Welcome to Faith Forms, where we explore the question, "What does it mean to be a Christian in the games industry?" Today I'm joined by Forest San Filippo, a Wisconsin-based artist, designer, and entrepreneur. He co-founded the indie studio FlipFly with his brother, Aaron, and created the hit game Race the Sun. [Music]

Forrest, welcome to Faith Forms. Glad to be here. Thank you, brother. It's been a while since we last talked. I think it was we were at MDev, right?

Last fall? Yep, yep, last fall. That was a pretty cool event. It's getting pretty big. Yeah, you graciously offered your sister's house to me to come stay. That feels like a total brother move. But it was awesome. You and I had actually never really got to hang out and talk before. We had exchanged emails and some stuff over the years, I think.(...) That was the first time we actually got to hang out and talk and get to know each other a little bit. I was really blessed to be able to also spend some time with your brother-in-law and your sister and their whole family. It was really an awesome experience. Cool, cool. Yeah, I'm glad it worked out.

Yeah, it was fun just to chat and share vision and hear where we're at with work and faith and all of the adventures and struggles related to that.

Love for you to just tell people about your story and stuff, but first I just want to catch up and see what have you been up to since we hung out.(...) Yeah, so I'm still doing my day job as a contract worker.

So I've got two primary clients right now. One is my brother, who I used to own a business with. That's kind of how I got into games. And then the other is a research lab at the University of Wisconsin. They do games for research and education kind of simultaneously.

I love working with them, so we've been doing some cool projects.

Contracting work. Are you primarily doing 3D art or what are you working on?

Yeah, so I got into the integrating and contracting for games since it's been three years now, I think. And when I jumped in, I was really trying to do UI and 3D work, kind of stylized 3D as my specialty.(...) But I ended up with the opportunity to do some illustration for a mobile game.

A couple years ago, and I was nervous about that because I've only really done tiny bits of illustration for UI work mostly.(...) But I took it on and it turned out to be a really good learning experience. And I was able to produce a high enough quality that I felt good about it. So I've considered putting myself out there for that again, but I have a very narrow style that I work in and it would have to be the right situation. What was your relationship with games growing up? You grew up in a Christian home, right? Yeah, so my parents were kind of just after the hippie generation. They called themselves freaks. That was kind of how they defined their movement.(...) But they were very much about getting back to nature, getting out of the city. They were raised in suburbs of Chicago.(...) So we moved out west when I was two and I lived in very rural areas for the next eight years.(...) And so video games were very suspect. That was just kind of rising,(...) gaining popularity.(...) First with the Atari was the one that we started seeing in friends' houses.

But eventually they allowed us to rent a Nintendo,(...) which was what you did back then when you didn't own one. The video stores actually had Nintendo units you could rent. And we also didn't have a TV for a chunk of my childhood. So we'd also sometimes have to rent a TV.(...) So video games was this very special kind of experience that we were allowed to do for special occasions,(...) which usually meant that as we got older, of course, if we only had a weekend with a Nintendo, we actually eventually then was a Super Nintendo,

you would just stay up all night playing through whatever cartridge you rented.

So some good memories and good experiences, but it was still kind of on the margins of what we did. We mostly entertained ourselves outside of the house when we were younger.

Nice. What did you think you were going to do when you grew up? You know, I didn't have a clear picture. I think I went through the typical, you know, looking around me and seeing what other people were doing. And when we moved to Wisconsin, when I was just as I was turning 10,(...) and a lot of people around me were farmers, I thought, Oh, maybe I'll be a farmer when I grow up. And then I decided pretty quickly against that.(...) But my brother, who was just a year(...) and a half younger than me,(...) he knew right away that he wanted to make video games. And it was really it was kind of neat, because my mom was she was the one who was most against kind of having video games as a regular pastime. But she was very for creating things. She wanted us to be like creative people. So as soon as he started like showing this enthusiasm for games, she was like, you could make them. You could make them.(...) And, you know, so so as I got into, you know, kind of young teen years, we talked a lot about making games together, you know, and it was kind of this dream, and we started doing the thing where you sketch out the story. And,(...) and we ended up with a home PC and we and eventually got missed on the PC. And that was that was kind of a life changing moment for me, because just realizing that there could be this, this level of interactivity and story mixed together was a totally new thing for me.(...) So I got excited about it. But I was also pretty lazy teenager. So I didn't spend the time learning how to actually make games. I did like art, though, and I didn't somehow didn't conceptualize that I could be an artist and do that in games. So I played around with 3d art and, you know, making gifts and that kind of thing when that was just just coming to the forefront.(...) And eventually, I, I had the opportunity to get into graphic design at a sign shop when I was like 20 years old. And that was kind of my path into art.(...) But it sort of led me away from away from video games. And I didn't, I again, didn't even conceptualize that those two things might meet up at some point.

