full interview_ahmed abdullah_khalil abdullah_9.mp3
Ahmed Abdullah [00:00:00] My name is Ahmed Abdullah. I'm CEO and co-founder of Decoy Games.
Khalil Abdullah [00:00:05] I'm Khalil Abdullah, I'm the other CEO co-founder of Decoy Games and we make really awesome video games.
Speaker 3 [00:00:13] Why video games? Why isn't it about video games that's so cool to listen to?
Khalil Abdullah [00:00:16] The thing for me, well, first and foremost, we've been playing games since the ages of like four and what, three or two or something along those lines. And it's an interactive movie. So I love movies. The next best thing in a movie is like being able to interact and play with it. And I think especially nowadays with the technology that you have, there's so many like stories and experiences that you can tell through video games that you can play one game is completely different from the next. So I always feel like there's just so much to give from games. So for me as both a player and a creator, there is just so much to experience.
Speaker 3 [00:00:45] What do you look for? I assume you're interested in finding out what it is. Thank you.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:00:48] I love playing games, I love creating them. You get the full experience by doing both. As Khalil said, it's basically us being able to get the whole creative process in making games because I love art, I Love development, I love the business, I like process and all these different things. And I feel like creating a game gives you the full spectrum. It touches a lot of stuff in film, it touches stuff in music. So gaming's the ultimate software, ultimate product and it's fun.
Speaker 4 [00:01:19] I just want to take a mic. Are they too loud back there? Yeah, fine.
Khalil Abdullah [00:01:23] We can fight him down if he has on him.
Speaker 4 [00:01:24] I can do these guys one at a time. All right, OK, I'll just ask. You can turn me down like that.
Khalil Abdullah [00:01:30] Okay, I got you. Hey, guys, you can keep it down. You can still talk, but just turn it a little bit.
Speaker 5 [00:01:36] Just five decimals. Chris.
Khalil Abdullah [00:01:37] Chris, just a little bit, there's one guy that's fried a little. You guys, you can still talk though, you're good. You're good
Speaker 4 [00:01:43] Thank you. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 [00:01:46] You start thinking like that.
Speaker 5 [00:01:47] Yeah.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:01:49] Yeah, just turn a little bit.
Speaker 3 [00:01:57] What is, when you look at a game or when you play a game, what are you looking for? What's the feeling you're looking for, what's the experience? Maybe it's a different experience.
Khalil Abdullah [00:02:08] I don't know, I think for me, it's different games, different experiences. Cause sometimes there's games I wanna play when I just like, at the end of the day, I wanna relax and I don't wanna think very much. So it's just like I just need like an action game, something with like light story, something where I don't need to read much. Sometimes I want games where I can like play with friends, you know, we can get people together in a room and have a good time. Sometimes I wanna game where it's like a deep story and I really need to think about what the creator was thinking of and stuff. So just like any art, there's no one just way to experience or time to experience it.
Speaker 3 [00:02:37] So how is it serving this cake, the one with the string spice?
Speaker 6 [00:02:44] We want to wait for him to be clear. No worries. Are you moving it? No.
Speaker 3 [00:02:53] You What makes games, as an art form, what makes them unique?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:03:03] View games are unique because you're able to have the creators put everything into it and that creator can come from a background in writing, they can be a developer that codes, they could be someone that just has a good vision of how to get together a team. And I think what makes it unique is you're able to so many different aspects kind of create that game. But the art out of it is there's the visual art, there's a creative process of design, it just, so much goes into what a game is, but this gaming is for everyone because there's always so many different types of games. If you like action, if you like the storytelling, and now make that interactive, there's nothing else in the world of it. It's why it's one of the biggest industries in the world and I think makes it so unique.
Speaker 3 [00:03:52] What are you trying to do with your game?
Khalil Abdullah [00:03:55] I want games that can tell different stories that haven't been told before and tell different experiences that haven't been told befor. So my dream is to have a large catalog of games, but I also wanna be a studio that can tell, sometimes there's a lot of studios nowadays who kind of can tell only one type of story over and over again. For us, I wanna be studio that can tell a bunch of different stories, a bunch different experiences. So that's kind of what I wanna do, show a lot versatility and what our team can do.
Speaker 3 [00:04:21] Tell us about the first game at this room, Sandy, OK? What's that like? What did you try to do with it? What's the experience?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:04:33] Yeah, so SwimSanity, the game that got us started, right? So Swim Sanity was basically a prototype to us to be able to understand what it is to make games. When Khalil started making Swim Sani, he did it in college and it was a project where he learned how to make Games in Flash, which at this point people might not even remember what Flash is, but it doesn't even exist anymore. But he used that to be to define what he can learn as creating a fun experience. And it was just a single player game called Scuba Driver, the booba driver. Thanks.
Khalil Abdullah [00:05:02] Daddy, the adventure of the Moobah Jiver, the Scoobah Diver.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:05:05] Terrible name. See, I don't even remember it. It's for good reason. So when he created this game, he was able to get some viral, just fun in the classroom. And I was in college too, and I was a freshman. I saw that I was like, okay, this is something we actually can do. Because when we took computer science, to be honest, we did it with like the 5% chance we could maybe turn it into gaming in some way, and it ended up panning out. And then we used that to kind of come together after college and say like, Okay. I think we can shoot for something big here. Let's try to make games on consoles. We loved playing Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation, all the things that they bring up. So we wanted to find out how to get on those platforms, which we discovered is a long journey. I mean, you have to be a publisher or get published, and we took the route of self-publishing when it came to Swinsanity. So during these years, we really took our time to refine the game. We brought it out to different showcases, big and small. Small to like Boston Indie Games Festival to big to PAX East, one of the biggest festivals out there. But it allowed us to understand like what it means to make a quality product while also meeting people in the industry to know what it mean from a business standpoint to market it to distribute it and that allows us to kind of get the game out there so at that point some Sandy when we got it to the different markets was downloaded over 1.4 million times so it allowed to us kind of understand what it meant to get it out there to a lot of people. Get that feedback and now we're working on our next title.
