Career Paths and Skills in the Game Industry with Alvin Juban of Synergy88

In this episode, Synergy 88’s Studio Director and GDAP chairman, Alvin Juban, joins the podcast as we dive into the evolving career paths in the game development industry and what we need to equip the next generation of creators to help them thrive in this line of work. 

Key Takeaways:

• How game development roles came about in the Philippines and the slow bloom that attracted talents to move to this industry.
• The not-so-sexy aspects of Game Development necessary for a business to stay afloat and grow.
• The evolution of roles and career trajectories for aspiring game developers today.
•  The importance of STEM programs in developing intuitive coders and programmers in the future.

Synergy88 Digital is an animation studio and digital business solutions company in the Philippines.

Find Alvin and Synergy88 online:

https://www.synergy88.media/

https://facebook.com/synergy88/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/synergy88

Transcript

[00:00:00] This episode features another veteran in the game development industry, Alvin Huban, who is currently the studio director of Synergy88 and chairman of GDAP. Together, we talk about career paths and skills in the gaming industry, how it started and how it has evolved into the roles that are available today, and the challenges that we need to overcome to make it big in this industry.

[00:00:26] I'm with Alvin Huben, Studio Director of Synergy88 and Chairman of GDAP. Alvin, thank you so much for joining us today. Today we're talking about career paths and skills in the gaming industry. So we're moving outside of talking about the development of games and we're talking about the people who develop it.

[00:00:45] Before we jump into that can you tell us more about your own career path in the game industry? Because you've been here a while, so you're one of the seasoned people in the industry. So they say. So they [00:01:00] say. Just many people In my sphere of influence that the elders in the Philippine community, a lot of us actually didn't have a real background in game development.

[00:01:11] We come from, the really good ones come from a background of computer science. I did not. I'm really more from the art side of things and management is management. And again for a lot of people like me, it was a lot of us were surprised that there was a looming. a slow blooming game, video game industry back in the day.

[00:01:34] And we, then we jumped on it. We had no idea what would really come to its promise, unlike in other countries where it has matured already, when I started in game development, the other countries like Japan and the U S already had. over 30 years of video game experience.

[00:01:51] So I realized early on that no matter what happens in, when we started in the Philippines, we're still way behind. We're still, we [00:02:00] will always be. My first since I came into the game industry quite late in life, after doing a lot of corporate, actually corporate background.

[00:02:09] I also had a, I ran my own little studio multimedia studio back in the day we were doing actually distance learning applications, when the internet was. Coming into the universe. I remember my first applications in the world in multimedia. I'm using air quotes by the way. We're on floppy disks.

[00:02:35] I remember those days. So that's how I got in when I did have the, so my entry to the industry was actually help a three year old studio find its footing. The studio had done it, but they had to bring in someone who'd make that talent work together. So I got a call for a drink, [00:03:00] get lots of drinks.

[00:03:01] And before I knew it, I started leading that studio. And it was a lot of matter what, a lot of kids when they talk about who I want to be in the video game industry, they think of it something like so sexy and so snazzy and so jazzy. It's not. A lot of it, the protocols that you have to learn inside a video game studio are business protocols.

[00:03:24] There's a lot of practical things that you learn inside the studio, how people should interact with each other, the hierarchy. It's a lot of progressive workplaces say they like flat organizational, structures. I believe when you're in a nascent industry, such as the video game industry in the Philippines, you still must have structure because we are still learning things in the Philippines.

[00:03:50] So that structure has to be there. Someone has to be on top and someone has to catch things from below and execute. So there I started there and we [00:04:00] grew the company rather quickly. But I thought my last A 14 man studio was a 90 man studio. We were doing programming a lot of art, and then we were Already opening up business for QA or for testing games.

[00:04:20] And so when I transferred to the current, my current studio, Synergy88, we, I did a lot of that at the beginning, but in the, after maybe five years, I really decided that the strength. of Synergy would be in the art side of things. So that's where I get my money for my vices. It's in building art for video games.

