PUBLISHED ONJanuary 26, 2023 12:10 PMByTimothy WeeWhy I Do What I Do is an original AsiaOne series where we showcase people with uncommon professions and what it takes to get there.
"We actually ran out of money like near the end, so Cat Quest was really do or die," exclaims Desmond Wong.
The local game developer behind the award-winning role-playing game shares with AsiaOne that there was a lot of uncertainly before finding success.
These days, however, Desmond, who is the Chief Executive Officer of local indie gaming company The Gentlebros, doesn't have to worry about finances just as much.
With two successful game titles under the company belt, Cat Quest and its sequel Cat Quest 2 have raked in $8.5m in gross profits with 2.5m copies sold.
So after such a remarkable turnaround, perhaps it is fitting that The GentleBros, the company which Desmond co-founded with two of his former work colleagues, have been rewarded as one of the Emerging Enterprise 2022 Award finalists.
The fact that they are the only game company nominated certainly is also indicative that they are held in similar high regard as other crucial fields such as medical and engineering.
But most importantly, Desmond says "getting nominated for the Emerging Enterprise Awards was definitely validation for all the hard work that [they've] put in" and that Gentlebros is "able to stand toe-to-toe with all these other industries".
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Hard work is no stranger to Desmond from a young age; the self-confessed perfectionist has been busy scribbling away in his sketchbooks "designing game levels" since his secondary school days.
It was then that the he first decided to take on game design as a career.
His first hurdle, convincing his parents on his chosen path.
"My parents' reaction to me wanting to go into game development was not great," shares Desmond.
But after some coaxing and support from his school teacher, he managed to convince them that if he was doing what he loved, then he would naturally do better in it.
So after completing his degree in Digital Art and Animation, the DigiPen Institute of Technology graduate managed to land a job at major gaming studio Tecmo Koei Games as a computer graphics (CG) artist.
It was here that Desmond met his two other GentleBros co-founders Leon Ho and Nursyazana Zainal, and gained invaluable experience working on international game titles like the Dynasty Warriors, Dead or Alive and Fatal Frame.
Despite working on such marquee games, he likens his experience in working for a major game company as being "a very small cog in a huge machine".
Elaborating further, he tells us that each employee works on very specific parts of a game character, like, say, the clothes and this means that he didn't feel a lot of "investment" in all the stuff he created.
"You don't really feel like you are contributing much to the overall vision, you're just there to complete the work and move on," shares Desmond matter-of-factly.
Is it any wonder then that he and his two Gentlebros co-founders left Tecmo Koei Games in 2015 to start their own gaming company?
Immediately, there was a stark difference in terms of working environment and experience.
Desmond points out that with a smaller game development team, the biggest difference is "the contribution and involvement you feel with every project".
He states that "everyone in the company has a very strong input into how the game is made" and that they make an effort to "ensure that everyone's views and opinions are taken equally".
Calling it the best part of working in an indie gaming company, it was this sort of collaborative mindset that set them to create their hit game Cat Quest.
Final boss battle
After releasing a free-to-play game previously that "didn't do super well", Desmond and the GentleBros team started working on Cat Quest.
But in 2017, in the lead-up to the release of Cat Quest, they ran out of money towards the end, causing Desmond to have doubts about the game launch and the future of the company.
"I think that was really a time that I remember till now for being really, really stressed about things," he shares.
If running out of funds wasn't big enough of a problem, Desmond and his GentleBros team also had to contend with being the "only one that was really going against the flow" in the gaming industry with Cat Quest.
At that time, free-to-play games were all the rage but Desmond and his team decided to take a gamble and made Cat Quest a premium game which is sold at a fixed price.
It probably didn't help that they were housed in a gaming start-up incubator building, surrounded by their industry peers who were all making free-to-play games.
Unable to turn to anyone for advice or support, Desmond admits that they felt "super alone" at that point in time.
However, he and the Gentlebros team believed in their product - which is inspired by classic video games that they love such as Zelda, Metal Gear and Super Mario - and put all their design sensibilities into it.
Initially, Desmond and his team set a modest revenue target of $390,000 for Cat Quest.
But clearly the premise of cute cats going on a fantasy adventure resonated with gamers and they blew past their revenue target in the first week of launch!
Besides being a hit with the public, Cat Quest was also a favourite within the gaming industry, garnering the Excellence in Visual Art and Design award at the SEA International Mobile Game Awards and Best Art Design at the Intel Level Up Contest.
Desmond and his GentleBros team followed up with the sequel Cat Quest 2, in 2019.
With the Gentlebros team hard at work on Cat Quest 3, Desmond reveals that the grand master plan is "to make nine Cat Quest games because cats have nine lives".
While he is unable to share any details about the upcoming game at the moment, he did promise that they are putting in "200 per cent" to make huge improvements from the previous instalment with "things that [they've] never done before".
When asked what is his favourite game creation to date, Desmond doesn't hesitate with his answer.
"The most significant will be the main yellow cat in Cat Quest because he's the one that started this whole journey," he professes.
Not only was it the first key art, but it "inspired the whole vision for the Cat Quest game".
While he says that his iconic main feline protagonist will hold a special place in his heart, Desmond is just as excited with some of the new characters that he and the GentleBros crew is developing for a new project in the US.
Just like in any video game, it seems that the best is always yet to come.
And Desmond has certainly have shown that he has levelled-up as a game developer to navigate his way through any challenges that might come his way.
timothywee@asiaone.com
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