Jason Thor “PirateSoftware” Hall joined professor Gordon Bellamy’s CTIN-463: Anatomy of a Game class as a guest speaker last Wednesday, January 22. The popular streamer and indie developer encouraged students to be at ease with failure, citing it as an important step towards success.
A pivotal personal journey
In front of a virtual audience of aspiring game makers, Hall explained that his current success did not stem from a straightforward path.
Hall’s first academic and professional aspirations were in entomology, the study of insects, but he quickly realized during his studies that the road he was taking would ultimately make him upset. The field offered little fulfilling work opportunities and Hall felt like he had to pivot.
After dropping out, Hall’s hobbies of programming and gaming provided an alternative route, with his niche knowledge of games landing him his first gaming job at Blizzard as a quality assurance tester.
“That was a realization where I learned it was fine to have hobbies and other things that you can pivot into the rest of your life and your career, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that,” said Hall. “Some people will be like: ‘Oh, well, you failed to get a degree’ and it’s like, ‘So? That’s okay.’ You can go and do other stuff, and it hasn’t stopped me from succeeding.”
Throughout his career, Hall got promoted at Blizzard, worked in cybersecurity for the Government, and is now one of the most popular streamers on Twitch with over 1.2 million followers.
Hall said that his career showed him how being resourceful, often seeking out information about specific hobbies or passions online, can lead to success and inspiration.
“If I take my passion for ants or my passion for mushroom growing, I can make games out of that,” Hall said. “I can take that as an idea for something that I’m more knowledgeable in, and be like: ‘I’m gonna go make a video game about this.’ You can add your passions together and mix and match them.”
“Your first game will likely fail”
When asked about what to expect when entering the gaming industry, Hall encouraged students not to be afraid of failure in their own career paths, especially as independent developers.
“Your first game will likely fail, and that’s great,” said Hall. “You want to make something that kind of sucks. You want to put it out into the world. You want to show people that bad idea that you had, and you want to do it in the best way you possibly can, and then learn from it and make something that sucks a little bit less.”
A lot of developers working on their first meaningful solo projects fall into the pitfall of seeking perfection to please audiences from the start, according to Hall.
Furthermore, it is important that this learning process happens in public. Hall encourages new developers to market their projects by using platforms like YouTube, Discord, and Twitch to create a dedicated audience that helps them grow by giving their input live during the development process.
“Many people out in the world are making indie games [...] from the side of a triple-A,” said Hall. “They’ll think: ‘No one can see my code, no one can see my art, no one can see anything that I’m doing.’ No. You do not have the money to fight the millions of dollars that triple A’s are going to throw at [marketing]. The best thing you can possibly do if you want to succeed in this space right now is show everyone everything that you’re doing, all of your code, all of the art that you make, make it live.”
Hall used the example of a past popular independent release Cube World to show the importance of community when developing a project. The developers of the game, despite important hype building around their game’s development, ceased almost all communication with their internet community and finished designing their game in isolation. This led Cube World to transition from one of the most anticipated indie publications to a widely disregarded game upon its release as it failed to meet the expectations of its fans.
Community is everything
Hall’s emphasis on community-building is visible in how he treats his current success as a public figure in the gaming space.
Hall said that his goal is to use his platform to help people learn about different hobbies and roles in the game industry. He often does development work on his stream or interviews developers for upcoming titles. Similarly, his Discord server is designed to have a plethora of beginner resources for various subjects and different community events.
When describing his server, Hall says:
“Here’s a platform for you to express yourself. Here’s a community you can talk to [...] That gives [fans] a platform to kind of search and do things on their own, because I can’t be there for everybody all the time. [...] That’s why I’ve set it up in this way: ‘here’s a platform for you to grow yourself, and then you choose from there. That [platform] is yours.”
While Hall’s path has been filled with career pivots, his hobbies and resourcefulness have helped him to become one of the biggest streamers on Twitch, head the PirateSoftware indie game studio, and become Director of Strategy for offbrand games.
If students are looking to learn more about certain industry professions, the CTIN-463: Anatomy of a Game as well as PirateSoftware’s Discord Server seem to be good places to start.