About You
Tell us a little about yourself! What’s your role at Series, and what do you work on day-to-day?
Hi I’m Sterf. My title is “Executive Producer” but that feels like a less and less apt description of what I actually do every day. Currently I’m spending most of my time as a conduit between our creator community and the platform itself, doing everything I can to help our creators be successful on RUN 🙂
How did you end up at Series?
The project I was on previously died and I had been taking the summer off to go to the dog park every day and do house projects and make lots of very silly deeply unmarketable games 😛 Some folks I worked with at my previous job could tell I was getting restless and asked if I had ever made anything in Ink before (I hadn’t). For the record, this is an excellent way to lure me into whatever tomfoolery you have in mind – I cannot resist a “Do it, you won’t” style dare.
I had never made a narrative game before (or even really done any creative writing) but I spent a week making a little interactive fiction horror game about a parasitic monster that tricks you and your friends into being hydrated and then lures you into the woods one by one when they have to pee to infest them. A few weeks later I was working on The Ultimatum at Series.
Your Craft
What does a typical day look like for you?
There Are No Typical Days At Series (and when there are I usually start losing my mind and start automating shit.) I enjoy being chest deep in the muck and we do a lot of that here. In a given week I’m juggling getting our events calendar sorted for the next few weeks, scanning the catalog for standout content to boost, doing feedback sessions with creators on how to improve their games, taking feedback from the community to build out tools and documentation and bug fixes to create systematic fixes for common issues, dogfooding various new features before they roll out to the general public, creating specs and UX mockups for new features, wrangling social strategy, and sometimes making a little game (as a treat)
What do you enjoy most about working on RUN?
Working directly with creators wakes me up in the morning – It’s energizing to get to see all the cool stuff people make and connect the dots of their personal experiences to the UX of the platform. I love solving problems at the intersections of humans and machines and RUN has those maybe more deeply than anything else I’ve ever worked on.
What’s a project you’re especially proud of?
I feel like the real answer to this is more of a process than a project (and it’s been very much a team effort), but over the last year RUN (and I) have gone from a place where it was Much Much Easier Than Ever Before But Objectively Still Very Hard to make a game. Game ideas float through my head on a near daily basis and I used to have to just let them go as too hard and not worth the effort, but lately lots of half baked spur of the moment inspiration has turned into shipped, playable games on RUN. I have long believed that making games is more fun than playing them, but only recently do I feel like that flow state is more continuous and (for the most part) free of tearing your hair out and crying every few steps, and that’s been a process of thousands of tiny course corrections to get the platform where it is today, but it’s also just feeling like I’m a better prototyper and game maker because of it – I’m super proud of the speed and quality at which I’ve been able to express ideas in playable form and the power we’ve built for other creators to do that same.
Inspiration
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Everywhere lol. A lot of my game projects have a weird specific thing I couldn’t get out of my head.
Lo-fi Vend Dreams was a game I started when we were building a tool called asset-bot (that still hasn’t been allowed outdoors for it is too dangerous for consumer use 😛) A couple years ago I acquired an old vending machine off of facebook marketplace and I’ve since been sort of obsessed with the idea of a vending machine operator sim and I wanted to make something with a drippy all consuming vaporwave/cyberpunk aesthetic. I was in a bout of insomnia at the time so a lot of the time i spent working on it was at 4am and I just really liked the idea of a game built at 4am to be played at 4am – just something simple and calming but liminal and dreamlike. I still have a lot to finish on this one (maybe a quest for when we take another swing at an asset-bot-v2)
Tiny Tides I made right after coming back from the beach. I spent a lot of time just being lazy and watching the waves and building walls to protect our stuff from getting stolen by the ocean. As an east coast kid I’ve had so many prized possessions stolen by the ocean over the years. At night we spent a bunch of time wandering through arcades and I am mostly not very swayed by gambling but IRL coin pusher scratches my brain in all the best ways. So Tiny Tides is sort of a reverse coin pusher game tower defense type deal.
You Have Died of the News was a game I made that weekend that lettuce was making everyone poop their pants and the air quality was in the toilet. Someone shared this meme and I was like, “That’s funny I’m going to make that a game.” I guess more broadly I just love that we’re living in an era where making a little game as a joke and/or artistic frustration at the world around me is something I can bang out on a Sunday.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned in your career that has stuck with you?
All Time Is Made and when things are important you find a way to get them done. I am still learning how to put less important stuff down 😛but whenever people say they don’t have time ask more questions because there is always a way if the thing matters.
What advice would you give someone interested in game dev?
There is no wax on wax off to game dev. The only way to get good at it is to do it and iterate a lot. No spec survives contact with the player. Playtest early and often. Hear the feedback and understand what your players like and don’t like about your game. It doesn’t mean you should spin your wheels forever on something that’s not working – it’s good to know when to move on – but if people aren’t very interested in playing your game there is a lot to be learned in understanding why.
RUN Favorites
Do you have a favorite RUN game or video?
It feels unethical for me to choose just one but I love a bunch of the stuff coming out of our Outer Space Week event (because I love space, but also because it’s so cool to see a bunch of creators scrap out cool stuff in under a week <3)
Lightning Round
Coffee or tea? Coffee
Early bird or night owl? Crepuscular
Favorite game? Rimworld
Favorite book? Ender’s Game
Favorite movie or TV show? The Expanse
Current obsession? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_5wR4xAic4
Dream vacation? Lazy beach trip with internet 😭yea I know I’m boring
One word your teammates would use to describe you? Sterf.
Closing
What’s one thing you hope creators take away from the work you do?
I hope they are inspired to create and share their weirdest little ideas 🙂