At the recent Casual Connect USA called Communication In Your Studio, Dan Chao, CEO and Co-Founder of Mastermind Studios led a roundtable discussion about tools/methods used to improve in-office communication, getting to the heart of the toughest topics. Dan emphasizes the advantages of starting his career in the games industry as an engineer.
Now when Dan designs things, his primary goal is to always make things “engineering-friendly”, where systems that are created allow a lot of variance through manipulating just a few numbers. He says, “I love game systems that are composed of a few low-level variables that can be tweaked to yield things that feel very different.” In addition, his engineering background has given him a feel for how long a task should take and what will be involved in accomplishing it.
The Fascination of Video Games
Dan’s fascination with video games began very early with a quiet addiction to arcade gaming. He admits that he would secretly spend his entire allowance on arcade games and then feel enormous shame and guilt afterward. He believes, “For many people in the games business, certain games have had a lasting impact and we joined this career to make that elusive game that we want to play ourselves.”
His start in the games industry came when a friend, who had shipped Jedi Knights at LucasArts, then decided to form his own company and needed engineers. So Dan came on as the first employee and for the next three years they worked on an Xbox launch title. Through the ups and downs the team became very close and had a great experience overall. With this game he had his first experience in game design through creating the combat scenes. “I think the lead designer,” he stated, “got tired of my constantly over opinionated views on how the combat worked.”
The time in Dan’s career that he remembers bringing him the most pride was designing a game for casual gamers, Wandering Willows. It was his first game as lead designer. He admits, “Normally I have an adverse reaction to heavy story games, but I put my head down and wrote a few thousand lines of dialogue over the course of a few months. I poured a lot of heart into that game.” He describes the game as “just OK”, but still considers it was a monumental achievement for the entire team given the circumstances.
Dan went on to be the lead game designer behind Funzio’s hit titles Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age. Come 2012, when Funzio was acquired by GREE, he was the director of War of Nations, another mobile game. After this success, in 2014, he and several others founded Mastermind Studios to develop mid-core mobile games.
The Challenge of Running a Company
He still is fascinated with designing games and as CEO he also has found surprising satisfaction in scheduling work so people’s tasks and dependencies are perfectly balanced. Even though Dan claims he would be perfectly happy spending all his time this way, he also finds it necessary to be involved in analytics, financial planning and company operations.
The challenges of his present role are tremendous. Dan has been astounded to discover the number of relationships needed to establish a company. As he describes it, “Everyday there is something new that pops up that I’ve never done before, a position that I’ve never hired for before, or I’m trying to contact someone that I’ve never met before and trying to convince them that we are worth talking to. Fortunately, social networks have gone a long way in making this easier in today’s age.”
Mastermind Studios focuses on the free-to-play business model to monetize their games. Dan explains that, “it’s possible to make a fun free-to-play game that has interesting strategic decisions rather than one that just preys on your OCD tendencies.” He also sees that it is possible to make a fun, strategic free-to-play game that still involves monetization. Given his past successes at Funzio and GREE, Dan believed his best chance at creating a sustainable game company was to once again create free-to-play games.
Building a Team
Finding the right members of the team is a crucial aspect for success in the business. Dan specifically looks for people who can pitch in and take responsibility for more than they have been tasked with. Although not everyone has this ability, it is especially helpful. Good game designers have been the most difficult to find, Dan admits. Generally traditional game designers moving to mobile games try to make a console/PC type game without having a sense of mobile game play session length and they do not understand how to work hard currency into the game design.
On the other hand, free-to-play designers who come from apps or previous free-to-play games may understand how to create a great economy, but not be able to construct that second-to-second fun game experience. That being said, Dan also states that “Historically mobile devices or web games haven’t been powerful enough to really support interaction at that level, but that’s changing.”
Not all Dan’s time is spent with the business. He also enjoys playing, writing and recording in a band. He and his wife have two cats and “an overly needy” dog.
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