So did you after high school, did you go into the workforce then? Or did you do any college or?

Yeah, I didn't do any, any college at all. I just just didn't have any desire to, I think, partially because I've, I've always been a cheapskate, and I just couldn't overcome the idea of how much money it was going to cost.(...) So I, a friend of mine got me a job at 18 doing doing landscape work, or not last year, I'm sorry, land surveying work, I did landscaping work as a teenager,(...) freelance, and then did land surveying when I turned 18. And I got, I got a, you know, a year and a half into that. And I realized, okay, this is this is really not how I want to spend the rest of my life.(...) I really loved music. So I started like auditing music classes at a university and thought maybe I'll maybe I'll get into music, but also realized that there's very low probability of making money doing music.

So I took this job, which was at the time a part time job, doing graphic design.

The business that I started working for, it started growing. And the owner, the owner was like, Hey, you want to buy this business?

And so I did, in my early 20s, I bought I bought a business and

I, at the time, it was just kind of science and graphics, and I really wanted to move it more in the direction of doing visual, you know, visual arts, logo design, that kind of thing.(...) And I did that for quite a while, like a decade.(...) And I ended up realizing that doing designs for other people was not quite what I was looking for either.(...) My, my best work never made it, never made it through the review process. It was, it was always the subpar version that made it out there. And I was a little caught up at the time, I think also just kind of self expression, I, you know, being, you know,

just wanted to get my ideas and my art and my work out there. And it was a little bit self focused, I would say. So I was kind of making myself more miserable than I needed to be.(...) But I thought maybe it would be music, maybe it would be, maybe it would be art. So I actually ended up quitting the,(...) I sold the sign business, kind of for a pitifully small profit,(...) and ended up trying to make music, go and make a go of being a musician.(...) I did that for less than a year, learned a lot about audio, a lot about recording,(...) and kind of hit a pretty hard wall realizing that I didn't quite have the musical ability that I felt I needed. And I was kind of, you know, to go to go that route.(...) And the combination of just the chances of success with the realization that I needed to spend a few more years working on my musical ability was just too much. Totally.(...) So you're on this winding path, but your brother Aaron is just kind of laser focused. Is that what it sounds like? Yeah, yeah. So he put himself through college and got recruited right out of the University of Madison to work for Raven Software, which was, I don't remember the size of it, but it was a medium sized studio in Madison. And they pretty quickly, I think after that got acquired by Activision.(...) And so he, he started out working on kind of their own IP, which was, he found really interesting and engaging, kind of got to own, you know, pieces of the, of the game.(...) And then Raven turned into a Call of Duty studio. So there was, you know, just much, much less in the way of creativity and kind of grinding out the, you know, the next Call of Duty. And so he was about seven years in when he realized that he was hoping for something a little different in his line of work as well. He was hoping to make, you know, creative steps. And so at that time I had sold my sign business. I had taken a few odd jobs and ended up doing website design. So I was doing freelancing again, but this was, you know, for websites, you know, doing WordPress stuff. And then of course all the graphic design. From what I've gathered from our time together, you guys have a pretty close family. Were you still pretty close to Aaron during that whole time? Or was he pretty heads down at Raven working? Yeah, we were, you know, always doing family stuff. Madison's only about an hour and a half from, from where I am here. So we would do, you know, all the holidays together. And we got, got a lot, a lot of time to talk about the different projects that we were involved in.(...) So he was at, he got to that point about, like I said, about seven years into working at a AAA studio.(...) And I was doing websites, which just felt like a kind of a failure because it was a return to doing other people's art for,

you know, and, and kind of again, watching my, my best ideas never make it through the review process.(...) And he said, Hey, you know, this indie thing is, is starting to take off for, for games. You want to give it a try.(...) And we had always talked about, you know, making a game together. And at this point, I realized I did actually have some useful skills that I could apply to, to video games.(...) And I hadn't, you know, I hadn't really been playing a lot of games since I was a teenager, but the mobile gaming thing was coming up and I was starting to see the potential there.(...) So yeah, that's kind of simultaneous with the app store starting to explode.(...) So we,

so we decided to keep our day jobs for a year and make a game. And we did that.(...) And it turned out really better than I thought it would. It was this mobile music making app. It was, it wasn't so much a game as it was a, you know, a toy for, you know, kind of young children to make music with. And it, it didn't sell really well. We didn't know a whole lot about marketing and, and monetization in the mobile space, but Apple really liked it and they featured it. And we got a ton of great reviews and we just felt like, okay, we can do this, you know, between the two of us, we make a good team.(...) So the next step was we, we talked about just diving and quitting our jobs and going for it. So we went over the next like potential projects that we could do and kind of did the whole list of, you know, here's all of our grand ideas. Here are all the prototypes we have, which one actually has a chance.(...) And again, we called,(...) I think it may have even been called Race the Sun early on in the prototyping process, Rose to the Top. And we decided to do that,

