We said NO to remote. Being in person is the only way to launch a game in 6 months.
Our private beta officially starts in Jan 2024! Update on the whirlwind first 6 months of Closing Theory Studios:
We shipped our very first TestFlight on August 7th, and since then we’ve shipped 48 more builds. Over 400 people have playtested HOUSE RUSH in person, giving us great feedback and guiding us in our pursuit of building something truly ‘fun’.
But i’m most excited about our Austin dream team coming together…
Nitin Rajinikanth and I are now joined by two exceptional founding team members:
Andrew DiZenzo dropped out of med school in his 3rd year to switch into software. After some time at Amazon, he left to follow his passion for gaming and started building his own casual mobile games. We met through a mutual friend (Tyler Bliha) and Andrew started as our founding engineer in September!
While getting her JD, Sangita Sarkar, interned at a gaming company and fell in love with the industry. After completing her degree, she immediately pivoted careers to work full time in game marketing, perfecting her craft at Zynga, Glu Mobile, Jam City and more over the next decade. One of our newest angel investors (Chris Akhavan) introduced us and Sangita joined as our founding marketer earlier this month!
Andrew and Sangita joining the team have enabled us to do something quite rare:
Ship even faster by spending less time building. Instead, we spend a disproportionate amount of time deciding what to build.
Every week we allocate 1-2 full days on digesting the previous week’s playtest feedback, determining what things to add in, tweak, or remove from the game, and scoping the narrow + critical path forward to put something in the hands of players the following week.
People coming into our office every week to play the game and give us feedback has been instrumental, and our brainstorm days would not have been possible over Zoom. They would have lasted a couple hours max.
This process of rapid iteration and quick feedback cycles has given us the conviction to start our private beta next month, with an international soft launch to soon follow.
If these sound like the type of people you want to work with and this way of working resonates deeply with you, we’re hiring for two more foundational roles:
Game Systems Designer
Unity Engineer
https://lnkd.in/gk7T2YVr
Fun pics from this year:
VP Sales/BD @ Immutable | ex-Uber, Hootsuite
1yClear + sensible was my takeaway.