Colorado Lottery GameJam - Zhenghua Yang, Founder & CEO of Serenity Forge

uh thank you for your time vitalik we're going to move on in the program to z yang who is the founder and ceo of serenity forge also a big fixture in the um game development scene here in colorado and really he's going to talk a little bit about how developing games in colorado has been a dream and like how you know we're really trying to create more and more inertia around that so z why don't you take it away yeah absolutely thank you so much sean hey how's it going everyone my name is zee i am the founder and executive producer at serenity forge i also happen to be the chair for the international game developers association here in bold or colorado i suppose the the chapter here uh so yeah i mean it's been i've been kind of pretty much a boulder native for the past uh however long and uh you know like what 20 years at this point uh and it's just been an absolute journey to get here uh you know honestly uh you know kind of long story short when i was 18 years old i was diagnosed with a severe and fatal illness that caused me to be hospitalized for two years and it was a really really difficult time where you know as a young you know 18 year old kid being trapped in a hospital you didn't really have a lot of choices into you know choosing what you want to do later on in life especially um but instead of you know kind of uh jumping into that despair i decided to pick up a lot of video games started playing all sorts of games single player games where it made me feel like i was a hero saving the world or multiplayer games where i got to meet people from all around the world and you know games like league of legends or minecraft and eventually miraculously i just started getting better and by the time i was 21 years old i managed to kind of transfer back to cu boulder at the time and kind of continue my education in finance but i can't help but think back to the fact that you know like these games that i played while i was in hospital they're not really designed to help me but in the end they essentially saved my life why not start making video games with intention to help other people what kind of power can we unlock when we do that so i started serenity forge while i was in college as a freshman i made my first game which was a non-fictional visual novel based my my on my own illness uh and i ended up getting played by tons of people around the world one particular fan wrote me a letter saying that they were struggling with depression and was planning to take his own life but he came across the game and it motivated him so much he he actually decided to put a stop to his plans uh and as a freshman in college i looked at that situation going like wow you know like maybe i did not become a millionaire overnight by making this game but i might have just saved someone's life like why don't we keep doing this i was super lucky to have met a lot of great mentors along the way working at cu boulder and just interacting with the community here by the time i was a senior in college i uh you know i already had six full-time employees just kind of working out of a basement working on educational games doing all sorts of stuff and nowadays where uh you know a handful of dozen of folks here in boulder are just creating meaningful artistic games that really challenge the way that people think you know on on devices on consoles and pc and of course mobile as well so really looking back at it uh you know like running igda here as well uh colorado has a very uh just a very welcoming culture when it comes to game developers we have we welcome you know new folks with open arms and we run amazing game jams such as this one uh and it's just so unique compared to the rest of the world if you travel around and look at the the other parts of the game industry where it's very much a single swim type of scenario whereas you know looking at the past decade folks like justin and yaprak and and josh you know like we have created these environments uh in colorado that that really facilitate creativity and just fosters that type of friendship and i think that's what really colorado um kind of stands out on compared to the the rest of the the rest of the world essentially especially in this you know really difficult difficult climate right now uh like covid you know a company like serenity forge if it wasn't for the support that we have from the community and also just the support that we have for each other here in the in the company uh there's no way that we would have been able to kind of like survive all this turbulence over so many years so yeah i mean i know that like you know things are running short so i'm talking as quickly as possible here but with that said you know uh thank you so much for having me i i think you know it is absolute dream to to kind of build the game industry here at colorado uh and uh you know we're working hard to to to make it happen and uh you know hopefully all the people here you know dedicated to to the colorado and this game jam really proves that this is absolutely our goal so yeah thank you so much and uh yeah really glad to be here hope you guys enjoy the jam and you're hiring too right z yeah that's right if you are a game developer that is looking for a job uh we're actually massively hiring right now we just locked down some major projects so we're uh having some serious uh periods of growth coming out in the next couple of years so definitely go to our website serenityforge.com jobs to apply and check out some of our open positions thanks for coming z we really appreciate you and and thanks for sharing your story and it's such a great testament to like the the just the vivaciousness and just the the creativity that's already happening here and that's really what we're trying to build on so like thank you for sharing that we really appreciate it