convinced that it was going to be a six month project. And again, we were, I think we were,(...) we were still young enough in, in doing the whole process to think that a six month game could happen.(...) Do you remember what the inspiration for that was?(...) Yeah, it's really my brother was just thinking of this idea of going really fast, you know, just how fun it is to go really fast. And we had one of the games we had rented as kids was Star Fox on the Super Nintendo. And it just blew us away. It was like the first 3D game we played.(...) And so we would repeatedly rent it and play through the whole game basically in one sitting.(...) And so it was it was kind of that idea what if it was even faster, you know, and we hadn't really played any of the arcade games that were in this genre of just, you know, go fast, avoid things.(...) But that was the prototype. It was just a triangle flying through a bunch of cubes.(...) And it was immediately fun.(...) So, you know, then, then I can't remember at what point the idea of like making it flying into the sunset came, but it was such a just kind of an iconic scene, you know, flying towards the sunset. So that happened. And then from there came the idea of Oh, what if you're solar powered in the shadows are also this thing to avoid that might slow you down or kill you in the sun is setting and the whole idea came together pretty quickly. Cool. And it had a bunch of success too, right? Yeah, it took a while to get there. Because our you know, our budgeting personal budgeting was for six months.(...) And so we were approaching a year later, and running out of money. And the game was not finding the traction that we'd hoped it would, you know, we just realized from what we knew enough to know that we were probably not going to have a hit if we released it. So we, we prepped for this Kickstarter, and got about halfway through the Kickstarter and just realized that the Kickstarter itself was going to fail.(...) And so we took a hard look at the game, I was very new to 3d art, and I had didn't have a real clear direction for the game kind of throwing things in there. So it was it was ugly.(...) And we just realized we had this massive content bottleneck where we weren't going to be able to produce enough content to get make the game and just interesting.(...) And so over the course of a week, I redid all of the art in the game, and my brother created a procedural generation system that would allow us to quickly create content and generated, you know, kind of get it into the game in interesting ways. And so just worked our brains out for basically, you know, two weeks during the Kickstarter,(...) and we kind of relaunched the Kickstarter midstream, and it just barely, just barely squeaked by and made the money, which was a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to

keep us alive, you know, and the Kickstarter itself generated a lot of a lot of buzz amongst kind of this, you know,(...) newish indie games community. So that was exciting and, and got us on people's radar, we wouldn't have been on otherwise.(...) So for the first year, the levels were all hand designed. Yeah, so initially, it was Yeah, we were we were kind of randomly trying to come up with ways to randomly spawn things in the world. And we were just I was just manually making like individual models and placing them in the world.(...) And part of the problem was just like creating interesting models that you would see for a split second.(...) It just had a strange feel to it. And so this was this was, you know, again, a big, a lot of credit to my brother and coming up with this idea of what if we just went super minimalist,(...) and, you know, kind of back to the original prototype, just kind of cubes and spheres and went with that. And I realized I could, if we went that route, I could lean more heavily into like the post process and, you know, simple colors. And

we came up with the idea of starting in black and white, and then progressing into more and more color as you get into the game.(...) And so yeah, so it went from this kind of scattered randomness. And then I guess the big innovation was realizing that we should hand design chunks of the game.

And then spawn those whole chunks into the into the level ahead of you so that we would always have something interesting, both visually and, and gameplay wise, and suddenly, I think the game actually got interesting. So how intimidating was it jumping into 3d for the first time? It's pretty scary.(...) You know, I did a lot of work in vector when I was doing graphic design. So conceptually, I understood what was going on just kind of added that third dimension. But I had so many gaps in my in my knowledge that I, you know, I didn't understand how shaders worked.

And, and just the, the process of figuring out how to take the thing from, I mean, looks this way and blender, you know, how do I get it into the game and a lot of a lot of learning, but it was fun as well, because I was I was making, you know, kind of for the first time, I was making my own thing.

With it without a, you know, without anybody else's filter going on it. And it was fun to be able to put that in front of people. And it wasn't, it didn't always land, you know, it wasn't always the right thing.(...) But I discovered I was able to that my, my eye for composition that I developed as a graphic designer,(...) translated really well into the 3d space, you know, that I can look at a scene. And, and even if I couldn't make the individual models look exactly as I had hoped, the scene itself would come together in a way that was pleasing and fun. How confident were you that you could just figure it out? Are you are you that type of person that will just get moving and then figure it out? When it comes to visual stuff? Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to code, I did, you know, I've always been terrified of code. So it's taken me a long time to overcome that.(...) But I, I'm finally like creeping my way into that world. But the visual stuff, yeah, I've always just taken an approach that says I will keep tinkering with this. And I'll keep trying things until I get it the way that I want it. When you were doing websites, did you do any of the HTML and stuff there? Or were you just kind of handing it off to someone else? Yeah, yeah. So for some reason, HTML CSS wasn't as intimidating to me. And then I ended up because WordPress creeping into PHP.(...) And I had, you know,(...) it was my only real experience with programming. So everybody told me how terrible a programming language it was. I don't know. I think this is all I know.(...) I've sure I've forgotten all the PHP that I learned. But for a while there, I did conceptually understand that. So that helped a little bit in my stepping my way into into the programming world.(...) You're working with your brother, and you're finally getting to do art that you that you believe in.(...) And the game's successful.

