Apeiron Interviews: Finessing Feedback with Big Jim

Hey everyone! This week we sat down with Jim Fok, fondly known around the office as Big Jim and a producer here at Foonie Magus. Jim has a…

Hey everyone! This week we sat down with Jim Fok, fondly known around the office as Big Jim and a producer here at Foonie Magus. Jim has a storied career — he’s been working in the video game industry in East Asia since 1987! — and has a lot of insights to share about the ups and downs of game development, knowing your audience, and why Apeiron might just be on the edge of another big moment in game history.

As a bonus, we’ve also collected some tips and tricks from Foonie CTO Gem Ng about what we’re looking for from you guys in terms of feedback i.e. what would be most useful to hear for our devs and for making a greater godiverse. Also a super special bonus from Frank Cheng, Foonie CEO (if you don’t have time to read the article, check the bonus content).

Lots to do, so off we go!

Foonie Magus: Hi Jim! So could you introduce yourself to our lovely readers?

Jim: Hi everyone, I’m Jim. I’m 58 years old, and I’m happy to be here to talk to you guys today.

FM: So you’ve had a long career in game development. Could you maybe talk a bit about how you got started?

Jim: Well, I had a background in electronics and electrical engineering. I made peripherals, pagers, that sort of thing. Do you know what a pager is?

FM: Oh yes, I remember those! Haha

Jim: So I was interested in game development at that time and actually I started to do some…well, some hacking. I am actually the creator of this device called the Game Doctor. It would let you hack some of the games back then and enter cheat codes and things like that.

FM: Wow that’s super cool! You’re an OG hacker!

Jim: I guess I am haha! But actually back then it was not super sustainable to do hacking. So I did it for a few years but then went back to electronics fabrication. But I always wanted to do game development: I know that. I found a job at Era Entertainment Company and we made a game about the [Hong Kong] celebrity Charlie Yeung. And this was my first game. But I still left the company after that, because their focus was not game development.

So then some of the other developers who made the Charlie Yeung game, they founded a new game development company called Warp Power, and I decided to join as well. We developed an RTS [real time strategy] game with 5 races, all with unique units. It took us 2 years just to finish the PC version of the game, which we ended up published on the Taiwanese market! The reception, unfortunately, wasn’t great. Still, we ended up getting a license to publish the game on Playstation from Sony. So we ported it over. We had to change the whole experience! Originally it was PvP but we changed it to PvE because the Playstation at that time didn’t fully support networked PvP. The game was released as Alchemist. It actually did ok in the end, although not enough to recoup all the development costs.

FM: That is some kind of story! I mean you turned all the gameplay upside down because of a licensing deal.

Jim: Yeah, and then after that we changed the purpose of the whole company from one focused on game development to instead being an internet provider. But then another opportunity came up and I joined Gamania, a game developer in Taiwan. At the time, it was a decently big company, and it grew a lot while I was there! Explosive growth in the industry.

Anyway, because of my experiences on the technical side of setting up a network that I got while at Warp Power, I was assigned to be part of a team that helped to set up the infrastructure and everything for a popular Asian MMO franchise. So I learned a huge amount at that time about everything related to the construction of the servers and the daily operations for massively multiplayer online games.

FM:That sounds…amazing! And like it was a lot of work!

Jim: Thanks! It was a big project, but it was successful, happily. Well, over time Gamania evolved as a company: its main business became licensing and publishing, then it developed a few games in-house, and then it out-sourced, working with game studios around Asia. And I moved from R&D Developer to become a Producer. In this role, I would go around Taiwan and Hong Kong and meet with the studios and talk to them, give them professional advice and help from Gamania if they needed it, that sort of thing.

It was in this capacity that I first met Orange [Foonie Magus COO], who was working at a company called M-Inverse. Anyway, I really liked working with these studios, and I wanted to come back to Hong Kong and get back into direct game development again. So I left Gamania and started working at Next Media back in Hong Kong. I was working in their games division, a group called NxTomo.