[00:04:42] Yeah. So that's how I started. And so here we are fast forward, 15 years later, I have a few titles under my name mostly in the AAA space. So a lot of the projects you'll find my name under. would [00:05:00] be in PlayStation or Xbox. The mobile stuff, yeah, I did touch, but, that didn't gain that much traction in my career.

[00:05:09] I was lucky to be one of the few Filipinos to actually have a good stretch, and I still enjoy that stretch in the AAA space. It's not for everyone, it's a tough space. That's where I sit, stand, and swim. Okay. That's that was a really good background journey that you've taken us. So I love the fact that you iterated that it's not sexy because that's a big misconception that a lot of younger people or people who are looking to jump into the game development industry are having.

[00:05:46] So it's not always glitz and glamour. It's not as sexy. But we have gone a long way. As you mentioned, 15 years. So you started from people who are from very different [00:06:00] backgrounds with absolutely no experience in game development, just using your knowledge in business and the, the. Business hierarchy that we're used to, and then just learning.

[00:06:10] So now fast forward to today how is it different now? Have you seen these opportunities change? How have they evolved the careers that you're seeing now? And you mentioned you work with triple A games. So how are the career paths different now? Because before there were no titles, nothing was official.

[00:06:28] And from the other people I interviewed, we were just winging it until we learned the ropes. Okay. The clear point I want to make nowadays, when you say games or gaming, there's a lot there's a big gray cloud upon it, mainly because of e sports. So we have this, let's first draw a line, okay, between everything in e sports, which is mostly it's either the competitive side of e sports or the broadcasting side or the event production side.

[00:06:58] Let's set that apart from what [00:07:00] I do for a living. So I'm a game developer. We make games. So if the video game industry globally is like 180 billion, which it was two years ago, e sports is, we call it the bastard child of video games. It's probably only 1 billion. So again, so here's where we get confused in a great cloud of sexiness and coolness where everybody wants to create content for video, and everybody wants to be a YouTube star.

[00:07:30] Everybody wants to be a sports broadcaster, but it's actually very small. That business is still very small. And that's, let's set that apart for another conversation for another day. So we stick with the elephant now, so back in the day when I came in, I didn't start video games in the Philippines no, there was already something happening when I got it.

[00:07:53] And there were really two main services that we could offer the universe from the [00:08:00] Philippines at that time. A typical AAA title. Takes around an average of at least two years to make, and a number of people, especially during that day, would be anywhere from 200, 800 people. That's a lot of people. And you can actually divide it into two spheres of expertise.

[00:08:28] One is the engineering. Let's call it engineering. Technical with with programming. And then the other side, which I have grown to love, is really in the art side. So those are the two main halves that you have to think about if you want to have a career in game development. So let's also be careful in the way we use the term career.

[00:08:54] So in where I sit and stand, I run a studio. So when I talk about careers, [00:09:00] it's like, Working for a studio like mine, that is the kind of career orientation. Being an independent game developer, God bless you. We need more of those people. That doesn't mean you're working in the studio under me. Because we are termed as outsourcers, we're termed as vendors.

[00:09:18] We are termed as, the politically correct way of saying it, external development partners. That's how we want to be called. But when the pressure comes, we're outsourcers. Because you can imagine in that two year span, the number of people, In a game will be smaller at the beginning and then peak at some point.

[00:09:40] And before that game is published in the universe, it drops down again. If you're a Western company, it would be insane to have all those people that you're back and call the entire time you're developing a game, right? So when you need help, you call on people like us. So it's either back in the day back in the day, it [00:10:00] was the Philippines In my point of view, there was like four studios doing AAA work.

[00:10:06] It's really mostly art in 3D and 2D. So that's where we sharpened our skills in proving that the Philippines has a chance, to really flourish in the AAA space. And we did, most of my seniors right now were people that I met from way back where in, we were really absolutely just.