Is that kind of like a high point in your career up to this point? Yeah, that was,

you know, the biggest success that we had had, that I had in business. And it was also my first experience with something that was mass market, where everything up to that point was, yes, you know, I'm working for one client, and that client is determining, you know, how this thing looks. And I realized that when you are, you know, when you're selling to, you know, 1000 people or 10,000 people, that you do still have that feedback and aggregate. But there's a lot more freedom to create. And you can, instead of instead of molding your product to look exactly how one person wants it to look, you can actually go the other direction and find your audience and find that people have similar tastes and interests as you and make something that will delight them.(...) So I, I was hooked, you know, at that point, I was sure that this is this is what I wanted to do. Looking at your LinkedIn, you were worked with Aaron at Flip fly for 10 years. Yeah, so we did that.(...) Sounds that sounds right. I think we did we started in 2011.

Under the radar, we released monkey drum in 2012, I believe, and then 2013 was was the release of race the sun.(...) And then that basically,(...) race the sun kind of became an ongoing thing, because at that time, Sony reached out to us when we went to we went to packs, and they found our booth.

So we ended up we ended up porting the game to three of three PlayStation platforms.

And from there, I think we went to

Xbox and then back to the iPhone, which was funny, because, you know, it seems like a ready made mobile game. But it took us a long time to go back and try the try the mobile space again. So and during that time, we were trying to figure out what to do next, you know, what is our what is our next project, we ended up taking on a publishing slash porting project with a game called just slipped my mind as to us fun selector. And the game's absolute drift.(...) And that was that was neat, because it was a game that felt like it fit in the world of race the sun. It was kind of very minimalist artistic game.(...) So we did a we did a couple ports for that game and kind of helped release an updated version with with new features. And that was a blast. But from that point,(...) it was we really wanted to get into making something original. And we had this idea for a hexagonal puzzle game, which in hindsight was so completely different from everything else that we had done. It was it was a huge risk that we didn't realize we were taking for the porting game, absolute drift. What did you do on it? Was there art to be done?

Yeah, that was an interesting one, because the art was mostly finished. So and the and the developer, the fun selectors of solo developer. So he had done all the art and programming himself. So I ended up in this role of doing a lot of QA. I did all the marketing materials, I made a trailer, you know,(...) that's some fun experience there. But it was yeah, I wasn't getting my hands dirty in the art, which I think probably contributed to this idea of like, you know, we want to we don't want to be a publisher, we want to make our own thing. So the hexagonal puzzle game, are you guys

into puzzle games? Or what brought that about?(...) Yeah, so it's interesting. I think we had both found, you know, different mobile puzzle games to be really engaging. I thought we wanted to make one.

And we had this, this idea for a world,(...) which was it was low poly and really, really fit a particular aesthetic that I was really excited about because of I think because my work in Race to Sun just realized that we could make this stylistically something unique.(...) But the game design piece of that piece of the puzzle was was definitely more complicated. And it took us a long time,(...) a lot of iteration, a ton of prototyping to find something that really worked well.

And then in the end, we ended up with a puzzle game that we wanted to set in this 3D world. And we wanted to give you the sense of progression through a 3D world. And looking back on it, like conceptually, it was maybe something along the lines of The Witness, right? Where you have a 3D world that has is really a 2D puzzle game, but you're playing your way through it. We, of course, didn't have the budget or time to, you know, to make it this big adventure game. So it ended up being really narrow and in some ways found maybe a bad balance between those two things. So the puzzle game itself was a lot of fun. But because you were in this world, you felt like you wanted to go and explore and do, you know, do an adventure kind of thing. And it really was very limited on that in that front.(...) So it once again, like found an audience at Apple, we got featured several times,(...) but it never took off as a, you know, a very marketable experience. The people who played it were fairly happy with it. And it was generally well received. But it just, I think it was just hard to grok from a screenshot or from a video, you didn't understand exactly what you were getting.

