Why this Facebook engineer left his job and opened a game studio in Japan | Athena Crisis 

I love how he prioritize family over work, while going back to his original passion of building game. It is probably not easy but it must be fulfilling

Very informative. I’m in the middle of starting a company here in Japan, then sell my game to schools here. Already in Early Access but lots of work! Maybe we can speak someday 👍

I'm also a game developer, and the advice about just figuring out what specifically you want to do without trying to immediately understand the fundamentals is spot on. So many people on social media (usually those that haven't actually made a game) will give all sorts of bad advice and lead you down the wrong path. Just get your hands dirty and figure out the specific things you want to do as they come up.

I am a indie game developer and this was great and everything this guy is saying is spot on. Great interview thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the interview, very interesting. I really fell in love with the idea to be able to ship game updates in 15 minutes from getting a comment on Discord.

Amazing interview 👏. Also gave me some perspective about why tech companies mostly pop up in US. The difference in process of starting a company in Japan vs US is prettybig.

well... after working 10 years for meta, I can imagine being in a position to be able to take these type of risks; I'm on the grind right now to put myself in a similar position, it's been 4 years now for me, thanks for sharing your amaizing story!

I have some insight into your question from around 29:30. This is just my observation from one event in Tokyo + a previous interaction spending some time with people who are engineers at a company with offices in both North America and Tokyo. Japanese companies, even tech companies, if they're above a certain size in terms of employees/revenue tend to still have Japanese work cultures and as a byproduct some aversion to newer technologies or spending time on investigating and replacing older technologies. So not only does the language barrier pose a problem, the people in Japanese tech companies vs foreigners are also interested in different technical AND non-technical topics. As a more concrete example, last year I spoke at the Tokyo DevOps Days conference. DevOps refers to a way of working where people not only write the code but also do the operations of the software as well. The topics for presentations from the Japanese speaking community tended to be about older technologies and things like "how do I get my company to operate in a more 'western tech company' manner", meaning faster development cycles, more autonomy for engineers, etc. The talks from English speaking presenters were either about newer "cutting edge" technologies in the space, or about why Japanese companies are in the situation that I just described.

there is nothing like coding for yourself, for the whole purpose of creating your own thing.

Did he mention which game engine he used to create his game?

Ohhh awesome! Another Austrian in Japan with an interesting career choice! Kind of feeling proud of our small country right now 😁