Interview with Austin Yarger

04 Feb 2021

Get to Know Who’s Who At GLGX 2021!

In the run up to this year’s event, we are conducting a series of interviews with presenters at Great Lakes Game Expo. We hope to channel from all corners of game development to present you with the best experience possible. So please enjoy getting to know our wonderful speakers!

Who are you?

My name is Austin Yarger, I’m a lecturer of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, teach the primary game development course at the university, advise the game development clubs at the university and I run a local start-up called Arbor Interactive.

What are you presenting at GLGX2021?

I have actually submitted two games, one of them is entirely made by Arbor Interactive. That one is Goodbye Groundhog, a game in which you are framed for causing an eternal winter. The groundhogs are pinned for extending winter so long that the animal community is starving and hurting. You’ll need to defend yourself from a very desperate and increasingly agitated mob. You’ve got to warm their hearts, find your daughter and turn the tables. It’s a tower defense game that is highly mobile and not particularly long. It was made for the Locally Sourced Michigan Winter Game Bundle (Link). I hope you only encounter a handful of bugs while playing it, but I think it’s a good experience for the cost, and I am fairly proud of it.

Another game that I have submitted is a horror game that I am working on with Prairieville Games. It is a game that centers around evil fraternities turned cults. We’ve got greek fraternities who are taking the Greek nature of their fraternities a little bit too literally and they are trying to revive ancient, bloodthirsty greek gods. You are a college student who is trying to escape and solve puzzles. It’s a very classic survival horror, Resident Evil inspired game.

The Indie Survival Guide talk is going to be a high level survey of how indie studios of our size, the kind of which we see in this community, sustain themselves. And also how they are getting to the point where they can work on games for more time, not just for a few hours of hobby time, but for half their day, their full day, maybe even as a full time job. We’ll cover the models that successful indies are using, how they are making sustainable revenue and other tools that are available to local developers.

What got you started in game development?

So it was a long time ago, it was Game Maker, that was my first game development environment, and I sought Game Maker out in response to my experience with Crash Bandicoot. When I first played Crash Bandicoot, my first ever game, it seemed as if it was a cartoon that I could direct. I loved cartoons, but this one was one I could really take ownership of and affect the outcome, experiment and see how things go. That really intrigued me. I would go to sleep when I was younger and just run through different design ideas in my head. I didn’t know about Game Maker and I couldn’t program, so I could never really bring those ideas to life. Once I discovered Game Maker and started making games and putting some of these designs out, I discovered that I love game design but I also love programming in general. And that has taken me through my career, through different companies, my degree in Computer Science at University of Michigan, to Facebook and Electronic Arts. Game development has been really great to me.

Here’s the thing about game development, here is what makes it magical: Game development is one of the few fields where so many different disciplines must come together. You need incredible engineering but you also need fantastic art. You need design, you need business and production talent and knowledge. It really takes all these things to make an effective game and, as a result, as a game developer, you just naturally become well rounded. You get to explore all these different disciplines that might not be your main discipline. You are constantly learning, constantly interacting with other people, learning what they care about, what is important for other disciplines and, as a result, you get a much wider view of the world. It’s a good feeling.

What games are you most inspired by?

I play a ton of games, so I try and take techniques from as many of them as I can. I am playing through Earthbound right now and one thing it is teaching me is the value of interesting text and dialog. You’ll find that Goodbye Groundhog has a lot of dialog in it in part because it is a relatively cheap way to fill a game with content. In terms of games that I am most inspired by, I really like games that are cuter, kind of goofy and full of energy. Games like Gitaroo Man and Elite Beat Agents. I also really like horror games and the emotion they are able to bring out of you. Games like Alien Isolation. The unpredictable nature of that game always has you guessing.

What has been your favorite game to work on?

It was probably The Sims 4. So The Sims 4 was a monumental effort for the development team at EA. It was an effort I came into at the very end of development. I learned so much from diving into like a five million line code base. Things like how to manage that complexity and how to work with other engineers and other professionals from other disciplines to get your tasks done. It was a really great experience. I learned a lot, the game came out and it was pretty fun. The Sims is a franchise I have played for quite a while and to jump on to that franchise and contribute to it was very special. Though, I do have to say, as your knowledge and experience in a field grows, some of the childlike wonder tends to disappear. The amazement and mystery I once felt for games has since been replaced by respect for the execution of the craft. I can’t decide whether or not to be saddened by this.

What do you think is the most important problem the game industry faces today?

That’s a really hard one, because there are problems coming from every angle. There are labor disputes, there is the issue of keeping talent and personnel healthy and the historical abuse that a lot of developers have faced in this industry is disappointing. While it has gotten a lot nicer in many ways, it’s still a big issue. There are plenty of stories coming out and plenty of people hurting. That’s no way to build an industry.

Another issue to take into consideration is the introduction of new platforms. First party platforms are making a lot of moves lately, whether it is investing in streaming technology or grappling with what it means to make their franchises work in new spaces. There are a lot of acquisitions happening. Tencent is really scooping up a lot of smaller developers, Microsoft is on a hiring spree right now. There could be concerns that this, over time, might reduce the availability of some of those games with games becoming first party exclusive.

As far as the industry goes, I mainly think about the local industry, I have been very pleased with the growth we have seen in the local Michigan game development industry. Something that I am really interested in is how we can get these local, part time game developers to the point where they can sustain themselves, sustain their families, and justify working on games as a full time job. That becomes a total game changer for that developer and also everyone that interacts with that developer. You generate a lot of knowledge and expertise when you are working on those problems for eight hours a day. If we could only get to that point, I feel that we can start a positive feedback loop in this area where cost of living is pretty nice, talent exists and that causes people to move here which causes additional talent to come in and studios to set up a satellite office; this is the kind of thing where it is conceivable that we could be something like Madison, Wisconsin in the next five to ten years. We just have to find a way to get a couple moderate hits out of this community. I think if you look at some of the teams around here that have had some really good hits, like Redact Games, Bowlcut Studios and Gaudium, you’ll find that these games are fantastic. They look great. They have clearly gone to a new level of professionalism where it is very hard to distinguish them from the best selling indies games on the market. We need more of that.

Tune in for GLGX 2021 to hear more from Austin and our other presenters! We will be live from the 18th to the 21st of February on Twitch.