From a player standpoint, did you lose a bunch of your audience from from Race to Sun and find a new audience?(...) You know, it seemed like the Race to Sun audience stuck around, even without a lot of new content. But I don't think there was a lot of crossover, you know, we tried to do cross promotion. I think it was just so different that our Race to Sun audience wasn't very interested in it. So we did bring in a few new players from from outside, but it, you know, never really took off in any particular market.(...) Was the puzzle game primarily mobile? We released it on Steam, but it didn't it didn't do anything on Steam. It was, you know, very much in that kind of artsy, low poly style that that, you know,(...) just just wasn't doing real well on Steam at the time.

What was the best platform for Race to Sun? Oh, that's a good question.(...) It's still going. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure when all is said and done.(...) I'm guessing that Steam is still probably the top the top platform.(...) Mobile did. Mobile did really well, even though the price was lower on mobile. And now there's a free version on Android, which is up to 10 million downloads.(...) Wow. The free the free version is not like it's it gets a lot of plays and it's highly rated, but it doesn't monetize real well. And my brother's done a ton of work just figuring out how trying to figure out how to

how to monetize that in a way that retains the the structure and the you know, the fun of the game. And it's just something about the way that it's put together makes it difficult to make a lot of money. So the 10 million downloads looks like we should be making a ton of money off of that.(...) But not it's not so. So now Flip Fly is working on Whisker Squadron, right?

The next kind of iteration seems like it's it's even more Star Fox. Yeah, yeah. So they're kind of in that, you know, in the middle there, we released Evergarden that didn't really go anywhere. And we tried a few games that we we've been announced one and we had at this time, Flip Fly had grown to have a couple a couple employees along with my brother and I. And the next game we were working on just didn't seem like it was gonna land to me. You know, I wasn't very excited about working on it. How far were you?(...) Well, it was again. Yeah, it was it was it was supposed to be a short project. And, you know, as as games do the timeline got extended and got extended and the concept got bigger and bigger. So I think we were almost a year in on it. And I just realized I was not excited to keep working on that game.(...) And and I did have like, you know, along with this this whole path of like creating all these other games, I'm like learning how to program a little bit, I'm starting to make prototypes and,(...) and I got I got really deeply involved in the design of a small we actually in the middle of after we made(...) Evergarden, we made a little puzzle game version of that, which took on a totally new life and ended up with completely different mechanics. But I got really excited about the design of that. And I realized that I love designing the games as well, like, and I wanted to be a part of that. So part of part of my, I guess my realization was one, I don't want to be really working on this the split fly game for the next year.(...) And I really want to get into design. But I didn't want to take that role for my brother, because he, you know,(...) really, the whole reason that he had left AAA was because he wanted to create things he wanted to design. And being a tiny little company with two designers just seemed like it wasn't going to be a great way to move forward, where one of us would always be sad that we weren't working in the, you know, doing the primary design. So, so at that point, I decided to step back and start my own company and try out some of the some of the ideas that I've been prototyping over the years.(...) So that was gosh,(...) 20 and 2019. And 2019. That was a step back.(...) So initially, I was just doing contract work to keep the bills paid. And I wasn't working for FlipFly at all. But after a couple of years, I'm a brother started working on Whisker Squadron, which was this yeah, kind of a building off of the race, the sun idea. And he needed some art help. So I came back to help out with with Whisker Squadron. We've been, we've been working on that for a while together, which has been a blast. How's working with your brother at this point that you've left?(...) In some ways, it's more fun. Because when we were both owners, and we had all the financial stuff and the whole kind of the whole future of the company on our shoulders, and we're trying to work that out between us, there's a lot of stress.(...) And we were both, you know, we both always committed to the idea of we're brothers first, you know, so if, if, you know, the business is never going to never going to get in the way of that, you know.(...) And so coming back and just, just being able to help out without the pressure has been has been a lot of fun.

You're also what, a dean in your church? Yeah, so that just happened about a year ago. I accepted an elder position at my church,(...) which was a big step.(...) My wife and I were, were pretty careful about stepping into that. When we were younger, we were, you're both deeply involved with, with our church. And we spent, you know, kind of every, you know, every time the doors were open, we were there doing something.(...) And yeah, I just had a lot of experiences that made us cautious about diving in too far. You know, we didn't want it to become a thing that hurt our family, you know, we've got three kids and we didn't want to, we didn't want to, church work can be stressful, you know, and we didn't want to like,

we didn't want to give our kids the impression that(...) faith was a thing that brought stress and difficulty into their lives.(...) How did your faith intersect your game work?(...) Yeah, it's interesting. So that's a question I've been asking ever since I got into games, because when I was doing contract work for other people, it really was just about how do I operate in a way that glorifies Christ, you know, how do I, how do I work hard for my clients? How do I, how am I gracious with the people who are not gracious to me?