Speaker 3 [00:06:35] And when I play some sanity, which is tell me about my experience, what am I doing?
Khalil Abdullah [00:06:39] Yeah, it's a pick up and play game. So basically it's lot of quick experiences. It's a question of competitive and cooperative games where you can play with or against your friends. So sometimes people like to join up with their friends and do a team battle and let's go towards like a single objective together or maybe I wanna compete and show that I'm the better gamer that I am with my brother. So it's really just that kind of throwback to the times when we used to play games where everything was kind of couch games when like Nintendo and Super Nintendo. You pick them and play games on the couch, have some fun. And just enjoy that day. So for us, we just want a really quick, fun experience that you can pick up and play and pick up and play the next day and pick them and play the next week. So that's the experience that you should get with Cincinnati, it's just a lot of fun, preferably with a group of people.
Speaker 3 [00:07:21] Quickly tell me, like, I know it's not a plot, but what are you doing? Yep. Yep. Take this underwater.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:07:28] Yep, yep. So Soosani is an underwater shooter with competitive and cooperative game modes. You play as a Muba, which is this kind of underwater warrior that's able to take out the opponents. If you're playing multiplayer, or you team up together to take out these enemy sea creatures, which are in the forms of like a blowfish to a big whale. So in our cooperative experiences, there's one that four players can play together locally, which would be in the same room, and go and try to like get to one end of the level to the other. Or they can play online, which they can do the same thing. But if you're more competitive like we are, you can go ahead and try to take each other out in different competitive modes, which is one called team death match, which is basically like the most KOs, the most times you eliminate your opponents, you win. Or there's last Muba standing, which is the last one standing at the end of the match. But we do it in a way where it's easily picked up by people of all ages, so we wanna make sure it gives that cartoon feel so parents can play with their kids.
Speaker 3 [00:08:28] What are you most proud of?
Khalil Abdullah [00:08:31] Um, for me, it's like the journey because yeah, I think I'm most proud of the journey because from where it started from a classroom all the way to, you know, being on Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo, and so much happened in between where we could have easily been like, you, know what, we're done with this. I think it's kind of making it to that finish line and then continue on to something else. So for me it's that and it's just cool to kind of see where it ended up and then all of the people that it affected along the way because You never imagine that you'll be sitting down and watching four people playing a game that you created. That was a really cool part for us, just to see people play it, without us getting involved in stuff. That's the thing I'm most proud of. There's so many things and there's so much more to accomplish, but I think, like I said, it's kind of just taking it all the way to release. We started that journey together, and now we're still here working those games.
Speaker 3 [00:09:19] Is it about, and this is obviously with your new game, too, is it about putting in stuff that you feel that nobody's done before? I mean, what drives you to, when you're thinking about features and what to put in the game and all that sort of stuff, from a treasure.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:09:38] Let's see, what drives me when creating a game? It's a few things, I think for us, fun factor is a big one when we start, but we do want to innovate on the way we're creating that experience. So we want to make sure when we create something that we bring something new, even if we're inspired by something in the past, like how can we change it to something that feels fresh and new. People that we love being playing it or creating games that bring people together whether that's competitively or cooperatively, so that's something we've had in our aspect of our studio. But one thing we strive on is to make sure that we create a versatile catalog of games. We don't wanna be known for creating just single type of experiences. We wanna have multiplayer, single player, maybe story driven or sometimes just go in and just have fun. So we look at it different ways, just depending on what the title we're playing or creating.
Speaker 3 [00:10:36] Is it? Process of coming up with a game, a creative process. And it is a creative processor.
Speaker 6 [00:10:44] Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 [00:10:47] You talked about this a little bit before, but just tell us again about the artistry and the creativity that goes into it. Does it start with an idea? Does it starts with an action, like how you want the mechanic, how you what the game to go? Where do the ideas start?
Khalil Abdullah [00:11:03] Yeah, the creative process of making a game starts with a bunch of ideas and that's honestly the best part because the honest truth is that you get one window opportunity to be that creative with your game. Eventually you start hitting production deadlines and stuff and you don't have that versatility but early on in the project where you can throw a bunch ideas at a whiteboard, the worst thing anyone can say to you is no, that's the most fun part. But it's really just that. I mean, with Swinsanity, with our current game, we literally sit in front of a whiteboard and write a bunch just wacky stuff. A lot of it gets axed out because it doesn't fit into one single game, but yeah, that's kind of the creative part. And even now through like our prototype, we're just doing a lot of testing, a lot of fixing, a a lot like, you know, will this work in the game? Let's try it. And sometimes it does work. Sometimes it doesn' t. You go back and revise it. But that's the creative process. And that applies to devs, that applies art, that apply to production, everything across the board.
