Brock Henderson:

Welcome back family. This is the Faith Forms Podcast. I'm your host Brock Henderson. And we are exploring the question, what it means to be a Christian in the games industry. 

Adam is a true brother and a dear friend, and we've made over 20 games together. 

I'm so excited to be able to talk with him today. And I'm glad you're here. 

Adam Buchweitz: It's a pleasure to be here. I hope I can bring something of value.

Brock Henderson: I know you will. I was trying to think, what was the first game we worked on together? It was Flash games, right?

Adam Buchweitz: Oh wow. Yes. I forgot we even worked on any flash games together. Jelly telly.

Brock Henderson: So was that Jelly Telly the first

Adam Buchweitz: yes. That was, that was so, so early. Cuz you, you guys were running the studio when I graduated and you brought me in pretty much right away. And you had me start working on flash-based carousels for skincare products while you guys were working on games.

 So I just watched you, I just watched you from my corner of the office that looked like you were having fun.

Brock Henderson: to give uh, the listeners a little context. I used to own a design studio with my college buddy, Brenden. We started that after the doors kept closing. And getting into games. So it was kind of like the next best thing for me, right? If I couldn't make games, I'd make crazy Flash interactive websites and stuff.

So he started the studio and Adam was one of the early people that we brought on, like right after school.

Adam Buchweitz: I still maintain the action script as a fine language. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with flash, it's just there's a lot of bad actors

Brock Henderson: Flash was absolutely amazing. You can make anything in Flash. Back in the day, it was such a good tool. Then the iPhone crippled it, but,

Adam Buchweitz: crippled,

Brock Henderson: I think we did like what, 10 games for Jelly Telly. Jelly Telly was Phil Vischer's venture after VeggieTales. 

Adam Buchweitz: I was certainly on the tail end of that. I, I was only involved in one or two at the end.

Brock Henderson: And then let's see what else we do. We did uh, you worked on Yahero 

Adam Buchweitz: Yes, I did. Was that before or after Zombies Ala Mode?

I think that was, I think that was after, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure Zombies Mode was next thing. I could be wrong. I guess the timeline's gotten a little blurry, but I think Zombies was the, was the next one. And you guys, I, I just remember I was not on that project. I was not on that project and you guys were over crunching on Unity.

And I I had just found out about a, a new Lua based engine and I took a couple of hours to fiddle with it and I had basically reproduced everything you guys were working on and you. Happened to see that I was working on it, came over and said, what are you doing? Like, well I just wanted to try this and, and see what I could come up with, and I'm pretty sure that that day you made the decision to switch from Unity over to the other platform.

Brock Henderson: Yeah, it I don't know if it was Unity's fault, I think part of it was the programmer we were working with,

Adam Buchweitz: Hmm.

Brock Henderson: but Corona was very good to us. We made a bunch of games together after that. 

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah. It was, it was so easy. It was ridiculously easy to make games. That performed pretty well.

Brock Henderson: So Corona was a 2D mobile framework that our friend Carlos we became friends with. And, 

Adam Buchweitz: Mm-hmm. 

Brock Henderson: It was pretty, pretty awesome. It was all Lua based. 

Adam Buchweitz: You can't find it by that name anymore. Since the pandemic, they've rebranded, so they're no longer Corona now. They are solar 2d,

Brock Henderson: then we worked on Yahero. Yahero was a Christian mmo. Was it an

Adam Buchweitz: it was it was an isometric, mmo, so not as, not as World of Warcraft, as you're probably thinking. But yeah, it, it was,

Brock Henderson: and it was anime based. It was. Funded by the Canadian Bible Society, if I remember right. It was, it was client work, but it was, it was game. They still owe me a bunch of money. They owe me like 35 grand. Maybe we'll cut this out. But

Adam Buchweitz: Thanks for paying my salary, even though they owed you money.

Brock Henderson: yeah, that was a hard time.

Adam Buchweitz: that was fun though. We got to, we got to make a bunch of little mini games that were all a part of the larger projects. there was fishing games and listening games lightweight puzzle games. Nothing terribly advanced or complex cause the target audience was was pretty young.