But then when it came to that realization of, oh, I'm, there's nobody filtering me, I can make my own thing.(...) I started asking the question, so yeah, how does faith come into this?(...) Race to Sonnet was, was just a very mechanical game and it didn't have much in the way of story. I kind of regret that we didn't hang on or we weren't able to hang on to it for a couple more months because there was a developing story for the game, but it, it made its way in a little bit, you know, in that game there's a, it's, you know, it's an endless runner roguelike kind of, kind of thing where you die and you restart.(...) And I'm sorry, roguelike fans, it's not a real roguelike, it's, I just called it a roguelike.(...) But,(...) but we just realized, you know, I'm chatting about it, that there's some, some philosophical ideas there about, about meaning that are pretty interesting. And so(...) I, I wrote this, the voice of the game, which kind of comes up just in text whenever you, whenever you crash or when you're, whenever you upgrade and it taunts you and it just kind of asks you, why are you, why are you doing this, you know?(...) And if, if you play the game, there are some hidden messages as you play through and some people have discovered them and basically it's just the same thing,(...) hidden in a few places throughout the racism world that says life has meaning.(...) And for me, you know, as a believer,(...) that's where I wanted to, I realized that it's, it's important to ask the right questions. You know, sometimes I think we start, we start from this kind of foundation of theology that a lot of us have grown up with as Christians. And we just dive into that. We start sharing what, what we understand as, as the gospel message, but we're kind of starting sort of, you know, on a pile of ideas that it takes, sometimes it takes people a long time to get there. And one of the ones that I've been sort of obsessed with thinking about over the years is meaning because we, we all operate as if life has meaning.(...) But the implication that life has meaning should drive us to ask questions about God.(...) But we, we, we stopped short of that. We just assume that life has meaning. We never ask why, why does life have meaning? Why do I feel such a sense of purpose? Okay. That I should have a sense of purpose in this life.(...) So for me, that was kind of a seed, you know, I wanted to plant that philosophical idea of here, we're all running this race. We're all trying to, you know, accomplish this thing, but why, why are we trying to do that? And the answer I wanted to say was life has meaning,(...) which turned out to be pretty interesting because there's one point in the game where the level, you know, the geometry and the level spells out the words life has meaning.(...) But it turned out to be a bit of a Rorschach test for people, because if you pause the game right at that moment, you can read it as life has no meaning. Oh, and it's like, you really have to be looking for the word no in there. It's not really there. But as people play the game, like there are there are people that pause it and said, life has no meaning. Well, it's a pretty dark message that flip flies putting out there, you know. And so that opened up some pretty interesting conversations.

What has God taught you along this journey?(...) Did you struggle with identity at all, at any point through the various jobs? You mentioned that you felt like a failure at one point. Yeah, for sure. I think that idea that you are what you do, that your accomplishments define you is somehow so ingrained in our culture that I picked it up. I don't think I really don't think I got that from my parents. I don't think I got it, at least not explicitly from from any of my church in the churches we were at.(...) But I was really looking for something to define me, you know, I really was looking for some purpose in my work outside of just doing my work and doing well for the glory of God.(...) And I, I think this image and this concept of yourself as an artist can be really damaging,(...) especially, especially with this, this, I guess I would call it an idol of self self expression, you know, that what I really need to do is tell the world how I feel.(...) And the world really needs to hear my thoughts.(...) And, you know, so that was something I really had to come to grips with over the years of doing work for other people and realizing that, you know, when I finally did have the opportunity to make my own art realizing that that wasn't the end, you know, that wasn't what I was looking for.(...) While I love doing it, you know, it wasn't going to give me the identity or the purpose that I needed in life.(...) Yeah, that was a hard lesson for me to learn.(...) I learned both sides of it by having some success and not being fulfilled. And then also God stripping stuff away at one point and just feeling like a complete failure.(...) It's kind of two sides of that coin that I had to go through for God to really,

I feel like to learn some of those lessons about identity. Yeah. And I mean, to be clear, I'm still learning it. So I went from went from flip fly where, you know, I was the, I was the art director slash lead artist, doing my own thing to back to contract work, you know, once again, I'm making other people's art in other people's ways.

Oftentimes what I think is the best version doesn't make it into the game.

So, you know, I do feel like this is a lesson that God has had to drive home in my heart. But I keep kind of coming back to this idol and saying, Oh, if only if only I could, you know, make it as a musician, if only I could make it as a game developer, then people would, you know, people would really appreciate, you know, this stuff. And then that would give me some kind of purpose and fill me up some way. And it's, you know, in my mind, I know it's a lot,(...) but I still, I still struggle with it.(...) So it's been, you know, it's been a journey. And I think that I think that I have found, I don't know, I found a lot of, I found a lot of joy in doing work for other people that I didn't know I could have.(...) And along the way, like doing, doing, doing types of work that I didn't think were fulfilling and realizing that if I, if I did think of them as a place where God had put me sovereignly, you know, that there's a moment here that I've been prepared for,(...) that shift in mindset could really open up my eyes. And I've been able to, you know,

serve other people in a way that I believe glorifies God much, much better when I have that mindset.

