schmitt: Yeah, I also worked in Japan for five months on the UFC project and Japan has very different expectations as well. It was fun and terrifying at the same time in that you go into work at eight in the morning. It would start off like a normal work day. You'd work all the way to about six o'clock. They'd bring lunch in. And then it was kind of mandatory. We went out to dinner together. And I'm like, Oh, this is nice. But every day, really? This is interesting. And then we'd go out drinking and karaoke and things like that.

And again, mandatory. Team bonding, got to be there, that type of thing. You can duck out at eight or nine o'clock at that point. But I'm like, how do you have a life at that point if this is all like expectation? 

Lizzie Mintus: As a woman with children, no. Really different. 

William Schmitt: If you want to move up in the ranks there, that was the expectation.

Lizzie Mintus: Well, things are better and different every day. Remote work. 

William Schmitt: We are very aware of work life balance at Proof of Play and we're fully remote, which I think a lot of companies can do if they do it right. We have a constant form of communication going. We started with Slack and Discord, and Discord was like our virtual office. We just recently started using a product called Rome, which is a very nice virtual office. We can just jump into meetings you see when people are online, things like that. So yeah, virtual offices are the way of the future in my opinion. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I think that's nice. And I like to work, but I like to be able to do something at 11:15-12 that I want to do in the day and not have that constraint.

William Schmitt: I was, I live in a place called Camarillo and there's a company that I worked for, Scopely, that was in Culver City. And it was two and a half to three hours a day in the car. And, you know, when they were saying you have to come in every day. And it was hard to keep that up. I did like that I got through a lot of audio books. But I was raising children. I wanted to be home for soccer practice and things like that. So it's a challenge, a lot nicer working at home. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's really nice to be able to work for a company and run a company with flexibility. It's important. 

We've been talking to William Schmitt, who is Head of Studio, at Proof of Play. William, where can people go to contact you, learn more about you, play your game, or seek employment at Proof of Play? 

William Schmitt: So the Proof of Play webpage is the starting point for everything. If you want to contact me, I'm just William Schmitt on Twitter. I still call it Twitter. I don't call it X. And you can always contact me through LinkedIn. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Thank you. 

William Schmitt: 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.