But it, it was fun to just build all these little mini games and, and fit them together into a bigger project, especially one that was faith-based and teaching the gospel.

Brock Henderson: Yeah, that was really cool. I don't remember exactly what happened. they just kind of imploded. I don't know if they just didn't get enough users or maybe you remember better.

Adam Buchweitz: I don't remember why it happened, but I remember that their grant money was pulled or, or not renewed. And I don't think we ever found out why. But they lost their funding and didn't tell us right away. So yeah, cut that out if you want, but

fix it in post.

Brock Henderson: we'll fix some. Yeah. 

 So then we went on and made a bunch of original games, just our own ideas. What was the favorite one that, that you made? 

Adam Buchweitz: Favorite one, hands down. Favorite one was Drawbreaker. Hands down. It was not our most popular one. But that was definitely my, my favorite. It was just, we really, we really decided that we wanted to spend the time polishing it. And I don't remember how long we spent on it, but our timelines were so much shorter than a lot of people would think of for making a game.

Like, oh, making a game takes years. We, we tried to make one a month, and I think Drawbreaker was our longest timeline, and even that was less than six months. I think it was like three or

Brock Henderson: Five. Yeah. Four or five. Yeah.

mean, we were making small games. They were, the app store was, was new and you know, people wanted bite size things. It was great to cut our teeth on that.

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah, for sure. our, our claim to fame was float with. Something like 3 million downloads and people really liked it. I was, I was shocked. We put in we put in a zen mode. This is uh, keep the balloon off the ground and we put in a zen mode that just had no penalties, and if you popped a balloon, you would get another one and you could just keep tapping, tapping.

But we were counting all of the taps to unlock achievements. Do you remember how high we set the achievements?

Brock Henderson: no.

Adam Buchweitz: It was something like 10,000 and people were getting the achievements and getting on the leaderboard for 10,000 taps. And then of course you get the 10,001 to just, to just claim that title. But I was shocked at how much people were tapping.

It was great. So that one was, was really fun because it did, it, it got a lot of a lot of downloads and people really enjoyed it. It was pretty lightweight. But it also gave us an opportunity to take a mechanic and find new and interesting ways of what was, what was Tommy's word? Or was Tommy's word or was it juice. It, I had to juice it.

Brock Henderson: Yeah.

Adam Buchweitz: Ed Edmond Edmond's word. Yeah. We had, took, took a mechanic and, and added onto it and explored different possibilities. So it was just, you know, tapping. And then it was, okay, we gotta add the spikes. So the spikes are gonna, the balloon, and then okay, the spikes are gonna move.

And then it was adding a wind mechanic. So you had to account for them for the wind coming in. And yeah, it was, it was fun to, to just play with the same mechanics and in different ways.

Brock Henderson: And to give people a little background, float was a game all built around the activity of, of tap, keeping a balloon in the air, right? Every child has played with a balloon at some time in their life and, and just tried to keep it up in the air. And that's kind of what we were, I guess, banking on for the appeal.

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah, nostalgia.

Brock Henderson: I think it was the number one kids game or family game in like 39 countries at one point. It kind of shot up and

Adam Buchweitz: I forgot that. Yeah.

Brock Henderson: then went back down. 

Adam Buchweitz: Then it's as a balloon,

Brock Henderson: yeah, very fitting.

Adam Buchweitz: and then it got cloned.

Brock Henderson: Yep. I mean, it wasn't, yeah, 

Adam Buchweitz: Not a hard game to clone, 

 I do think that we put a lot of care and concern into the, into how we built the game. It wasn't just about, you know, tap on the balloon and it goes up. You could control where the ball was or where the balloon was based on how you tapped it and, and hitting it farther.

So we gave you, we gave the player the ability to finesse it and control where it was going. We added some, we added that don't tap it too many times, or you'd pop it thing it just, it was a, a fairly polished little app that wasn't just a money grab. Like I felt like the clones were just trying to, you know, get something really bare bones out the door.

But we actually cared about trying to make a, a good, a good product.

Brock Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think for me, a lot of the, the Elevate Games were just focused on the joy of play and humor.