[00:10:29] There was no YouTube back then. Everyone was learning from magazines, paper, okay, paper. The courses for the art side that we could depend on were the usual. It's fine arts, kind of things. For the programming, obviously, it would be mostly a computer science. And then they would have to learn on their own how to handle physics and how to handle.

[00:10:56] So that's how the elders, did it back in the day. Now [00:11:00] it's changed because for the last, what, over 12 years, we've had a game development course offering in the Philippines. It's a full four year baccalaureate degree. And a lot of other schools are offering it as a, what do you call that that, that's the associate the elector the elective, yes, elective, so there, there are many pathways now can take advantage of.

[00:11:26] Most of all, the biggest school in game development is the University of YouTube and the University of Google, which we never again really had before. So you are, I'm lucky. I have some friends who've had, like 25 years of experience in video games and they tell me, back in the day when there was just a handful of people doing video games, if you called yourself a video game developer you were such a rockstar, you were such a rockstar because.

[00:11:56] There were so few of them. These are people who were hard coding games. There [00:12:00] was no unity. There was no unreal. These big names in, in software development right now for games. You need the, there was none, there was C plus C sharp back then, and they were really, truly rock stars. Now you can just hop on a browser, download this, watch this, and suddenly claim that you are a game developer.

[00:12:20] Oh, a lot of people do that. Believe me, a lot of people do that. So and so it has, it has expanded and again because of worldwide map, the internet connectivity, it is much more possible to you for a Filipino to touch base with clients around the world. For. I've been lucky that I've found clients who really appreciate that we have a different time zone.

[00:12:44] When they give their during the day, we receive them at night, but at the time they wake up, the work is done. It's done. So it's like writing a 24 hour When we need meetings we just agree to a, we call it the APAC friendly time for a meeting. Yeah. [00:13:00] So it depends if you're the client is like from Vancouver or Seattle, usually meet at 9am, which is something like.

[00:13:08] 6 p. m. on their part. Those are the small adjustments that you made, that you just made. So yeah these things are more commonplace nowadays. It's not impossible. And we, we are putting hope upon hope that this industry stays with the Philippines and actually grows and gets bigger.

[00:13:25] And hopefully, we can, Get more chances to build our own big games. We want bigger. Yes. We want bigger games. So I love how we dispelled so many misconceptions around video games or video game development. First, we take out the world of e sports cause that's different. And then you mentioned the fork in the road of engineering and arts.

[00:13:50] And it sounds like for the last decade or so, and I've seen this in other companies as well, that we have been providing a lot of amazing art and [00:14:00] creatives for them. I've seen Philippine studios create amazing skins for triple A games and, It's hard to wrap your head around it. That's us. And as a normal gamer, I wouldn't think that this is something that was made from home.

[00:14:13] And I love when you mentioned we were outsourced. I like to think about it as scalability experts because we're here when we do right. So now that we have those, that fork in the road are there any specific skill sets? That you think is important if you're pursuing, let's say the engineering side or the art side is the art side is a little bit more straightforward if you're great at designing digital design, but what about the engineering side?

[00:14:41] Is there any specific predisposition? Yeah, that's a really big challenge. Unfortunately, our country, many challenges, especially in the field of education, and our biggest challenge is STEM education. And the end of that is math. [00:15:00] Programmers need very high logic, and you need that high logic early in life, not just in college.

[00:15:13] So if you are, were never gifted math or physics, Growing up and then you decide to become a game developer in college, I tell you, you will have a really hard time. And after 10 years, so for example, by chance, your tito got you a job in a studio. After 10 years, you know what? You will still be a junior programmer.

[00:15:39] Find yourself never have that late. That is most, most times, that's what happened. Because they didn't have the strong foundation of math. Of the mathematics. It's programming the ones that are the ones that are handling databases, handling, object oriented programming. It's very intricate and [00:16:00] difficult.