Speaker 3 [00:11:54] So if I'm a painter and I start painting on a canvas, I don't have to show it to anybody until I'm ready to exhibit it. I mean, I can. I can bring people in front of me and ask them for permission or opinion, but I don't t do that. Can y'all do that in games or is there another? In terms of bringing in the consumer, the viewer, the end user, it's different in games, right?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:12:16] Yeah, I mean, there's different aspects of when you want to bring in that feedback. So in gaming, there are different phases of your production. You start up in your concept phase, which you want maybe get feedback to see if this is something that fits in the market or how does it fit. You want to see this is something people want. When you go into the next phase, this is prototype, you're now building out the game and that's a great time to start getting feedback, okay, is this fun? Is it hitting some of the goals that we set? At that point, you're heading into this. Pre-production production phase where, you know, now you're very set on what you want to create. You have your market there, and now you are pretty much just a chase to get to that end point. And that's when you have more deeper phases of really getting down the end-to-end part of it. At that point, now you push it out to like your alpha, beta, which is like, you now, this is where people are like, oh man, now we're gonna get it out there and get some real testing. And sometimes you have to go backwards. So at any one of those. You might have to jump back a couple phases because the feedback just told you like, hey, you had maybe a good idea but you didn't really land it. Maybe they're looking more this or this thing you didn't t think would hit so good is not they really like that. We should go back and build on that. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to do it and you have to do that at scale and that's important to make sure you have that feedback.
Khalil Abdullah [00:13:33] It definitely takes thick skin and a low ego, because people are going to tell you what's wrong with your creation. They're going to say, tell you what's wrong with you game. And it's never personal. People just want to have fun, right? They want to enjoy the game. And that's what they're telling you, that this game's either not fun or maybe it's really fun. Whatever their opinion is, they're just trying to tell you what their experience is. But you can never take it personally. And if you're making a game where you want to, like you said, the whole point is we want to make something with fun factor. In order to do that, we have to take the feedback from the people who may or may not consider it fun.
Speaker 3 [00:14:03] But that can be pretty brutal if you had your heart set on like a mechanic or something and people are like...
Khalil Abdullah [00:14:10] Yeah, I think it's like the nature of the game and we always joke around about like testing your game with that if you really Want to find out if your game is fun test it with kids because they have no filter They'll let you know right away if something's not fun, but I think It's just the nature the game. I think the best game studios take feedback really well open feedback up really well. So Um, if you want to make game for people you have to listen to the people who are playing
Speaker 3 [00:14:31] What does it tell you about the feeling? I mean, the feeling is a big word, but is that an important part of your creative process?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:14:40] Yeah, I think, I mean, to me failing is part of getting to the journey of success. So you have to be able to find areas to improve. So there is always success and failure, you just have to find out where it is. So you're not going to nail it the first time. If you're nailing it the the first and throughout you probably didn't get the right amount of feedback because there's probably something wrong with it. So it's just part of the process. I mean that so you have to just bake that feedback in there, bake the fact that things will have to be redone and revised, and that's part of making a great product.
Khalil Abdullah [00:15:15] I don't even really consider failure when it comes to creation. It's just learning experiences. We've missed more times than we've hit in this process, but at the end of the day, no one sees the misses in between. So what that ends up being are just learning steps along the way. So for me, failure is not even, if you're calling a misstep a failure, then you already have the wrong mindset. And you're probably not gonna make it to the finish line if you are already deeming something that you did a failure. So yeah, it's not even a word that we consider now.
Speaker 3 [00:15:45] Is your work ever finished? I mean, does a game ever kind of like done finished or is there something else? I mean a painting, you finish the painting, goes on the wall of the gallery, 99 out of 100 times, that's it. The guy buys it, it goes on his wall, you might never see it again, but you see it at a museum. Is it that way with games or is it a different dynamic?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:16:05] Yeah, I mean games definitely finish. I will say in today's economy of games, people are kind of looking for their last game to play at this point. So everyone just plays Fortnite and that's what they want to play for the next 10 years or whatever. So there's this new brand of these called live service games where you do have to keep giving them content and content. So those people probably won't say games get finished because they truly will probably never be for a while until people decide they want something new. But games definitely finish, and that's one of the hardest parts, is I think every dev would probably agree with me when they say, you probably always had more you wanted to do when you released the game. You kind of just have to be like, okay, we just got to get this out there, this didn't make the cut, we got to really ship this. So it's a matter of finding a nice ground so that people are getting the product that you promised them and they like. And yeah, and then if there's extra content, hopefully put in like a sequel or some downloadable content after.
Speaker 3 [00:17:04] If you ever play a game and go, boy, I wish I'd done that. Boy, I'd love to do something.
Khalil Abdullah [00:17:09] Yeah, I mean, I always play games as the funny thing is ever since we've been making games now when I play them I'm always thinking about I always I tried to tune out of it a little bit but it's really hard for me to look at a game now and be like Man, like I wonder what the production was like behind this or they really should have like expanded this environment because it's driving me Crazy, so it's it's very tough to do that Sometimes when I just want to enjoy the game But all the time there's a lot of games that we have on our list We're like if we if we got the opportunity to remake this game that we would do it So but you know, that's just kind of like the nature of it
Ahmed Abdullah [00:17:38] Yeah, I agree. I have a hard time just playing a game. Now I always am looking at different things they do and I come back and I call Kluh and I'm doing this. Look at the menus on the screen. Yeah, it took me like an hour to get through the first menus because I'm just looking at the menu there. But yeah, it's part of it. But I still enjoy it, as Kluhl said. It's every game I feel like there's something probably worth the value taken out of it
Khalil Abdullah [00:17:59] You can find a validation of that too sometimes. If you see something in a game that we're already doing, we're like, oh, they're doing the same thing that we were doing. Like, we're doing something right. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it's cool to see what people are currently doing in games now and kind of comparing what we have going on in-house.
