A Tribute to Signal Studios

This article is a personal tribute to the company which dwells in the most memorable place of my recollection, Signal Studios, LLC.

Before I delve into details, I would like to go over a brief introduction of Signal Studios for those who have not heard of their name.

Signal Studios, LLC, is a game development company founded upon the Greater Seattle Area of the Washington State, United States, in 2008. Their first major title, Toy Soldiers, was a major hit which delivered a great deal of success and popularity to the company in the early 2010s, subsequently allowing them to develop a number of other legendary titles such as Ascend, Savage Lands, and The Sleeping Prince. The studio then became rather silent for the following few years due to a bit of hardship which existed both internally and externally, and in 2019-2020 they resumed their genuine endeavors to revive their old videogame franchise by partnering with Accelerate Games, Inc, Outer Heaven, Eden Industries, and others.

I worked at Signal Studios as a software engineer from 2017 to 2019. The time was unfortunately rather short, yet it was the period during which I witnessed the most cherishing experience I could summon in the heartiest recess of my ever recurring daydream.

Here is my story.

I graduated from the University of Washington as an EE major during the summer of 2017. I was an international student back then, with the availability of the OPT (Optional Practical Training) program which allowed me to be authorized to work in the United States for at least a year after graduation, so I was quite desperate to grasp an opportunity to be employed by anyone in the field of engineering. The problem was that I did not have any prior engineering experience outside of academia - no internship, no extracurricular engineering activitiy, no participation in any of the open source projects, and so on. Many of my colleagues were quick to have their resumes already filled in with all sorts of glorious titles, along with names of large corporates (e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc) with whom they had established cordial relationships by the time they were ready to graduate. I, on the other hand, was not so keen enough to discern the practical implication of this and simply maintained a rather foolish belief that being knowledgeable in one's field of expertise would be a sufficient factor for being recognized as a talented (and therefore employable) individual.

I recall attending the university's career fairs as well as submitting at least hundreds of job applications throughout the span of more than a half of my senior year, which were all in vain. Most job openings, including those which even stated that they were looking for "entry level" engineers, required candidates to have already gone through at least 2 or 3 years of prior engineering experience. All of my applications were followed by either silence or formal rejection letters, which could be expected for obvious reasons. Years of study, personal projects, and other efforts to understand the conceptual essence of theories in mathematics, science, and engineering, suggested nothing to them. All they wanted to see was a collection of quantitatively measurable metrics, which was understandable from a statistical point of view. As long as I had neither prior experience nor any acquaintance in the industry who would be generous to recommend me, I was nothing more than an utterly insignificant little rat which deserved not even a chance to have a 5-minute conversation with an engineering lead for the hope of proving its decency.

After another round of job search following the graduation, I became rather frustrated by the nature of formal recruitment processes and began to look for alternative routes. One of the informal approaches I took was to open up a Wikipedia page which had a list of videogame companies in Seattle, visit each one of their company websites, and send emails to their contact addresses asking if they could offer a chance for a recent engineering graduate to work for them. For sure, most of them did not bother to respond probably because they were either too busy developing games, had no currently available job openings, or just could not risk their precious time and capital for training a novice.

And then, one of them responded.

The person who gave me the response was the lead engineer of Signal Studios at the time. He said that he would like to add a programmer to the team, and asked me to send him examples of my engineering work. I sent him the source code of one of the assignments I did in the Digital Image Processing class, and upon receiving it, he got interested and invited me for a brief interview.

It was the summer of 2017, and the air of the Pacific Northwest was warmer than ever. Their office was located in one of those serene suburbs of Bothell, amidst of which were nothing but a few Canadian geese discharging their green feces and a breakfast cafe which had the most delicious English muffin sandwiches I've ever witnessed (In case you wonder, it's "Parkside Deli" in North Creek Parkway Center). When I entered Signal Studios' office room, I was quite surprised to find out that they did not seem to have any apparent intention to "test" me with trick questions or any other means of obscure technical challenges. They did indeed present me with a couple of engineering problems to see the way in which I would approach them, but those were rather casual and were not bound to any specific programming language, development framework, or any of those typical Google-interview-ish algorithms that would appear in a Computer Science textbook. Rather, these were purely conceptual yet practical questions in game development, such as "How would you implement multiple game worlds inside a level-based videogame such as Super Mario Bros?", and so forth.