Where do you hope your career will go? So, you know, I've been working on a solo project, which is unannounced because there's some, some publishers and platforms who don't like a game, don't like games that have already been announced, but I would potentially like to work with. So I would love to, I would love to be designing my own games. And my dream is to fall into this place where I could be doing art direction and design and handing off, you know, the, the coding work to people who actually know what they're doing.(...) And I have lots of game ideas that, that land in this spot where, where I think that they're helping people ask the right questions. And they're helping people get into a, get into a brain space where, where we can actually confront some of the deeper questions. And one of the, one of the funny things for me is that like this game I'm working on right now is a comedy game. And I, I don't think of myself as a very funny person,(...) but I love, I love funny games and I love comedy. I love, especially like physical comedy in games. And, and one of the things that I have realized is that comedy is a, is a way that kind of, it's kind of an open door, you know, to people where you can, you can, you can open up and help people ask really deeply philosophical questions. If you, if you say it in the form of a joke. And so that's, so I also feel that games are like, games can be really good at comedy. There's, there's lots of different ways that the format of games works and jives really well with, with funny situations.(...) So yeah, so that's what I would love to do. I'd love to be making funny games that help people to ask the big questions.

So what's God teaching you specifically now in this season?(...) Like, is it, if one thing I've been thinking a lot about is just, just seasons and God's been impressing upon me about like, he uses a season to prepare you for the next season, sort of thing. So what's God doing now in your life?(...) Yeah, so apart from the, you know, continually reminding me that my, my idol of self(...) expression needs, needs to die.(...) He's teaching me a lot about trust.(...) This, you know, being a,

being a contract worker, even if, even if you're like, you've got great clients and you're being well paid is still scary, you know, lining things up can be hard. And then, you know, working with(...) bigger corporations or, you know, institutions, sometimes it takes a long time to get paid.

And it's been, it's been really amazing to, to look at our budget and go, Oh, we're not going to be able to make it. And then just see God come through in really unusual ways. And have him just remind us that he's, he's still working, you know, he's still taking care of us.(...) But it's also a reminder that, you know, I can't go into this for, for, for fortune either. You know, the games is sort of the carrot that's held out in front of a lot of, you know, a lot of indie game devs, right? Look at this game dev who made millions, you know. And I, I think that I'm learning right now to, to kind of put that out of my mind and, and target, you know, a quiet,(...) quiet life that glorifies God.

And to be, you know, satisfied with that as a dream, you know.

I'm curious related to that and the finances. How is your wife with you being in games? Just because it's a, you know, a hard industry.

Yeah. So she's been through a lot. It was, you know, the, the early days of flip fly, we, you know, we, we burned through all our savings, which wasn't a lot at the time. And then, you know, we had our first, our first baby just as, just as we were finishing up the second game and going, you know, we dove in with, you know, with everything. And so that was really scary. And then, you know, the hours of work that come with that kind of panic of realizing that the money's gone and we needed, we need to make it work, you know, so that's, that's a terrible combination, you know, like the stress of running out of money and then also having, you know,(...) having new work just insane hours.(...) We've had periods of stability, which, which have been great. And, you know, that's kind of worked.(...) The flip side of that is I've been working from home since our first born was born.(...) And it's become, initially it was kind of, oh, that would be nice. So that'd be convenient.(...) And now, now that we've been doing it for so long, it's become, you know, something that I really want to protect and I got major reason why I want to stay in games. So I can, so I can be home.(...) Comes with his own difficulties.(...) That's why I have headphones on and not a microphone because you would, you would definitely hear some screaming or something. But, but that side of it has been good. You know, I think that at this point, being so far into it, it's, it's probably the best career financially, best career decision for me financially as well.(...) So I think that's a factor as well. I feel,(...) you know, and maybe that's my excuse is that I say I'm trapped because I love it so much.

Do you have any advice for someone coming up in the industry?(...) Uh, you know, I've also been terrible with this because my path into the industry was so,(...) so backwards compared to so many.(...) And, um, initially I was, I was really nervous about that. I said, well, I didn't go to a university. I was a self-taught graphic designer who now makes games full time. Uh, I think I feel a lot more confident now that the whole structure of, you know,

structure of, you know, education is changing.(...) Um, so yeah. So one thing I would say is don't, don't believe the doom and gloom, like, you know, for as long as I've been in games, you know, I think it's coming up on 15 years now.