Adam Buchweitz: Oh, I always thought that we would see a little bit more from the mosquito madness, endless runner, because it was so off the walls. And I thought that we'd get more traction on the Lumina disc throwing game because hardcore rhythm games were in at the time. And and then I actually, probably from a gameplay perspective, The the free to play game that we made.

That one, that one sticks with me because it wasn't just a statement piece, but it actually, I, I felt like the gameplay was pretty solid, even though it was really simple. It was really simple. Just, you know, one screen game with your little character moving back and forth to avoid the the blocks that were being dropped on you, jumping on top of them to collapse them.

 I felt like we did a good job with the controls and giving you flexibility and emotive. And it just had a pretty solid, pretty tightly refined gameplay loop which I appreciated. I know, I, I know that some of our testers really enjoyed it. 

Brock Henderson: Did I tell you that somebody I worked with, we brought on at Numinous kind of as an in intern entry level in their games study course in in college. Their professor referenced that game.

Adam Buchweitz: Get out. Okay, listeners, we made a game out of frustration because it was too hard to make money with paid games. And we called this game Free, free, free, free, free, free to play. And that was abbreviated F F F F F F two P. And it was, it was a free download and it, and it was a simple game where you were, you had ads.

Thrown at you and you had to close the ads and that was your, that was the platforming was each platform that was thrown at you was either gonna squash you or you were gonna dodge it and then jump on it to, to close it. And by doing this, you would earn money and then you would take the money to buy power ups.

But the joke was that in order to win the game, you had to pay the ransom for the princess.

Brock Henderson: Yeah, so you can either pay it with in-game coins or real money to

Adam Buchweitz: or with real money, if you wanted to win the game with like $3, you could just pay the $3 to win the game. Nothing could be more free to play or pay to win than literally paying to win the game.

Brock Henderson: But it works because it's a ransom, right? He has, there's a ransom though. He kidnapped your princess

Adam Buchweitz: That's right. That's right. No, your princess is not in another castle. She's right here. You just gotta pay for her.

Brock Henderson: Then we worked on NBA AEs, well, beacon NBA Escape. We did a bunch more. We did some VR stuff for Numinous, and I guess we did, you helped on T D C as well when we reported that to mobile.

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah. You guys brought me on to, to bring that to mobile as well as do some general cleanup to make it more maintainable.

Brock Henderson: That's, I mean, we've had to work on over 20 games together,

Adam Buchweitz: I forgot about Beacon. I forgot about Beacon. Maybe I just blocked it out. But that was a fun, that was fun because I think you actually handled most of the heavy lifting on that. 2D 3D game where it was it was a, it was a 2D game, but we faked 3D in it with, with depth and flight. And that was interesting.

You were a little b character that was flying around and collecting coins. But it was a 2D 2D engine, so everything was actually 2D sprites and we just faked it. But it worked

Brock Henderson: so if people wanna play the games that we worked on, where can they go?

Adam Buchweitz: into their imagination.

Brock Henderson: Yeah, I realized this the other day when somebody asked how they could support me and they wanted to buy one of some of our games on the Google Play. I think it was, we made like 20 games, I think the only thing that's still available is that Dragon Cancer. I'm not mistaken.

Adam Buchweitz: I think that's correct. I think that's correct. When we were churning out the games so fast we, we ne we, we weren't thinking at the time about having to maintain them through Apple updates and Google updates. So this was like, this was 10 plus years ago. And if you were gonna maintain an app through updates so that the, the new operating systems could play them you'd have to maintain all of that.

And that's not something by the time that, by the time they started falling off, availability, we had moved on for, for years. We had moved on.

Brock Henderson: Yeah, I mean, so Flash is really kind of no longer around. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that that's kind of a dead engine. And then Corona is kind of a dead engine. Lanica is a dead engine,

Adam Buchweitz: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about Lanica. Lanica was that was an another new engine that was coming out that was based on the titanium JavaScript platform. So in theory, it's an interesting idea to make a game engine based on JavaScript, because so many programmers know JavaScripts. And so Disney was, was willing to take a shot with one of their subsidiary games.