Speaker 3 [00:18:14] So, a lot of stuff, like in museums, they often focus on cinematic games. We interviewed Jenema Chen, the guy who did Journey, you know, a beautiful, beautiful game. And then there's Anna Perner, they published these really gorgeous games. Is that something you all aspire to, or is that just somebody else's gig?
Khalil Abdullah [00:18:37] Yeah, I would never say no to anything, really. Like I said, there's so many different types of games. Like, for example, Journey is like, it's a storytelling game, right? Like, if you're not playing it because it's like a difficult game to beat or you're trying to get challenge, you're trying to go and like find an experience. And it's just a different type of game. And like we said, one of our goals early on was to have a wide catalog of games, so I never want to take a genre of game and say we would never do that, because I don't know where I'm going to be creatively in two, three, four, five years. So yeah, I mean that's definitely something that we're open to. You can say, would you wanna make a dancing game? I'm gonna say yes to a puzzle game, I'm going to say yes. I'll say yes any kind of game because there's so many cool experiences to make.
Speaker 3 [00:19:19] You have kind of an interesting back story because your parents and their attitudes about games and stuff like that. You all want to tell us about it? I know you've told us about other folks.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:19:29] Yeah, I mean, so our mom worked out a Toys R Us for probably the really childhood of our lives. So she actually introduced us to gaming. So she was a gamer. She loves a game called Bomberman where it's kind of this half-puzzle game, half-action game. She still plays it today. But she actually, we look back at our catalog, we're like, wow, she picked out some real classics here. I don't know if she knew, but yeah, that. Got us into gaming early, like it just created a bond between my brother and I to play together, compete together. But we found out that at an early age, we started kind of getting into games that she was buying that were like creative, very creative type of games. So I think that kind of pushed and we like Legos and stuff like that too. So we always had this creative aspect to it. And I think, that's what made us look at games more than just playing them and like, How does this actually mean? So we started getting into the maker of games. But yeah, our parents have been very supportive of our, just playing games early, our game making journeys and it's just had a really supportive family. That's a huge part of us having success today.
Khalil Abdullah [00:20:36] Yeah, 100%. And I think the funny thing about games now is that video gaming now is so much more understood than it was back in the 90s and stuff. So there's definitely that translation of what the game industry is. Because I feel like kids growing up now when they're like, hey, I'm getting into gaming, it's much more clear what that might mean. I feel like back when, in the early thousands, even indie gaming was completely new when we started. No one really knew what indie gaming studio was. So when we said, hey, we're going to be indie game developers, no one really know what that meant. So I think there was like, there's kind of like the education of like what the game industry is and how to get into it that was happening at that time, which I hope like those doors are open now so that like kids who are getting into gaming can very easily be like, Hey, I want to be a game developer. And like, it's a very understood that it's an awesome career opportunity.
Speaker 3 [00:21:19] And what are the skills that you all need? I know you've talked a little bit about the business. Tell me again. The skills you need to do to be deaf.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:21:26] I mean, it can, when we talk about art and everything, it's so many different things. I think that's the thing people think, okay, what programming do I need to know? It's like, no, you don't need to know programming to make games. That's just one part of it. So you can be, if you want to be on the coding side, then you need to maybe some object-oriented programming, some physics, some geometry. But even that, I mean there's these visual scripting, they call it, where you're just moving shapes around and now you're kind of telling the logic of the game. If you're on the art side, maybe you're in the 2D art, 3D art animation, 3d modeling, if you're into music, if you are into storytelling, pick any part, I mean it's like a film, there's always some aspect of it, so there isn't just one skill. You can be completely on the business side, you can be on the legal side, and now get out of game development, now you can become a content creator and all this stuff. There's so many aspects, so I feel like there's always something to get into gaming. So. My first question then would be like, what would you like? What do you like, what do you want to contribute? And then from there you kind of are different tracks you can take to fit yourself into a game development cycle.
Khalil Abdullah [00:22:33] It's a large industry, and it's just like any other industry, right? Like, I remember we even knew this individual where his role was that he went to different game conventions around the world and basically helped set up. He did like the setup and stuff, like the set up of booths. What he also got to do was try out all the new games for Arden and Elstead because he was able to go to the E3s, the PACs and like the overseas shows and that was his thing. That's what he did every show. He kind of helped out. He started out by volunteering and then it kind of became like his job over the years. Stuff. There's so many things you can do and get into gaming though the thing I would try to say is like you don't have to necessarily be an artist or a dev that stereotype there's so even those terms are such a wide umbrella of skill sets under them so yeah there's so many skills and it's better to ask how your skill set fits into gaming instead of assuming that it doesn't.
Speaker 3 [00:23:18] But for you as the guys at the top of the pyramid or whatever, you have to know lots of things.
Khalil Abdullah [00:23:27] Yeah, for sure. Well, I'll say this, like, we definitely have to understand, like from the top down, what's going on with gaming. But the thing with us too is that when we when we have people join our team, like we have them joining as experts. So instead of pretending I have to know every single thing about art and every single thing about modeling, like I have experts on the team who can be the experts in that area, right? So like they they know the details of what they know their craft, right. So I don't need to know every detail of that craft. But I do need to know how it all works until like the end product. So yeah, there's too much to say that you know every single detail, but we definitely have to know like the grand scheme of what needs to come together to make a game.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:24:05] Yeah, just like any other business, it's a business. So you need to know how to run a business, get your Business 101 books, and make sure your finances are there, make sure you're taxes part, you're legal. So yeah, we have to know to run the business. We also know how run a game development cycle. But as Koolo said, even when we're talking about game production, you can bring in producers that can handle that side. So every studio is built differently. So we're still in this indie space, so. Chloe and I wear a lot of hats, so we kind of touch a lot of the things. But there's some things where the head of studios just had to make sure the vision is there, the business is coming in, and he had all the people in place to actually have it run.