[00:16:00] How do you handle it in a massively multiplayer game? How do harness all that data and make sure nothing no, nothing crashes, make sure no one's disconnected. It's so complex. It is so complex. So it's not just true. It's not for the simple minded ones.

[00:16:19] It has to be deeply ingrained. It has to be, it has to be, I, I have a friend and he was the one who was, he was British. He's British. And yeah, he said 25 years experience. And no, he had 19 years of experience in, in AAA development coding. And then the rest lately he was doing, he was freelancing and then he has, he had an older brother.

[00:16:42] Who lost his job and goes, Hey, maybe I should try what you're doing. You're just lying and okay. And I was deep inside. I was Oh my God, this guy is so over 40. He was an important game developer. What happened?[00:17:00] 

[00:17:01] He did. Oh, wow. Why? Because his foundational education was good. In the UK. Yes, late in life, but It was already there before he decided. Okay. Okay. That's really important. I think. And for us who are older now it's a shame because we can't jump into that. But I think that's a baby.

[00:17:33] You were good. I don't know, I wouldn't say that I am, but I think that's a really good opportunity that we're setting up for the younger generation. If he, if we create stronger STEM a stronger STEM focused curriculum, we give them better chances of us. Game development will just be your.

[00:17:54] One of the options, you can go straight to software development and that would give you a steadier livelihood. [00:18:00] If I had children and they were given and they were technically gifted, he asked me, where should I go to game development or software development? I would say, son, I am the chairman of GDAP.

[00:18:19] President for 11 years. Please stick with software development. Knowing what you know now, I will tell you. Knowing what I know. Game, games. It's a hit driven industry. It's like making movies. Not everything will be a hit. So, there is a lot of danger, a lot of danger, but That really means if you go into this industry, you need to go in with open eyes, knowing that those are the big risks in it.

[00:18:50] It's not all, it's not all pretty. It's not, it's never going to be that YouTube star that you know, it's not going to be that for everyone. It's a very [00:19:00] It That actually goes that way. God bless you, but the rest of us normal people, we actually have to make a career out of this. And that's good.

[00:19:10] I think that's a very realistic way of looking at it. So when you tell your parents, mom, I want to be a Game development. I want to be in game development. There's other things. It's not just you wanting to make a career out of it. You need your STEM background if you want to go into engineering.

[00:19:27] And I think I dare say that in the art area, we're pretty good. So if you're great at art, if you're good at designing, which is which is another stereotype, I think that we're already smashing because a few years ago, If you tell your Filipino parents that you want to go into fine arts, it was a travesty.

[00:19:49] Poor, what a travesty. Oh my son, the poor artist, the poorest artist. I disown you, I disown. But now that has largely changed. So when you tell, When you're [00:20:00] telling your parents, I create this and this for a game development industry, they don't know the particulars, but they know since you're bringing home food on the table, they won't question it anymore.

[00:20:11] So with a new rig worth 200, 000 pesos, and then buys you dinner. Have. Grab, deliver something expensive. Where this comes from? No, mom. It's clean money, mom. That's all you need to know. This is not Pogo.

[00:20:27] So with that with that optimism with the art and then understanding what we need on the engineering side, right now, are there any certifications? Cause you mentioned the baccalaureate, the four year course and then the elective. Are there any other certifications or courses or programs that you've seen out there that anybody can add to their arsenal?

[00:20:48] Again as someone from the elder generation, I would say, um, these courses give you the best chances.

[00:20:59] It's not [00:21:00] a requirement. It's not a requirement. It will give you the best chances. It will open your eyes wider, deeper into things. But the courses we offer still are not perfect. A long way to go. One of the biggest drawbacks we have in game development education in the Philippines is very few of our teachers actually came from the industry.

[00:21:21] Oh. We paid so much better in the studio than in school. Like abroad, it's fair wage for what you deliver in school. So the four years in, in college, or even less if you're a tri set, it's really not enough to, to master. everything because you have to be a to be paid. You have to be a master of something.

