Gylee Games

Welcome to Gylee and Friends! The podcast where you hang out with game devs and hear about our pixelated shenanigans! Join our hosts, Chris Bergman (Founder/CEO of Gylee Games) and Kim Edwards (Senior producer at Gylee Games) weekly, on YouTube or listen anywhere you get podcasts! #podcastclips #indiegames #indiedeveloper #podcasts #trailer #gamedesign #gamingpodcast #gamepodcast

Welcome to Gylee and Friends! The podcast where you hang out with game devs and hear about our pixelated shenanigans! Join our hosts, Chris Bergman (Founder/CEO of Gylee Games) and Kim Edwards (Senior producer at Gylee Games) weekly, on YouTube or listen anywhere you get podcasts! #podcastclips #indiegames #indiedeveloper #podcasts #trailer #gamedesign #gamingpodcast #gamepodcast

Location is everything. I spent time answering emails from area schools about speaking directly to students about the realities, opportunities, and lived experience of working in #gamedevelopment for a living today. Since Gylee Games put down roots in our hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, we never lost the ability to speak directly to the young people in our schools and help inspire them to continue building the scene here.?We can offer effective, actionable information that can help them break into a very competitive industry. An industry they no longer need a map to see, because they can point directly to it in their own neighborhood. I brought my kids into the Gylee Games office last weekend, in fact, because I had to pick something up and they were curious about what a video game studio looks like in “real life.” Pictures can only do so much.? It was amazing to be able to show them around and explain that this is where we have meetings, artists can draw on those screens like they would a piece of paper, this is where we test and refine RA RA BOOM, and here is the wall of board games and art books that’s in every single game studio I’ve ever visited. I was able to show my kids firsthand that people make #videogames, including people in their own community. Games aren’t airlifted in from bigger cities, they’re made everywhere, including right here in the #Midwest!?After a career spent telecommuting, it felt special to be able to show my family the realities of the job in person. Now that we’re deep into production on RA RA BOOM, which has an amazing publisher in Midwest Games, we’re able to do even more community outreach, and have already hosted a number of aspiring local devs who had a few questions or asked for a tour. Time is always against you when you’re making a game, but investing in your own community is the best way to plant even more seeds for the future. And if you plant even a tiny seed in the right place, it can #grow through concrete until it reaches the sun's rays, changing everything in its path. This may look more like a field for now, but we’re absolutely sure of one thing when it comes to our home of Cincinnati, Ohio: This is a place where trees will grow.

Something has to change. Companies are laying off talent left and right, for a number of reasons. Apologies are written, promises are made about doing better in the future, but leadership stays in place while the people making the games continue to suffer an industry that offers little sense of security. The loss of talent is staggering, especially considering the average career in the #games industry is only five years long. #Experts and #mentors aren’t leaving, they’re being shoved out. What’s the solution? There isn’t an easy one. We think that by keeping control of our future as much as possible, and operating with the long-term goal of building a strong, vibrant game development community in Cincinnati, Ohio we can make a positive contribution to the industry. We win by growing and remaining here, in our home, and making the best games we can. These aren’t just words, RA RA BOOM is being published by Midwest Games, a company itself dedicated to the same cause.?Our mission drives every part of our decision-making process. Because the bottom line isn’t the only thing. It’s a single data point in the journey we’re on to continue to create games right here, in the #Midwest. Our goals are quality, longevity, and humanity. Revenue and profit are the means to achieve those goals, not the win condition itself. The real path to happiness may be building something that lasts, a business that grows and strengthens your own community, while others do the same in their own home towns. Gylee Games isn’t a house we’re flipping, it’s a home we’re building.