Speaker 3 [00:24:48] Creatively where your influence has come from besides other games.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:24:54] Um, see, film, cartoons, anime, um...
Khalil Abdullah [00:25:00] Well, sometimes I look at other studios and exactly how they got into the business and how they got their games attention and stuff. I know when we first started, like we were looking at one of the names and I was filming the people make Castle Crashers and
Ahmed Abdullah [00:25:14] Behemoth. Behemoths.
Khalil Abdullah [00:25:16] Guys who made Super Meat Boy because that's when like indies were first spinning up so it wasn't even really about like what kind of games they were making it's just like how did these guys even get attention like how do they even get people to know where their game was how do they even Get their game on the platforms and we would go to shows and just talk to them and they were friendly enough to have these conversations with us so especially early on getting started it was like I want we were looking at people who we figured started like us with like one or two people like and see what see what things we can learn from to see what things we can change.
Speaker 3 [00:25:45] Mary, do you want to? Yeah. Do you want me to push? No, just run over. There you are.
Speaker 7 [00:25:49] I've got a bunch of things. I want to go back to your origin story for a second because I read something that made your mother remind me of my mother, and that was when you were small, when you weren't personally pronounced in a game during your childhood. So now you're up. Would you tell us that story? Talk to me.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:26:11] Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, my mom supported us playing games. The only rule that we had was we couldn't play games during the week. So we had to focus on school. So that means that at the end of the week, you know, that was our time that we can play games. But what that did create, though, was we found these loopholes during that was to create our own games to play during the week out of paper, out of a paper. And we would use those ideas in order to kind of recreate games that we play. So if we played Mario Kart on a weekend, we create like a paper version where we're racing on these like kart. We would take, like we get like Ego boxes, like leftover Ego Boxes, make a whole world map. But we didn't know that we were actually paper prototyping, which is a real way of creating and prototyping games. We were just using it as a workaround, but what she did is allowed us to tap into our creative side during the week, and then we can go and play games on the weekend and what actually ended up happening. Is we stopped playing games on the weekend. We actually did a full week of just being creative and creating our own stuff. So that was a pretty interesting way. It got out of control.
Khalil Abdullah [00:27:19] It got out of control though. We started having our own businesses. So like I had my game studio, he had his own game studio. And then we'd compete with each other. We even used like Monopoly money as the currency. We made magazines which we would use to advertise our games. It was out of our control. So we told our parents like, you created this. You created this monster.
Speaker 3 [00:27:38] That's a real vision.
Speaker 5 [00:27:42] Thank you.
Khalil Abdullah [00:27:44] Yeah, paperware was our first technology, yes. Yeah, definitely didn't have, we didn't like laptops or computers, nothing that did anything to help us back then for sure.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:27:52] Yeah, we have a lot of paper.
Speaker 7 [00:27:53] I also read that you've traveled a lot as a kid. How did that influence how you think about storytelling?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:28:02] Traveling around the world changed how I look at people, just look at the world. What our parents did was make sure they brought us places that I think a lot of places didn't talk about when we were kind of growing up. My parents brought us to Africa early, Zimbabwe. We were at Bali probably way before people were there. Same with Dubai. They were just building Dubai. So, we've had a chance to go all around the world, but... It wasn't to resorts either. It was really on the street level of just getting to know the people there, getting to know how people live and allowed us to just understand people more. I think a lot of people make stereotypes of how people live around the world and what it means to be happy. And people are happy within their environment. So for us, that's just, we try to take that on just, it's bigger than games really. It's just how we carry ourselves, how we want to make sure we give opportunity to others. And that was a huge part just making up who we are today.
Speaker 7 [00:29:01] So our series is about art, science, and creativity. And one of the things that motivates me is whether it's happened to education in terms of style or whether it is science, art, technology, or science. How did your experience at school help inform what you do? Did you take a range of subjects?
Khalil Abdullah [00:29:29] So I'll be honest, I don't know if that came from my experience at school. As much as I'd love to give them that credit, I don't think. I don't think.
Speaker 3 [00:29:35] I don't know what came in.
Khalil Abdullah [00:29:36] Oh, sorry, I would say that the understanding of like how much everything connects from different like crafts and lines of work. I wouldn't say that came from school, at least not the school that we attended. So I think that came, from a lot of life experience. Similar to like things like like talking about traveling meeting different people seeing real world experiences seeing like when you get into like the workforce, you kind of see it there right like. There's a lot of teams in the workforce that work together and you see those skill sets come together. It's definitely something that I think should be pushed more on the educational level to show how these things work together. And then ultimately for us working on games, like that did show like the, there's no individual part of the game that we can isolate. We can't just isolate the art. We can just isolate to dev. We can isolate and everything needs to work together, so it's really life and work experiences that taught us that not so much the schools that we attended.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:30:34] Yeah, so when we were going to school, STEAM has kind of been more of a modern thing. STEAM wasn't really integrated into probably the school systems that it is now, which is great. And I think it's important for all schools to make sure that you're kind of showcasing how they all connect. But the thing that's also powerful, too, is that a lot of stuff you can learn online. And that's the path that we took was just kind of seeing those different aspects and learning online. In building what we are today, they're just self-teaching. So whether it's learning curriculums, not just in the school system, but people are putting those curriculams even online. I think there's even, I think Harvard computer science like intro classes, literally the entire semester is on a YouTube channel. So it's incredible what you can find online. And that's what we did, is to kind of build our craft through that. So it is important to make sure everyone knows more about that and how accessible it can be.