[00:21:48] That's true. You can be a master engineer, master programmer, a master artist before we, before wallets open up and actually pay you what you think you're [00:22:00] worth. So school the way I explain it to interns who want to intern in our studio, which is good right now because we're doing internship online.

[00:22:09] That's something we, that's probably the best thing we learned for the pandemic. That was allowed, because and I would work with all these schools before and I told the internship, especially in this field, should be six months or more and offer it at that length. Nevermind don't email me.

[00:22:36] I'll just delete your email and mark as spam. Cause again, you need that time for mastery. You need to repeat and repeat. If it's hard to programming and so far it's worked for me in 90 percent of the people I've hired over the years. We're all ex interns. Oh, that's good. Because, yeah, because, yeah, it's something that they worked with us while they were in school.

[00:22:53] They mastered it while working with us. I can't say that school was bad. It's just that there's not [00:23:00] enough time in school, so it's, for me, it's just since you're enrolled in school as required by our universe, we have to make the best out of it, but again, when I started this thing in CHIDA, when I started, internship was either one month or two months.

[00:23:19] Or three months. I go, Oh my goodness, maybe you should send your children to Jollibee or McDonald's so they can learn service culture, it's easier to pick up, it's easier to pick up, but here, so the schools did adjust. In all fairness, they did adjust. So that's why we love our school members.

[00:23:41] They all adjusted. They divided the internship into two parts. So it makes it six months. Fabulous. So six months is the sweet spot. That's really good. And we've learnings. We've heard a lot of prerequisites that we need to look at in terms of being ready to just jump into the game development industry if you decide to do [00:24:00] it.

[00:24:00] I know you mentioned a lot of the learnings before, but if there is something very important that you want to tell aspiring game developers out there, whether they're as they're an intern or somebody in their 40s attempting to get in the industry. And that's beautiful because before I think 15 years ago shifting careers that way was unthinkable.

[00:24:23] If you were in marketing, it was impossible, but now there's a lot of things that are open. There's a lot of flexibilities right now. There's a lot of that. Again, hand in hand with the education system, we're trying to come up With micro certification and micro credentialing. Short courses that can lean you towards, that part of the career.

[00:24:42] Because again, these are the two big, when I said engineering and art, those are the two big, but there is, management. There's QA, there are other streams, there are other verticals, which you can, I think the biggest requirement, and I can't believe some people missed this. [00:25:00] Biggest requirement is you must have.

[00:25:04] That's true. You can't book an interview with someone like me and know nothing about games. If you have no story to tell, no game that inspired you, forget the interview. What are we going to talk about? That's true. That is very true. And again, going back to the part where this may not even be a very lucrative career.

[00:25:26] What are you hinging on until you get that lucrative, that promised lucrativeness if you don't love games? Exactly. So Why are you here? Get out! When I go on stage, I've done that when I was president going around the country. Exactly. Going to the main province and there'd be 1, 000, 2, 000, 3, 000 people in front of me, mostly schools and teachers.

[00:25:51] And when I get on stage, I would say this. When you say, and now the speaker will talk about video games, the world stops. Even the janitor would [00:26:00] freeze. Oh my God, Pikachu games in the Philippines. What would this guy say? And my first lines would be, this is not for everyone. I'm looking for just a few good men or women.

[00:26:13] That's how I begin, because it's not. , it's really not. If you look at the jobs being done in across many countries, for example, in Canada wherein they, they earn something like $6 billion in the video game industry. They managed to track it, they earn that. And this is just for production, video game production.

[00:26:35] They earned that with only 16,500 people in the industry.

[00:26:40] In the Philippines, the way we have poorly tracked it, I'd like to think that there's say between three to 3, 500 and it's barely a million dollars. We have a long way to go. Long way to go man, long way [00:27:00] to go. As dire as that sounds, it sounds like We're giving the torch to the next generation with with a few more steps forward.