And so we were working on that in this, in this new engine which was an interesting experience. It was not, The engine was not polished. We had to do a lot of things manually without any of the nice APIs that a modern engine would afford you. But yeah, that was, that was in Lanica, I think.

What was the name of the engine? Do you remember? Platino

Brock Henderson: Yeah.

Adam Buchweitz: That was in Platino, which is no longer around. Technically Corona is still around. It's a completely different, there's only one person around working on it anymore cuz it's open source and he's being supported through like Patreon. But there was a time when I tried to, to resurrect one of our old games and it had too many changes with animations because the animation platform had changed so much or become unavailable.

So even though the code. To the actual logic code would've been fine. The, the graphics engine had changed so much that it, it, for all intents and purposes, the game is, is not able to be resurrected. It'd be, be better to just rebuild it from scratch now on something else.

Brock Henderson: And I don't think I realized this case of, I guess, bit rot until kind of far into my career, right? Where we started not being able to update the games and like keep 'em, keep 'em up to date. I, you know, you'd think that it's digital, that it could, there could be a way to have it always around, you know?

But hasn't been the case.

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah. It, it goes back to the whole concept of entropy.

Brock Henderson: Yeah.

Adam Buchweitz: Anything is going to naturally. Evolve into lack of order and chaos, and even software. There's, you know, there's projects to resurrect well loved, not our games, but, but like famous well loved games from decades in the past. There are projects to break out the code and resurrect it, and we see all these emulators from people wanting to replay the games that are way, way in the past.

But if you want to, if you want to play bef before the age of emulators, if you wanted to play a Game Boy game, you had to have a game boy. And if you didn't have one because they weren't being made anymore, you wouldn't be able to play it. Now we have things like emulators that, that were getting.

It was people taking the, the actual source code of the game boy and figuring out how to run it and, and understand it. So now those things are more readily available, but if you don't have serious effort going towards maintenance, you're going to devolve into entropy.

Brock Henderson: How are you doing with, with that, that all the stuff that we've worked on kind of come?

Adam Buchweitz: Well, I just keep telling myself, I just keep telling myself that I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna update all of

Brock Henderson: oh,

Adam Buchweitz: I'll get around to it. I've, I mean, I've been saying this for like five years. I'll, I'll get around to it. I'll, I'll get it all updated and available at some point before I die. It's hard, man.

It's, it's really it's really demoralizing to have put so much time and effort and love into a project and just see it. Disappear into the ether, just not available for, for me to point at and say, that's a cool thing that I made, or not avo available to let my kids see the kind of things that their dad worked on and not available for people who want to support the project to go and, and look at it.

 It's probably not even available for the university student who's studying free to play games. But I guess we have, we have at least we have some videos on YouTube where people can see what the gameplay was like. But yeah, I, I maintain that sometime I will go back and I will resurrect all of them and bring them up into a modern, a game engine. But it's hard 

Brock Henderson: it is something that you and I have talked about a lot. We want to do something that's good and valuable and lasts and it's really been hard to wrestle with it. You know, you have to, had to take an eternal perspective on the work. I don't know. There's so much that is just out of our hands, right?

You do the best you can and you try to do good work, and you try to put things that are beautiful and true out into the world and like they may or may not succeed.I mean, nothing's ultimately, nothing's gonna last anyway.

Adam Buchweitz: You know, it just struck me that even, even large studios with all of the budget that they could need, Are gonna struggle with this because consoles change. And what's jumping to my mind is that one of, one of my favorite Triple A games is Destiny. And they have released Destiny One and Destiny Two.

And Destiny Two is gonna continue to be Destiny two forever. It will never be Destiny three because they're just going to continue to evolve it, but it's too big for all of the content. So they have introduced a vault system where they are adding and literally removing content from the game on a periodic basis.

So if you want to go back and play a raid, but it's not currently in the vault, you just cannot play it. You bought it when they came out. You, you were a, a paying member when they released it and you enjoyed it, but now it's just gone because it's not. Active in the ball and if you want to go back and play content from Destiny One, but you don't have a PlayStation four anymore cuz you got rid of that.