Speaker 7 [00:31:33] So in the gaming world, there are indie developers and then there are big companies doing stuff as indie developers. Can you be more creative than innovative?
Khalil Abdullah [00:31:44] I think we have a lot more range of creativity, for sure.
Speaker 5 [00:31:47] As in the
Khalil Abdullah [00:31:48] As independent developers, I think for sure we have a lot of range of creativity. Um, like a lot, when you jump into the AAA studio, you don't necessarily get to experience like a concept phase or prototype phase, you might not even be able to get your ideas in if you are involved in those phases because someone above you or someone on a different team is responsible for that, uh, as an independent team, like we have to wear those multiple hats all the way through development. We have to have that communication with our team all the way through development to be able to like push those concepts. So, um, but again, at the same time. I always say that there's benefits to both sides of both Indian and AAA development because who wouldn't want to say that it works on a Mario game or Grand Theft Auto, whatever your favorite big AAA game is. So yeah, I think there's kind of great sides to both. Yeah, I
Ahmed Abdullah [00:32:33] Indie development, AAA studios is the big stuff. It's really interesting climate today because they're starting to merge a bit with the way that it depends on what kind of product you are and people try to talk about like, is it an indie studio, is it not? What does it mean to be independent at that point? They just, is the amount of control you have, is it the amount funding you're getting? Is it just the fact the game looks low fidelity versus? Big graphics. Everyone has these opinions on what it is. I think there are small independent studios that have a lot of flexibility, I think they're bigger ones too that have that as well, but it could be vice versa where those aren't available in either way. So, I wouldn't necessarily say that today, every indie studio just means creativity and AAA means not. You'll definitely find more in an independent way, but you'll find also possibly. Harder tracks toward funding and different things that are there too. So it's hopefully that independent developers, AAA, can all find the right medium of one, getting the right resources for them to create the product they want, and then if you are a big studio, making sure that you have the integrity to make sure the people that are working have a good culture to be able to work in a nice way. So it is that balance of making sure the studio has that.
Speaker 3 [00:33:58] Going backwards, was there a game that you played coming up where it just kind of just reset your head and you said, wow, this is hard, or this is something completely, this isn't just like fun, there's something greater here.
Khalil Abdullah [00:34:14] I think the game for me that changed my vision of gaming, there's games for every generation for sure. But the game, the first one for me was probably Perfect Dark on N64. The main reason for that one is just because I think growing up I had this idea of what a multiplayer game could be. I think that game showed how many different ways there are that you can play with a group of people. Whether it be competitive, whether it be cooperative, whether they be mission based, whether there be different goals towards the end. That one for me just really changed my opinion and the complexities of fun that a game can offer.
Speaker 7 [00:34:48] How do you keep your ideas fresh? Do you go to movements, do you go to museums, do your favorite journals?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:34:56] We keep our ideas fresh by being huge nerds and just just enjoying all sorts of media all sorts of comics games and everything so we're just we just like so many different things that we have ideas for a bunch of games at this point just a matter of making it be realistic. So yeah just just being in the culture of of gaming which touches so many different things.
Khalil Abdullah [00:35:19] I remember the first time when we, one of the early times when we started going to talk stuff for indie gaming, probably the worst advice we ever heard from someone when they're like, someone asked them what they should do to get into indie gaming. He's like, lose all your friends and stay home and eat ramen noodles or something and don't get out. And that's probably the worse advice that you can get. Get outside, enjoy the public, because you're gonna learn a lot as you're making games through watching movies, playing other games, talking to people. And that's where all the best ideas come from. So that's really it, like I said, we're just big nerds who keep doing big nerdy things and keep getting more and more ideas and those will keep coming.
Speaker 4 [00:35:58] The gaming, however, changes, right? I mean, nothing ever stands still.
Khalil Abdullah [00:36:02] No, gaming changes every day, every month. Yeah.
Speaker 4 [00:36:04] Yeah. So how do you navigate that? I mean, is that something that's always in your mind? It's kind of like, well, how am I going to...
Khalil Abdullah [00:36:11] Yeah, I think at the end of the day, we're still gamers, and gamers are changing too. So we're changing along with the game. So I think because of the fact that we're evolving as gamers, that we are also able to evolve as creators of the industry.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:36:26] Yeah, you've just got to keep playing games to know how the gaming economy and environment and culture is changing and it is shifting literally all the time, month by month, year by year. When you're talking about games that change the dynamic of like, man, this is a game changer, you get two, three of those a year and they're going to keep coming. So you're going have to be on your toes when you're making your game. By the time games take so long, they take years to make. By the time you probably are at the end of finishing your game, whatever trend you were creating on has likely moved on. Probably old, yeah. So it's difficult. You're probably a little behind, possibly, or you've got to kind of create it in a way where you can shift and hopefully land in a spot where people are still feeling that type of genre. You kind of get some of those games sometimes, you're like, okay, this clearly was trying to be something that we're not really feeling anymore. So you've gotta hopefully land on the right spot.