[00:27:09] So that's amazing. That's good that we're having this experience. And when I say about the Philippines 8 million, that's the declared revenue. Oops.

[00:27:26] But that's good. Cause we're moving towards, Direction we're in, we could we could say we're earning more in the future. So that's amazing. And okay. So we're wrapping this up. Alvin can you tell us more about Synergy 88 and how people can find you? I heard you mentioned you have an excellent six month program that is that has been tested.

[00:27:48] When you go out there, you're actually ready. Again, those are things that you have to qualify. So Synergy88, we are a fully Philippine studio. We have no f [00:28:00] foreign owner. None of us are foreigners. We're all katutubong Pilipino. It's just that I look so handsome, devastatingly handsome, which, it's hard to tell.

[00:28:11] It's a shame that we're on audio. I know. It's sad. I'll send pictures to everyone, but it's full of Filipino owners. We've never had a foreign consultant, nothing. Everything was really grassroot level. We just had, I guess we were my, the owners of the company made me brave. Go out there, and do it again.

[00:28:34] If you look at the, in the landscape, most of the studios, 98 percent of them have foreign eyes because it helps in business, especially when you get sides abroad. That will help you bridge the gap and put in more clients or build better avenues to build better. So we are a [00:29:00] 11 year old studio. And our claim to fame really is in triple A games, particularly with Xbox, particularly with one key title, which has kept us more than alive over the last decade.

[00:29:15] And this is the game called Gears of War. So it's not known here in the Philippines because it is Xbox. It's very, it's a very North American platform, but it is one of the biggest titles that Xbox has. It's a shooting game, and I love shooting games, and we have been working on that IP for the last 10 years with Noah.

[00:29:35] Oh, wow. Yeah, so we are a we are a, what do you call it, an integrated art studio. So we are directly connected with our client studio, even IT wise. We have a tunnel to the game engine, which we keep on improving for every year on year. the last 10 years. So we're so lucky and blessed to have this opportunity to build on.

[00:29:59] And [00:30:00] lately, our main clients have visited us just in May this year. And we talked about what we're going to do in the next 10 years to come. Wow. Yeah. So, this enables us to share our expertise with other projects. If you're using the same tools as this team is doing or the same style in terms of style, especially art wise, we we do realistic work, not stylized.

[00:30:27] When you say stylized, that's mostly the cartoony stuff, the anime stuff, stuff. We don't do that. We are realistic, really blood and gore. That's what we do. So in art, you got to choose also where you're good at. So if you'd like that realistic. style. Then you can apply as intern to us.

[00:30:46] You can hit us on Facebook. You can look for me on Facebook. And if you approach properly, I'll repeat myself, if you approach properly, maybe I'll answer you. Number one, I am not your [00:31:00] friend. Prepare for that pitch. I think that's important. That's an important thing to have. Don't approach me as if I was your classmate.

[00:31:09] I am your classmate. Properly, if you'd like to apply. And offer your credentials, especially don't start, can I ask you a question? You're already asking. Please ask it now. Don't hesitate. Just go for it. Tell me your name, your salutation and the body of the message. So I can read and please attach something useful.

[00:31:35] That I can read and understand if you qualify. I think that's another important skill set to have. So when you want to be in the And I think that's something that's often overlooked. So you have to understand, how you need to know how to do your pitch. You need to understand your strengths.

[00:31:53] So if you want to get into this very competitive environment, you got to work on those things. So [00:32:00] the basics, it's the basics, actually. It's the basics. That's great. It's great to hear our basics during our time. And it doesn't seem to be like part of the basics now. It's still relevant.

[00:32:14] Nowadays you send a message and it's left to be unseen for hours. You get upset because it was not

[00:32:23] seen. It's different. That's true. That is true. Alvin, thank you again so much for your time today. We look to the future with keen eyes and knowing that you guys have started this and then we're just moving it to the next generation. It's up to them to make it better. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:32:45] If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our series on game development experts on the Arise Plus Philippines YouTube channel.