Um, the, um,(...) yeah, maybe 14 years. I don't want to oversell my, oversell my experience.(...) Uh,(...) everybody's every year there's a new apocalypse,(...) something, you know, something's going to destroy the gaming industry. And, and what do you know, the next year, the gaming industry is still growing and it's still huge. And so I would say, don't believe the doom and gloom. Don't, you know, don't think that just because somebody, you know, somebody on Twitter or somebody on a blog said that, you know, there's not going to be anybody making games in two years, but that's really what's going to happen.(...) Um, the other thing I would say is like, don't, don't wait, um, for somebody to like give you permission or require you to make games. There is, there's literally no reason why, like, if you own a computer, you can't, there's no reason why you can't download unity, download blender, you know, download inkscape or gimp or something and just start making games. There's, uh, a glut of fantastic YouTube tutorials about how to make games. Um, there's at least three legitimate game engines out there that are free,(...) maybe more now, uh, as you can actually publish games from, um, there are platforms you can distribute games from for free. Um,(...) so I'd say, you know, I've been in a position to do some hiring over the years, uh, and to kind of influence the hiring at different organizations.(...) And I, I can, one of the things I, I can do is immediately spot when someone's portfolio is, is all assigned work. Like I didn't look at your art portfolio and say, Oh yeah, a professor made you do every single one of these. So as soon as I see somebody, especially, you know, I'm talking because art is mostly where I've been, you know, able to influence things. It's like, if you're an artist, like make art, you know, don't, don't go, you know, don't go to your professor and say, what should I make? Like make art. And when, you know, someone in a position to, to hire you or to, to bring you onto a team sees your portfolio and they see that you love the thing that you're doing and that you actually invest your personal and your free time in doing it, they're going to be so much more excited about working with you.(...) What's a telltale sign of that? One of the things is just the quantity, you know, there's, it's a small amount of work that most artists are required. And then it's kind of like, it'll, it'll always be like a one, a one of a kind thing, you know, it's like, Oh, here's the, the rigged character, you know, here's the, you know, here's the, you know, the one material that I have had to make, you know, and you can just, you can kind of tell that the person wasn't learning materials, you know, there's not a, Oh, here's, here's the 10 materials I, you know, I built while I was learning how to make materials. It's kind of like, here's the one I was assigned that got me the grade.(...) So you say not to be doom and gloom, but I'm curious,(...) you've been out pitching your game. Do you have a sense of with publishers and just kind of the general feeling in the industry about like when things are going to turn back around right now, we're kind of in the down cycle.(...) Yeah, I've been trying to trying to figure that out. And to be honest, like I haven't, I haven't worked as hard as I could have with the pitching. And part of that is the elder thing. It just, it was, I guess, an eyes wide open choice to realize that between my contract work and being an elder and family that the personal project was going to kind of suffer a little bit.(...) But my best assessment is that it's going to come back because the industry still needs games, the industry still, you know, there's still people, people are still playing games, their habits are changing a little bit.(...) But my best, my best guess at this moment, from what I've heard anyway, is that there's not a lot on people's 2025 portfolios.(...) So at some point,(...) the publishers and the investors are going to realize that they're not going to have a business if they don't start signing games for that time period.(...) And so the, you know, whether that's the investors going, hey, you know, who's who's making money off of 2025 games, or that's the publishers going to the investors and saying, hey, you know, you're not going to have an investment if you don't give us some more money. I'm not sure how that all plays out. I've never been in that part of the business.

But it does come back. And I think that one of the things, one of the reasons that it feels so bad right now is because we had COVID, which created this, you know, unnatural bubble in the games industry, and a lot of money flowed into the industry. And of course, that bubble burst, everybody could see that coming. But I think that coincided with sort of the epic, you know, epic games store money, petering out the, and the new consoles, kind of being maybe the last of that type of, you know,(...) market where you would have a device and then allow money flowing into the industry to fund games for that device. So I think we're in a transition period, I think that the Netflix model is really interesting. It seems to be working pretty well for Netflix and for Apple.(...) And you see, I see the consoles go that direction as well. So it might just take a little bit of time for all of the systems, you know, kind of the processes where games get found and then make their way to one of those platforms. That might just become the new way that publishing happens. Sure. That makes sense.(...) Well, it's almost an hour here. I want to be respectful of your time. I've been really blessed by our conversation here today. Is there anything you want to point people to? Anything you want to promote?

Ah, gosh, I don't have much to promote on my end right now, because it's all behind the scenes.

But I would say, you know, if you want to check out FlipFly's latest game, Whiskers' Squadron, it's Whiskers' Squadron Survivor, because there's a plan for another game in the series.

But yeah, check that out if you're into, you know, if you're into Race to Sun or into Star Fox, you know, kind of like that sort of thing. It's a lot of fun. I've been doing one of the artists, FlipFly's grown again. So I'm working with a whole team. I get to be just one of the artists, but I'm doing the VFX and some of the 3D art for that. Very cool. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to that.

Well, thank you again, brother.(...) I loved our conversation. Thank you for taking time to talk with me.(...) Yeah, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's been great.