And the most glistening impression I acquired during the interview was that they were kind enough to explain in detail what they were doing in their current game development project, as though they already had me in mind as their new fellow engineer. They then proceeded to explain that it is not of their primary interest to seek experts who know specific technical standards such as programming languages, jargons, and other petty details which a typical senior programmer with many years of experience may possess but do not necessarily reveal one's aptitude as a true professional (I could tell that they really meant it, since I openly acknowledged that I didn't even know the meaning of the word "singleton" in the context of software engineering during the interview and they were completely fine with it). They said that, as long as an individual is "teachable", there will always be a room for unbounded growth.

The meeting was quite brief, and they told me that they would give me a response within about a week or so. Contrary to my expectation that at least a week would pass in silence, they responded in just a single day saying that they would like to have me as their new team member.

And thus I was blessed with the most graceful decision of theirs.

Now, some of you might raise an eyebrow and say, "Oh, come on! They probably hired you just because they wanted a cheap intern to help complete their project with as little budget as possible. You were simply being used because of cost-effectiveness!" Before such a presumption provides itself with a chance to fill your senses with an air of cynicism, please let me clarify one thing that would be a shame if neglected. First of all, they did not hire me as an intern, nor did they pay me any less than an average American software engineer, ever since the very first day of my career at Signal Studios. They didn't even deduct a penny off of their hourly payment for the first week of my period of contract, which was solely dedicated to training me for the purpose of getting me on board without expecting any direct contribution to the project. This was quite an exquisite blow in my mind, as you may be able to tell, since they clearly possessed every opportunity to carry things out differently to their own advantage.

Note that I was an international student back then, with only a temporary chance of work authorization and absolutely zero career experience. I had no connection with anyone in the industry, nor had I won any prize or participated in any major activity to complement the sheer desolation of any enticement to brand myself as a ready-to-use human resource. I had none of those elaborate focal points of self promotion.

Yet, Signal Studios never chose to exploit this hint of desperation as means of extracting as much merit as possible from a beginner's fountain of passion with the absolute minimum cost. They technically could have hired me as an unpaid intern, as the first year of the OPT program allowed volunteer services to be part of their range of work authorization (as long as they were related to one's major). Or they could have at least reduced my hourly pay and backed up themselves with fine reasons such as, "We are spending lots of resources training you, so it factors as a part of the company's expense!", "You are learning from your job, so the value of the education you are receiving should be considered part of your compensation!", or, "You are an entry-level programmer, so you are not yet experienced enough to contribute with as much speed and efficiency as our experienced engineers do!", and so on. These strategies, however, which were so easy to pull off due to the feeble status and lack of negotiatory ability of mine, were nowhere to be found in them. Instead they hired me, compensated me, and respected me just as much as they would do in regard to an American software developer who had years of experience.

And not only that! They even paid me for every single extra hour I worked for them during weekends, without the slightest glimpse of exception, and later on (after several months or so) granted me a raise even though I never asked for it. It was as though they had completely tossed the notion of "cost reduction" outside of their window when the matter of employment was concerned.

Now, at this point of writing, you might be carrying in your mind an impression that I am some kind of superficial jerk who only cares about money and nothing else. Such a conception is understandable, considering that it indeed has been the pivot of the depiction of my early job experience so far. But before yielding a chance to this apparent bias to let itself draw an imaginary contour of a person whom you probably do not even know personally, please give me the freedom to resolve this potential prejudice by providing a short discourse in regard to the importance of rationality when it comes to the matter of deciding which acts of mercy should be embraced with the most cordial air of gratitude.

Oftentimes, we see groups of ambitious companies which brand themselves with catchy slogans such as, "We don't work just for money. We work because it is fun!", or, "Passion is what drives us to work hard. Money is not everything, and we are glad to be working in a place where everybody can make an impact!", and... you know, I am sure you have heard of such phrases quite a lot in the tech industry. Of course, things like "passion", "vision", "impact", and other cool-sounding ideas embellished with buzzwords can indeed be the main source of motivation which impels a developer to dedicate one's soul to the company's product. We must also be aware, however, that such a cloud of abstract values can just as well be employed by a cunning business owner for the purpose of undermining the significance of objective rewards when it comes to the nature of equity in the labor market, just to get away with as little wage as possible. And many developers, who are too pure in their own sphere of intellectual endeavors to pay attention to such intricate fragments of psychological manipulation, fall into this trap and simply rejoice in their own cage of metaphorical imageries.

What makes Signal Studios the greatest game developer of all from my point of view, is that they never utilized such a method to trick the naive mind of my younger self in any way for their own benefit. Instead of trying to lure me into believing in an abstract, intangible type of compensation by mesmerizing me with grand words and amorphous promises, they simply paid me generously. And you know what? This tells a lot about their immesurable sense of dignity in terms of honesty and straightforwardness.