I don't even think you can play Destiny One anymore. So they're working on fighting the entropy and bringing back the old content from Destiny one into Destiny two. But the resources that that takes is huge. It's massive,

Brock Henderson: Hmm.

Adam Buchweitz: so nobody's immune.

Brock Henderson: Yeah.

So why did you leave games?

Adam Buchweitz: I felt like I was forced out of games. I felt like in talking with my wife and, and looking at our family situation. We wanted to try and go for a little bit more stable environment, a little bit more stable working situation. Games at a small studio have an ebb and a flow, and if you have too much ebb and not enough flow and you just don't have income and that's hard to budget around.

It really just came down to we wanted more stability and I had I had unfortunately and sadly given up on games as as a viable career unless I wanted to do something that I was unwilling to do, such as move to a major tech hub like Southern California. The Seattle area, maybe New York, any of these densely populated areas that are known for housing large game studios, I could go and work for one of them, but it would be just being a cog in the machine.

And a lot of these companies aren't particularly recognized for encouraging a positive work-life balance. And I don't know if any of them are immune to the crunch of a of a relief schedule. And I know that I personally can have tendencies of workaholism and. So I knew I knew ear early on in my career that I was not going to I was not going to move to a Silicon Valley somewhere that I would be sucked in and, and not see my family anymore.

 So yeah, I guess once we just started getting a little bit older, having kids games were something we felt like we needed to say goodbye to.

Brock Henderson: Did you find the stability that you were looking for?

Adam Buchweitz: Absolutely. Yeah. Until it wasn't, I went on and did some contracting for a while. I got to work with with some companies that I really enjoyed. I don't regret my time even if it was short. Even if it was short and bumpy, I met some really great people along the way, lifelong friends, I hope.

Brock Henderson: And have the, the work that you've done, is that still around?

Adam Buchweitz: Why you gotta do this to me, man?

Brock Henderson: Well, I, because this is the

Adam Buchweitz: do,

Brock Henderson: part. I know, I know the answer, but, but this is what

Adam Buchweitz: if you want stability, if you want stability, say no to startups. But I found myself working at a startup that was building virtual reality products for trade shows. And then 2020 happened and there were no more trade shifts. So that company failed. And then I rolled from that company into its sibling company, which was a client services company, also a startup.

And that one was actually going pretty well for a while. So well that our largest client wanted to absorb the the workforce and just bring us on full-time to work for their project. And we all believed in the project. We thought this is a great idea, we should do this. And so we, we switched to we switched to focusing on them full-time, and that lasted about three years before it too, being under capitalized, eventually fizzled out.

 I think there are still some people trying to keep the lights on, but It's doesn't look anything like what it used to, and at least at the time of recording, none of that is available unless you live in a very small geographic location. There are some, some clients that are still using the software and there's no reason why they couldn't continue to use it, at least for a while.

 Servers will probably come offline sometime. But no, generally it is not still available.

Brock Henderson: You say that the stability is kind of limited to a startup, but do you really think that there's. Stability, even at a big company, you look at all the massive corporations right now, laying off tens of thousands of people, I think stability's a myth.

Adam Buchweitz: I wouldn't be one of those tens of thousands of people. So, yeah, having never worked for a, a major, large company it's probably more of a figment of my imagination.

Brock Henderson: Yeah. I think about the verses where it talks about, you know, not putting your trust in your chariots or your money, or, there's a few different verses throughout there, we're supposed to put our trust in, you know, our hope in the Lord and me

Adam Buchweitz: year or next year we'll go into this city or that city and we'll make profit.

Brock Henderson: Yep. James. Yep.

Adam Buchweitz: mm-hmm. Hmm.

Brock Henderson: I don't know. I, I feel like just my career and my entrepreneurial ventures. God has used it so much to, to just open my eyes and like strip away things. And sometimes the process has been super abrasive and painful. I personally, like most of the work that I've done over the past four years hasn't come to anything.

I don't know if it will 

Adam Buchweitz: It's, it's very, it's very discouraging. I'll join you and I'll, I'll say it, that I feel like I've never been able to be a part of anything that was truly successful, but I've had this conversation with some of your friends of mine, and they will they'll remind me that just because something become the, the angry birds of the App Store doesn't mean that it wasn't successful.