Speaker 3 [00:37:19] Can I just follow up on that? Okay. Which has to do with, it's what you were saying before, getting out in the public, is that for us, for example, we are making a film, okay? The film is going to be in a particular order, alright? We can't make people watch completely in that order because it's going to be three nights and we don't know if it's three hours and we don't which one they're going to watch first. But it's gonna be kind of like we get to kind of control the experience. You all don't exactly do that, or do you, as designers for games, and then you mention multiplayer. So already there's this missing piece of the player, but then you're talking about multiplayer. So how do you set up the creative box that allows people to interact with your creativity and your art, but it's still yours?
Speaker 5 [00:38:10] Yeah, yeah, that's where you want to go.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:38:13] You know
Khalil Abdullah [00:38:14] Go ahead.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:38:15] No, I just think as far as, the thing we're speaking of now is what goes into game design. Because in order to have people experience the game that you want in a way and steer it in a the way you want to, that's the challenge of having great game design, because that allows people to kind of put them into this experience, it's interactive. Now people will absolutely find ways to interact in a unique way and that can Open up. A whole new thing. I mean, there's been complete new games created just because people are experienced in a different way. So that can bring on great things, but it goes into the game design. It goes into, the moment they turn on the game, how do you want them to start understanding the controls? Which ways are they experiencing it? Is it through VR? Maybe I want them be immersed, so maybe I do want them in a headset, and that's it made me choose VR or if I want them to be something where it's more kids friendly. Maybe I want to be on consoles because the control is just better for all sorts of people. So you have to think of so many different things. But yeah, game design is going to allow you to steer the people in the right direction.
Khalil Abdullah [00:39:23] But I also think that when it comes to, just like movies, I don't think the point of creating a game is necessary to control your audience. Some of the best games are games that are more like sandbox. And it's just as hard, if not harder, to create a game that's just an open sandbox where you have people do whatever they want without control. But that happens in movies as well, too. Some of best movies are the ones where it ends, and everyone's arguing about what the ending meant. So it's still very similar to movies, as it is video games. It's just... Some games have designs that are more controlled, like you just follow a single path to the end and what you see is exactly what you get, and some are a little more wide open. Every game is different, and the experience is always going to be different.
Speaker 7 [00:40:04] So playing games together, the two of you as brothers with your friends, knowing that groups of other people are going to play your games together. That's sort of probably an unusual concept to people who think of the game player as the new gun, because the nerdy guy was a couple of hot noodles. What is that togetherness all about? Playing together, collaborating?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:40:33] Yeah, I think, so when we talk about gaming today, here's the reality of games, right? Gaming there's three billion gamers in the world, it's about half the population. I mean, it is more than, it people from young age of five to old age of 60, 70, 80. So there's no one identity for gamers. It's a worldwide industry, it one of the biggest industries in the word. For mobile games, people probably don't know, but more than half the mobile gamers in the world are women. So we can look and say, okay, how do gamers look or play? They look and play likely like you because there's a game for everyone. So when we're talking about the industry, really it's if you're able to do the things that you do and you play sports together or you do these social activities together, gaming is just another avenue to do those same things. So gaming and probably the people that do those things, a lot of time they might go home and then continue to play games or they do it when they're on the way to their social experience. So being playing cooperatively, competitively is just within the experience of games. It just depends on what is something you like to do, but it just is really for anyone.
Speaker 3 [00:41:48] What does it feel like when you're playing with your buddy?
Khalil Abdullah [00:41:51] Depends on the type of game Yeah So what does it feel like to play games with their buddies? The cool thing now is that when you play games, you know with technology now where you're able to play online Like I I don't have to go and you know Sit side by side with Ahmed to enjoy like an awesome experience with him when we grew up It was you know, we sat next to each other played a competitive game Get really intense into the sports game now. I could do that with him anywhere around the world. It feels like I said, I'm having a conversation with Ahmed right here and now we're able to go through an experience together, go through a narrative story together, go through sports game together. Yeah, it's just a really cool experience that I don't think you can really find anywhere else.
Speaker 7 [00:42:33] I have one other question. Andrew, I think you have a question.
Speaker 5 [00:42:38] Yeah. You want to let him know?
Ahmed Abdullah [00:42:42] Thanks, you got something to do real quick?
Speaker 5 [00:42:44] Oh, thank you.
Khalil Abdullah [00:42:44] Yeah, you're in the.
Speaker 3 [00:42:46] It's just the noise. The sound and stuff. Yeah, it's all good. That's okay, sorry. We'll be dead in a little bit. No, I'm done, dude. Okay, thanks very much.
Speaker 7 [00:42:54] So most art is intentional, right? Painter picks up a paintbrush, composer for piano, some kind of piano. You guys create something, but you've got another participant, and that's the game player. How does that play out for you guys? It's not the complete composition, because somebody else is gonna do something.
Khalil Abdullah [00:43:20] Yeah, I think to simplify it for us, we just compare it to, like I said, if you're making a movie, more likely than not, you're makin' it for a viewer. If you're makein' a book, you're makin' it for the reader. For us, we just have someone who interacts with the game. At the end of the day, as soon as you decide to make a product that's commercial, you're probably making it for somebody. If it's food, you want someone to eat the food. So, for us it's just someone who has a little bit longer interactivity with our product, and that's how we see it. We wanna make sure we please that person.
Speaker 3 [00:43:49] So, I said this before, when I was introducing ourselves. People will watch this. And some of them will say, why are you talking about art? It's not art, it's just like a commercial enterprise with people doing mindless stuff on a console or on their phone. What do you say?