It is a strictly objective standpoint of mine that, when it comes to being an employee (or a contractor) of a company, financial return should occupy the topmost row of one's priority list. Otherwise, why would a person give him/herself enough humiliation to sacrifice a huge chunk of one's time and energy fulfilling somebody else's goal? Why not just enjoy working on any hobby project of one's choice as an independent developer, if money is not of foremost concern? Do not get me wrong, I am not the kind of person who would exert every bit of mental effort to squeeze every penny off of someone's wallet while refusing to acknowledge the existence of any other dimensions of appreciation that are not tied to monetary interests. I believe in the importance of collective visions, as well as a mode of compassion that is being shared amongst my fellow developers. The problem is, such a subjective set of values should never be used as means of belittling the clemency of those whose blunt yet humble characters encouraged them to embrace their workers with unpolished pieces of diamond which are not grandiose by appearance yet nonetheless possess intrinsic values that are superior to glittering rainbow candies made up of cheap compliments, while they could have elegantly sugarcoated their reputation with subtle excuses and psychological trickeries.

It was not necessarily the absolute amount of cash I received from Signal Studios which made me beg to have an honor to say that I owe them every charmful of admiration. Rather, it was the strangely brute yet juvenile sort of innocence of theirs which inspirited me to have an insurmountable degree of respect and trust in them, outside of any worldly measures. They demonstrated that there could ever be on earth a private company, a body of business which is supposed to be optimized for profit only and nothing else, that operated on the hearts of warm-blooded people who sincerely cared for the well-being of all.

Aside from the absence of stinginess, there were other virtues in them which I was able to perceive with the inner lens of my heart. In order to provide a bit of background knowledge, let me describe in more depth the early days of my work at Signal Studios.

By the time I joined Signal Studios' development team, the company had already been working on a mobile multiplayer game project called "Call of Guardians". They were working with a publisher called GungHo, who had headquarters situated in both Japan and the United States. The course of the project's development was rather stressful to the whole team, as the company's staff had been greatly reduced in size and everybody had to wear multiple hats on some occasions.

I recall the chairman and the lead producer of Signal Studios painstakingly communicating with the publisher, trying to digest various feature requests coming over from multiple departments and laying them out in a way in which they could be handled by engineers/artists with relative ease. What I clearly remember is that these immesurably diligent people, despite the prevalence of moments of exhaustion caused by little morsels of miscommunication as well as dissonance between the publisher's design philosophies and those of their own, put their maximum level of exertion to guard their developers from the pain of endless design reiterations by resolving as many technical discords as possible on their side.

But please don't get me wrong! It is not my intention to blame the publisher for anything. GungHo was a great company to work for; some of their own engineers, who used to provide technical advices regarding the project, were highly insightful and deeply sincere in terms of helping the studio overcome any of the development challenges. Both the publisher and Signal Studios were nests of heartful professionals, who worked day and night pouring truckfuls of their juice of dedication into the cradle of their endearing product.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of frustration was quite real on the development side due to the presence of seemingly trivial yet cumbersome reasons, which were little bits of discrepancy between their creeds and those of GungHo regarding the technicality of how exactly the game should be designed and implemented. The thing which impressed me the most during this time period was that both the CEO and project manager carried all the burden of this nuisance on their backs and assured the rest of the team with an implicit voice of a paternal figurine which echoed, "It's all right. We've got everything taken care on our side, so don't feel stressed out. Keep working at your own pace, and we will be responsible for the rest."

And I can reassure that it really was the case, as they constantly strived to minimize the necessity of extra work as much as possible by sculpting the publisher's requests into the most streamlined form. We still did spend quite a number of additional work hours during some of their busy weeks, but it was nowhere near the so-called "crunch mode" which many game development companies were notorious for (And again, I mustn't fail to mention that I got paid for every single one of these extra hours).

Another thing I've got to point out regarding the nature of the course of development that was happening at the time, is that the project was not particularly in a good shape by the time I joined the development team. The game as a whole was pretty laggy, and there were plenty of features that were yet to be completed. And to the team's frustration, the number of engineers had been drastically reduced almost down to zero by the end of the year. After a period of sincere mentorship provided by the lead engineer whom I appreciate with all my heart due to the sheer absence of any intention of his to withdraw any mouthful of knowledge from my learning brain for the purpose of gatekeeping, I was pretty much left alone to teach myself and discover solutions on my own. Yet, the CEO and project manager of Signal Studios respected me as a fully qualified engineering professional whom they could put their trust in with respect to making authentic choices, by granting me an almost full control over the whole engineering aspect of the project as soon as they perceived my capability of handling it with an insignia of integrity.