And the magnitude of shipping a product is so large that we shouldn't. Consider the apps, the games, the products that we have built and shipped as failures. Even if the company didn't end up being financially successful, there was nothing unsuccessful about the code that we wrote, the art that we produced. And that is an encouraging way of thinking about it. The startup that was absorbed, that could be looked at as a, a huge success because you started a company and you ran it for three years and then it was absorbed by a larger company. That's like, that's what a lot of companies want to do. So there's that.

 I think that a matter of, of perspective is important. And while I share the sentiment that. I haven't been a part of something financially successful. I do think that the ventures themselves have been successful shipping a successful product. It can be successful in more ways than just money. Building the, the prayer app that I made was I, I think I've made $10. But it was successful because it, it was the product that I wanted to make that I felt like the Lord was leading me to make. And it served at least a small audience for a time. And, you know, just like the other games, I'll, I'll get to it eventually.

Brock Henderson: I had to adopt a new definition of success, and the best definition of success that I've heard is doing what you were created to do. If you're doing that in the context of, you know, a God that created us and put us here for a reason. And we're, we're walking that out.

That is success.

Adam Buchweitz: hmm.

Brock Henderson: too often I've been focused on the, the micro, you get too focused on the, on the little product and stuff. And the products don't seem to last. I remember you and I both have a bunch of architect friends and one of my friends from, from college was talking about how the stuff that they make, you know, stays around.

Like it's where permanent and stuff. But I'll tell you what I, my house here is from the 1840s, and if somebody constantly working on it, it wouldn't, it wouldn't, it'd be a pile of bricks right now. So,

Adam Buchweitz: Absolutely, absolutely, man. I'm reminded of the story of Isaiah a prostitute for a wife, and his calling was to remain faithful to her no matter how many times she was unfaithful to him. That's a failure. Like that is not a successful marriage, but that was what his calling was. It was a tremendously difficult thing, totally demoralizing every day, and yet he did it.

And by being a part of a failed marriage, he brought tremendous glory to God. And, and I would say that we are called to be servants, to be obedient, to glorify God in whatever situation we find ourselves. And we can actually bring a greater amount of glory to the Father by doing something hard than doing something that fails, even though it's what we were called to do.

 I. I personally feel like God has led me to exactly where I have been. I, I look back and I see, well, I had two opportunities and I was all set to go to the, to the interview and accept the job offer the next day. But I happened to meet somebody else the night before who said, you know, I just left that company.

I don't think you wanna work there. Go and go and check it out, and if you don't feel like it's a good fit, come and work with me.

Brock Henderson: Well.

Adam Buchweitz: And the next day, like I said, it was, it was the next day. And it is that coincidence, is that totally coincidence or is that Providence? And the time in, in the time after that, I was offered that second job, I was offered both jobs and I took the one.

That made me, that made me feel like God was rescuing me from a bad situation. And the the first company burned out hard and the and the people involved got, got burned and were unhealthy. And instead of that, I met some people that have become some of my best friends. And you know, they do anything for me.

I do anything for them. So I see that the Lord is working in our lives. I see that God has brought me from one thing to another thing to another thing until I am where I am right now today. And I don't know what's next, but I find a lot of comfort in that I've been brought where I am. So no matter what happened, Let's say I lose everything. I'm still where God brought me so remaining faithful. No matter what happens, I glorify God just because I was forced out of the games industry just because I wanted something like stability that I didn't end up getting. I feel like I was brought through that and I was glorifying God through obedience and following his leading.

Even though I haven't been a part of something wildly financially successful, and that's hard for me to, to, to bear my pride to bear, it's okay. And it's actually better for me to be humble. It's actually better for me to humbly say that I'm where God wants me to him be the glory in my success or in my failure.

I'm gonna keep doing it.

Brock Henderson: Amen, brother. That's really good.

Adam Buchweitz: I feel like that's a lot of growth. I don't know. I, I think about us 10 years ago and.

I don't like to think about that version of me.