Khalil Abdullah [00:44:13] Anything that anything that a person can create that another person can consume is art Food can be art Literature can be Art Feudal can be our anything that I create right that me talking to y'all right now if someone consumes it and They're able to assess that experience. That's art. So I Like you would have to tell me why gaming is different from that to convince me that it's not art It's a it's a product that we're creating for someone else is kind of to consume and that's why it's art
Ahmed Abdullah [00:44:44] Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't get into the nonsense of the office with you, that's like my answer. I mean art can come from a game. Some of the biggest TV shows now are now coming from games. It creates art and art is required in order to create it, so I mean that's that.
Speaker 3 [00:45:07] I mean, I'm old enough when they used to defend jazz, old jazz, you know, that kind of music, right? But 15, 75 years ago, you had to say that. I studied movies in college, and it was like, they're paying you to go to college? My parents were very supportive, but I know other people in the head.
Khalil Abdullah [00:45:29] There will always be someone there to challenge or invalidate what you're doing. So that's not our target audience.
Speaker 4 [00:45:36] I have one quick question also actually. That's what I was going to ask. One of the things that, I don't know if you, the story that we're following is just like that games can actually be used with therapy. Okay, yeah, there's a game company out in San Francisco called Akili and they created a game for kids with ADHD. It's very specific. It's called a DebraRx. Yeah, it's called Debra Rx. It's actually prescribed. But you couldn't play it without a doctor. Okay, cool. Have you ever thought about the fact that games could be something other than a good time and involving a good
Ahmed Abdullah [00:46:14] I think actually, in most cases, games are more than just a good time for a lot of people. They can either be an escape, they can be a learning experience, they could be therapeutic. They're games that are, one, you're creating experiences within there, but you're also maybe learning something like City Skylines. If you play that game, you basically know how to build a whole economy in like a whole city, but there's some that are more calming. Yeah, gaming's can be used as great tools because of interactivity for pretty much a lot of things, right? I'd actually say a lot people don't simply just play games to have fun. There's something that they're doing that helps them balance their life when they're playing games, and that's what's special about it.
Speaker 6 [00:47:01] Can I ask a question? Do you guys consider yourself foremost artists, businessmen, or IT guys? Yes.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:47:08] Yes, yeah. So if you ask me if we consider ourselves business, artists, or IT, as Cool will say, the answer is yes. I'm not doing this to be put into a box, right? I mean, this is something... We love doing something in gaming because you're able to explore so many different avenues. So yeah, we can be able to be flexible to adjust to any of those things, but yeah.
Khalil Abdullah [00:47:37] Yes, that's why I like the term creator just kind of covers a lot of the different areas of what we touch But yeah, I think especially to be an indie game developer You have to be ready to touch each and every one of those things or have someone in position to do that So yes, the answer is yes to all of that. Yes, sir
Speaker 3 [00:47:55] You have been really active in sort of showing the way for younger people of color to work in the industry. Is there, like is there a black way of doing games or is it just, it doesn't matter?
Khalil Abdullah [00:48:11] I think that there's a lot of, just like any art, that can come from your background. Where you were raised, how you were raise, your ethnicity, your religion, whatever it might be. And I think, that will show in your art. I think the thing that we want to show, is that there are stories in gaming to be told and be created from everybody. And that's what we're trying to show. Those creations that are created by everybody, can also be enjoyed by everybody. So while we are black developers... White gamers can enjoy our games, Hispanic games can enjoy our games. Everyone can enjoy games. Those that there's no like isolation for, hey, like this is a black game, Black D last played. This is a Hispanic game. This game from the LGBTQ community, only their community can enjoy it. No, there's games can be created by anybody and enjoyed by anybody on the other side. And that's something we want to make sure people can understand.
Ahmed Abdullah [00:49:06] Yeah, the easiest way to innovate any industry is to open up the ability for different people of different diversities to actually create the games. I mean, whether it's the sports industry or film industry, gaming is the next one up. I mean only 2% of game developers are black, so that means there's just not enough content coming from different people who have different experiences, which will allow for different types of games. In. Sometimes you're in an industry and things get stale because you're getting them from the same point of views all the time. So you're gonna get different point of view, different experiences, and that's just great for everyone because you get just a more diverse catalog of what to play.
Speaker 3 [00:49:42] We did a one of our other stories about roller coasters. Oh nice. There's a roller coaster designer in Switzerland and We said something. When did you when did you first get into this? Because he was like 15 or 25. When I was seven years old I threw pictures of Roller coasters and he actually had one his parents saved. And now he does like stuff for Disney World and he's like a roller class. Sorry for saying this. It's really great. Sometimes people don't know what they want to do. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up. It is really, not that much to say, but 3% of developers right now are black companies. But the people playing must be a much bigger...
Ahmed Abdullah [00:50:21] Oh, it's way bigger. Yeah, so the biggest problem about the 3% of game developers being black is the fact that 80% of black teenagers play games, which is the highest percentage out of any teenage of any type of demographic. So the audience is there. And I would even say that a lot of black gamers are pushing things of the black industry, Really pushing not just the... Like sales of it, but also the culture, the trends. I mean, everything is starting to feed into gaming in what is cool, what is acceptable. So it would be great to start seeing them be able to on the creative side so we can start just driving the industry on that area as well, because that just seems to be the pattern of what happens. That's why I feel like gaming is up next. And you're gonna really see some great stuff coming out when we're able to open the doors up for more people of color.