It would've definitely been a safer choice of theirs to use the inexperience and young age of mine as an excuse to immure me in a prison of micromanagement, for the purpose of converting me into a submissive droid who would do nothing but serve the egos of the top-level decision makers. Instead, they granted me an honor to spend time figuring out solutions to problems based off of my own engine of reasoning and intuition. This impelled me to extract every faculty of mine to polish the project with the utmost degree of elegance one could ever dare to imagine, for I feared I might disappoint and lead them to regret their choice of generosity otherwise. I studied the essence of game development by pinning down all sorts of bugs and feature requests as swiftly as possible, refactoring the codebase for efficiency and readability, as well as optimizing various subsystems of the game from low-level to high-level. And when some of the design specifications were hidden behind a fog of war due to the nature of uncertainty in game development, I squeezed every conceivable drop of mental energy from every conjurable corner of my subconscious for the joy of interpolating/extrapolating details outside of the formal domain of definitions and moved on to implement them. This momentum, which sprouted from the purity of respect they had endowed upon me, was unstoppable to the point at which it was mighty enough to shed the friction of productivity which was caused by my initial shortage of experience.

Day and night, an everlasting light of wonderment encompassed my mind with the question, "Is this job even real?", for it was too perfect for me to even fancy to fool myself to believe that I could ever deserve it. Every handful of work I was privileged to do inside their Bothell office was in favor of my undertaking to display a subtle kind of appreciation which I longed to express in words but in vain because the size of the feeling was too great for a bucket of literature to hold.

And here is even more to the story. When the company faced financial difficulties which rendered continued employment rather challenging, the CEO so graciously went on to introduce me to other companies whom he knew quite well, and recommended me as one of their prospective teammates in case he would no longer be able to keep me in his workforce. I didn't even ask for it, he did it voluntarily. Such an act of benevolence was a speechlessly unexpected welcome, that the memory of it appears almost surreal to me even to this day. What I saw in him was neither the pretentious energy of a venture capitalist whose wit is lit by a spotlight of self-importance, nor the shrewdness of a corporate boomer who would throne himself on top of a pile of ladders which were kicked down by the boots of mannerism and political tactics, but an evincement of genuine care solely directed to a fellow human being.

Every single moment I spent in Signal Studios was the most pristine intersection of every ray of delight, emanating from the prism of reverence which I always wished to hold a chance to rub further for the hope of seeing it shine forever. It was the most quintessential period of my life, full of growth, purpose, and unrestrained potentials, which will never return again. Those days had howled their farewell and the iron snowflake of honor which was courageously engraved upon the frail glass bottle of my Millennial soul had long been shattered into oblivion, but I will never forget their pure golden rain of kindness which showered upon the meadow of the Evergreen State.

Now, I am well aware that some of you might not agree with me in terms of the perceived characteristics of this company. As far as I can tell, the general reputation of Signal Studios is not so bright, contrary to the way in which I have hitherto been describing them. As a matter of fact, they have faced a notoriously long list of bitter criticisms both from the community of gamers and that of game development professionals. And you know what? I do understand those grim remarks and do acknowledge the validity of many of their arguments. The presence of certain "personalities" in Signal Studios did indeed suggest a possibility that there were rather bizarre interpersonal confrontations present within the team, which could sometimes be irritating to a considerable degree. Hence, the company used to be significantly bigger in size years before I joined them, so I can, by nature of extrapolation, deduce that a great deal of unpleasant drama and politics would have easily introduced themselves due to chaotic tendencies of a large team. The wondrous experience I had by the time I joined the studio might have been the result of many lessons which the company had to learn after years of struggles in regard to the dynamics of leadership and project management. Maybe I was just extremely lucky to have jumped into the right workforce in just the right time, and it could have been a completely different scenario if I joined them years before.

Nevertheless, the experience I personally had in Signal Studios was marked by pleasures of extraordinary fulfillment, regardless of whether or not mine was an exceptional case that was made possible by a collection of happy coincidences which most other people were not so fortunate to be part of.

And dear fellow supporters of Toy Soldiers, Ascend, and other titles of Signal Studios, who might be reading this article, please bear in mind that they are a group of developers who always strived to present us with a box of fun little toys not for the sake of scrapping off every penny out of naive juniors and quasi-gambling addicts, but for the sake of creating and sustaining a beautiful environment where people could work with an inexplicable sense of dignity. Whenever you happen to notice that they do not respond to your inquiries for an unreasonably long span of time, please do not interpret it as a sign of plain rudeness. Rather, please take it as a sign that they are just as frustrated as you are, considering the time of despondency they had to endure for the hope of reviving their past glories.