Brock Henderson: No,

Adam Buchweitz: He was, he was pretty dumb. One of the things that I've learned most, ah, I shouldn't go into that, that's pretty off topic, but in terms of growth I've learned that not everyone is exactly like me,

Brock Henderson: I could have told you that 10 years ago.

Adam Buchweitz: but 10 years ago I wouldn't have listened. So yeah. Growth off topic growth, but, but growth.

Brock Henderson: So you're thinking about maybe getting back into the games industry though, right?

Adam Buchweitz: I, yeah, I am. You know, really what I want is stability, and I feel like I can get a lot of stability by joining the

Brock Henderson: yeah. Yeah.

Adam Buchweitz: industry. Yeah. Okay. Well, nothing is, nothing is certain, but there are a lot of interesting projects going on right now, and there's a lot of space in the VR ideas. I have a, at this point, I have quite a bit of experience in vr, so it's, it's interesting to look for a role where I could be working on that.

 And then An opportunity that I'm considering, which would allow me to be in the games industry without having to take on the stress of living or dying on the success or failure of any specific product. It, it's a, it's an opportunity to have a wider range of products and portfolio that would be able to weather storms. And that would actually be really exciting to be able to return to the games industry and work on really cool products but do it from a, a less glamorous and hopefully safer vantage.

Brock Henderson:

So here at Faith Forms, I'm exploring the question of what it means to be a Christian in the games industry. And you are one of the best engineers that I know. 

so I'm curious how your faith impacts your engineering.

Adam Buchweitz: I think in a lot of ways. I think in a lot of ways, as every good Christian would say my faith impacts every aspect of my life. But in all seriousness, I think that there's two ways of looking at it. I think that there's, there's there's hard skills and soft skills. I think that when it comes to the hard skills, the, the technicals I lean on, I lean on something that my mom drilled into me when I was a kid, which is, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And when it comes to software doing something well, has a very long lasting effect. It could be a service to yourself because the code that you wrote six months ago is, is gonna need an update. And what in the world was I doing here? What was I thinking? Let's, let's do ourselves a service and do it the right way now so that in six months we're, we're not banging our heads against keyboards.

It could also be a service to others because somebody else is gonna have to update that code in six months.

Brock Henderson: Mm-hmm.

Adam Buchweitz: Doing something well upfront. It's going to continue to benefit the project for the project's lifetime. Unless that code is ever, unless that feature is ever removed from the system, which some would say is an even better way of writing code.

Cause the code that you don't write is never gonna have bugs. Yeah. So doing something in service to others in service to your future self and ultimately in service to God in doing something to the best of your ability are, are always that faith influences how I approach technicals. But there are soft skills at work too, and engineers are pretty notoriously.

 Understood to be in communicative and terse and very focused on just the code and not the interactions. And I've been in several leadership roles where I've dealt with engineers and I've been an engineer and I've started to understand, because the Lord has graciously been growing me, that people receive information differently.

People deliver information differently. People handle assignments differently. Some people just want a task list. Some people want autonomy. Some people cannot wrap their minds around a project that's too big. So the best way to serve them is to break it down for them. Some people would be insulted by that. So I feel like one of the most practical ways that God has been working in my life is by growing my understanding of other people and other people's perspectives. The best way that I can serve you is by finding out what the best way is that I can serve you. That means I have to be a listener and not a talker. Sorry to all you, to your listeners out there, but I'm talking. It means that I have to set aside my own pride and my own agenda put your agenda above mine. It means that when there is a failure, instead of throwing you under the bus, I'm gonna take ownership of that. When I tell my boss. It means we're gonna have real conversations.

We're not going to dance around the issues cuz that's not gonna make them go away. But we're going to have the conversations with Love and Grace.

Brock Henderson: Mm-hmm.

Has your love and empathy for people grown too with your understanding?

Adam Buchweitz: Absolutely. 100%. The more that you learn to understand other people, the more compassion you can have for them. 

Brock Henderson: So in my little time with One Vision, when you were there and I was doing a little freelance Unity work with you guys, it was pretty clear that one vision had a pretty great culture. I'm curious two things. One is what you learned, what the key parts of that culture were. And then is, did that come from being believers?

