Game Design and evolving Business Models with Alexander Brazie and Jon Radoff

Alexander Brazie: The real job of a game designer is to connect the players fantasies and your vision of the product together in a way that they work together to create a final product, right? And that's what makes a really amazing experience. In this episode of Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff, John sits down with Alexander Brasi. Alexander is a design director, combat mechanics and system designer. He has 16 years of game combat and game system design experience on World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Ori and the Will of Wisps, and two unannounced AAA projects for major studios. Let's jump into this fireside chat.

Jon Radoff: All right, welcome Alex to Building the Metaverse. Welcome back everybody who's tuning into this. This is going to be an awesome conversation today because Alex is someone I've gotten to know over the last two years. Through some of the social audio platforms, like Clubhouse and really came to appreciate a lot of what you know about the industry and game design and creative leadership and everything in between. So I wanted to use this opportunity to bring you on and talk about game systems and business models and all the things that are happening with game systems today. But I actually wanted to start a little bit with how you got into the game industry and like what was that first job?

Alexander Brazie: Oh man, wow, that is a story. It was for a little game, right? It was for a little game. Okay, well, I think we'll start with the little game and then my first visible game that anyone here has actually played. So I lived a really fortunate upbringing and I got to start working with computers back around five years old. And it was when my grandmother brought one of her IBM PS1s to home. And so it's sit there and learned all the little commands and stuff, right?

Alexander Brazie: Super young.

Alexander Brazie: And my father was one of the first programmers over at IBM on main frames and all this old tech. So we had one around the house with a few years older. And how I got into games was actually we had these magazines was called 321 Contact, Science Magazine. The very last six pages was literally Q-Basic Code. And you would type that Q-Basic Code. You'd play the little game, it would be like a mini game or you know move the arrow back and forth and shoot the little spaceship in the sky. And anyways, one day my father was part of this pilot program, this thing called the Internet. At that point it was, we were started by accessing through something called IBM Gofer, G-O-P-H-E-R. And yeah, that was before HTTPS was a thing.

Alexander Brazie: Anyways, fast forward, we'll say a little bit of a year into that.

Alexander Brazie: I was homeschooled by my parents for various reasons. And so I had a whole lot of free time and a whole lot of computer time. And I found this little web game. It was called Zelda Online. It was straight up, they stole the pixel art from Zelda 3. And then literally had this multiplayer space, it was like this free roaming space. We could walk around his link, slash a sword and attack a baddie. That was it. That was the whole experience. You could pick up some heart containers, pick up some swords and bow. Anyways, and I was like, all this is so cool. What if I make my own custom art for this? Because they've clearly sold it all the art. They don't want to get in trouble. I got to help them get out of trouble. So I went in and repainted sprite palettes in Correll Photoshop, which is like photo, you know, a Correll photo paint, like Photoshop, two decades ago. And I think the action might still be around ridiculous. Anyways, the story is wandering. Let me speed up a bit. Anyways, I actually then decided, well, you know, if they have all of these Zelda heads all over the place, I bet if I put a Yoshi head in there, no one will blink an eye. Should not they didn't. So I made a full set of skins that I called the dinos, who were just straight up Yoshi pixel art, repatched on characters. Anyways, this got, then I sat down, I made like 15 little levels, like levels and said, here's all but your levels that are not steals, rips from Zelda. And they're like, cool, content, thank you. Stuck it in a tree. You'd walk into a tree, if you walked to a certain spot in the tree, you'd open up, and you'd go into the Yoshi home, or the Dino home, where all these Yoshi's were running around.

Alexander Brazie: And yeah, so another couple of months go by and they reach out to me.

Alexander Brazie: I was like, hi, we're going to be making a new version of our game. The game was, we're going to be calling it growl online as in the holy growl online. And we want to invite you to make content for us. And I'm like, content, okay, that sounds amazing. What do you want me to do? Like, we'll make levels and stuff. Like, okay, I can do that. Keep in mind, I'm like 13 years old at the time. And the way I get this message is through an email. And I'm like, yeah, okay, awesome. We're going to start a new project, new people. And how old are you by the way?

Alexander Brazie: I'm 24.

Alexander Brazie: I just finished college. And they're like, perfect.

Alexander Brazie: All right, here's an NDA.

Alexander Brazie: Here you go. But because I had, you know, literally been learning C++4. Oh my god, probably three years at that point. I'd been on a ton of JavaScript, learned art, and all of these different tools. By the time I was 14, no one could distinguish between me and like a crappy college student. So all the communication right then was non-video. It was all IRC chat rooms. It was all text-based. So aside from me being a little emotionally irresponsible, it was fine. I spent three years on that project. And then it finally crashed and burned under its own weight. Though growl online is still running. The business model worked and so on. I was devastated.