We were asked to localize a game called BFB — Barcode Footballer. It’s a mobile game, a football game. But we actually made some big changes to the game through localization.

FM: How so? Is localization really such a big project?

Jim: It can be! In this case, we did an analysis of local Hong Kong football fans. We looked at their play patterns — the situations they were most likely to play and have fun in our game — and then we made adjustments accordingly. And it paid off! BFB has been a big success.

But again, Next Media was never focused on game development, they just had this one division. So in the end, I decided to leave. And when I left, Orange invited me to join here as a producer.

FM: What a story! You’ve witnessed literally the rise of networked gaming in Asia and been a big part of it. So moving to the present — what do you think about blockchain? And Apeiron?

Jim: Well of course the technology is amazing. It’s another game changer for the industry, and we will have to adapt. And as for Apeiron — I think it’s on the right track to catch this moment. The game type is very new and unique: an RTS and roguelike card battler combination: cool! I’m looking forward to seeing more of it as we move forward with production.

FM: So as you know, we recently released our demo and we’re collecting feedback from users. Do you have any advice to our users about how they might help us, or advice to fellow developers on what to look for?

Jim: Well — it’s hard haha. There’s no one right answer. But thinking back to the success of something like BFB, I’d like to ask our audience a question: how do YOU play Apeiron? More specifically, what are the situations you play and enjoy the game? If we can isolate this element and answer this question, it will be a big benefit for us. But of course it is challenging, especially when you have a global audience to consider. Different people in different countries will have different answers. And sometimes people will tell you what they want to hear rather than what you need to hear. So I guess if I have one piece of advice to our players: be honest with us. Tell us the truth! That’s what we need.

FM: I can see someone knocking at the door looking for you, Jim, so I think we have to close the interview. But this is great and thoughtful advice! Thanks so much for your time and speaking with us today! See you around!

Jim: Thanks! Bye! *He rushes out the door at top speed, on the way to produce the hell out of another game.*

________

And that’s Jim, everyone! A very cool guy with a lot of experience and great advice. If you missed it, when giving feedback on Apeiron, tell us the truth (rather than what we want to hear) and consider the situation you’re playing in. For instance, right now, our leaderboards are focused on time running through the levels: how might that have affected your perceptions of different aspects of the game?

On the matter of feedback, we also have a bonus from Gem, our CTO: “Actually, standard QA is in person. We want to see people’s emotions on people’s faces, to see how you react. As developers, we consider ourselves as designing an emotional experience. So how to translate this online? Well, one thing you can do is stream or record yourself playing with a webcam: then we can actually see your reactions in real time! Another thing is hearing about your journey: describing to us your feelings about it from beginning to end. What are your happiest moments? Your roughest moments? Give us the details and it will be great! Thanks everyone!”

Super special Bonus content from Frank aka Foonie CEO: “Dont ***ing mention hotkeys, it’s supposed to be a ***ing mobile game in the future as well. So no more hotkeys, death to hotkeys! About feedback: best to ****ing stream yourself playing it you monkeys” (respectfully and with love).

Right then, that’s about all we have for today. Are you ready to tell us your real thoughts about Apeiron? Join us on Discord and tweet us on Twitter and let’s have a conversation~

And as always, thanks for reading, godlings. We’ll see you next time.

About Apeiron

Apeiron is the world’s first NFT-based play-and-earn godgame. Apeiron will feature a unique card-based action-adventure combat system combined with god game simulation gameplay inspired by classic god games like Populous and Black & White. Players will be able to build up planets from above before descending to the ground as a powerful Avatar to solve the mysteries of the universe. Players will grow their planet to the point of developmental stagnation, then reset the planetary cycle via an Armageddon event to allow for even more advancement and thrilling late-game alliance level GvE and GvG activities. Apeiron will use a tri-token architecture, which means that there will be three separate tokens to navigate their ecosystem: a governance token, a play-to-earn token, and a premium alliance token.

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