Adam Buchweitz: Almost all of the upper management were believers, and I would argue that the, the one vision that we were pursuing, Was faith focused. our mission statement was to speak love and truth into the hearts and minds of young people across the nation. So there was a very strong element to faith that was influencing our decisions. But I would say that the decision is an active thing. Deciding to do something is intentional. And one of the greatest things that has had, one of the biggest influences on the company culture is deciding what our company values are and making those company values align with our faith. Those values were things like love. We actually wrote out L O V E as a core company value. Servant heartedness. The most secular one that we had was excellence because we wanted to be excellent and we wanted to glorify God through our excellence. But the ones that resonated the most with people were the ones that were around servant heartedness.

Brock Henderson: Hmm.

Adam Buchweitz: had accountability as as a core value and in our day-to-day operations, I'm gonna include myself in the leadership as I was operating as technical director and I had several direct reports. We encouraged everyone, including other members of leadership and ourselves, to record and submit highlights for one another throughout the week. Any. Personal interaction that we had with another member of the team was an opportunity for us to highlight them for some part of our core values.

Brock Henderson: Hmm.

Adam Buchweitz: They didn't know that they were being highlighted. Perhaps somebody needed help with a bug. So I could highlight Brock for his servant heartedness in taking two hours out of his day to help me crunch on this really difficult bug.

And then at our weekly meeting, we would go through the one, the highlights from the week, and some of the most impactful ones would even get elevated from our engineering weekly meeting to a company-wide monthly meeting. So this culture that was. Saturated in these touchpoints for our core values was very intentional.

And speaking with one of my direct reports really encapsulated the benefit of, of putting together such a, a strong emphasis on these core values because he said that the best part of working at One Vision was that he never felt valued for what he could do for the company. He felt valued because of who he was.

Brock Henderson: Oh,

Adam Buchweitz: And I will celebrate that forever.

Brock Henderson: You don't hear that? 

Adam Buchweitz: You don't. It's, I'm, I'm afraid to work for someone else. I'm afraid to work for someone else who doesn't share a culture like that.

Brock Henderson: Is there anything else you wanna talk about or promote? Do you, you wanna, is your prayer app still available?

Adam Buchweitz: Praylist is still available. I would encourage anybody who's interested in trying it out, it uses a space repetition algorithm to surface and resurface prayers. 

Brock Henderson: Can you say that again? In non-engineer speak just for the people that aren't programmers.

Adam Buchweitz: space repetition. That's like a flashcard thing. That's like a, that's like a memory technique. It will resurface prayers to you at somewhat regular intervals based on how much gravity a particular prayer has.

Brock Henderson: And it's prayers that you wrote that 

Adam Buchweitz: Yeah, you would, you enter your own prayers. You can tag prayers and you can rather than building a list of prayers, you can, you can put everything in there and tag it.

And if you wanna pray just for family, you pray for that tag. If you wanna pray for family and friends, and you can, you can pray for those two tags. One of my favorite tags you have prepopulated was enemies. Giving people an opportunity and a little nudge to put in those people that are hard to work with, even if enemies is a strong word.

 There's a lot of people, unless you're Sheldon Cooper, most of us don't really have enemies. But we all have people that are harder to work with or harder to live with, harder to be family with. And remembering to pray for them really helps to soften our own hearts towards them, give us a better understanding of their perspectives, and ultimately love them better.

Brock Henderson: Is that for iOS? An Android.

Adam Buchweitz: Yes sir.

Brock Henderson: Awesome. We'll, we'll have links down below for people and that's called Prayer list.

Adam Buchweitz: Pray like a playlist, but for prayer,

Brock Henderson: Awesome. Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining me, brother. Loved our time

Adam Buchweitz: genuine pleasure. I love what you're doing here. I love, I mean, I love the art every, every blog post, but I love the the mission behind this this exploration.

Brock Henderson: Thank you so much for joining us today. If you found this valuable, would you consider passing it along on social media? Also stop by our website, faith forms. Dot games there. You'll find our blog. Podcast and other resources. Thank you. ​