Interview with Liam Philiben: From UChicago Cinema Studies to AI-Powered Game Development
Early Life and UChicago
Xiao He:
Hey, Liam, we can start by introducing yourself to our readers!
Liam Philiben:
Yeah, for sure. So my name is Liam. Xiao and I know each other from grad school. We go a little way back. I've spent over five years working in entertainment tech in a product management, project management capacity.
I’ve worked on a whole host of different things. At this point, I've worked in mixed reality, so I’ve worked on a lot of experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality. Some of that was headset-based, some of that is on mobile devices. I also spent time working in the game industry.
The game I worked on most recently was called The Bazaar, a deckbuilding autobattler, at Tempo Games. We launched it last October, and it peaked this year at a number that I don't know if I can disclose, but it did pretty well for a AA title. It got super popular on Twitch. So if you were a viewer who watched Northernlion, or you happen to like a lot of auto battlers, you probably saw clips of the game, whether you liked it or not.
But long before then, my first introduction to any of the stuff that I ended up doing after grad school was when I was a game designer on an alternate reality game called the parasite which was sponsored by the University of Chicago. Which turned into a much larger thing than I could've expected. It was, at the time, one of the largest alternate reality games ever ran. We had a Wired article written up about the entire experience. It was very tiring, but it was pretty magical.
Xiao:
Wow, I've always wanted to ask you this. I know you went to UChicago and studied Cinema and Media Studies. I'm curious to learn more about what you did in your undergrad and how that led into the game design projects you just described. When you first entered UChicago, did you know that you wanted to be in media, gaming, or even game design at that time?
Liam:
You know, I feel like I had a subconscious desire to do that. But my path to getting into game design and the game industry was not straightforward.
At the University of Chicago, they don’t — for better or worse — believe in applied majors. There wasn’t an engineering major, for instance. So all of my friends who wanted to be engineers, they ended up being physics majors or they ended up taking CS. When I came to the university, I thought I was going to be pre-med. But there was no pre-med major, so you could major in pretty much anything you wanted as long as you took the prerequisite courses for medical school. And at the time, I was really, really interested in movies. I was really, really interested in film. So that’s what I majored in.
But it’s strange, because when I think a lot about how I spent most of my free time, even back in high school, I used to play a lot of indie games on Steam. Super — I mean, I don’t know if they were really obscure, but I would play the popular ones like Braid and Super Meat Boy. However, I was obsessed with a title called Anodyne during my senior year, which is a surreal and abstract Zelda-like game set in the mind of the person you are playing as.
I spent a lot of time reading blog posts written by Anodyne’s developer, Melos Han-Tani, because I really liked their thoughtful approach to game development and design. And as I continued reading their blog posts, I realized they were actually a student at the University of Chicago. And to me, you know, there had been a bunch of well-known people who had graduated from the university like Philip Glass or Carl Sagan, but I was like: wow, here’s a developer I admire who’s attending the university right now. If this is the kind of person produced by the university, or who gravitates towards the university, then I want to be around those people.
So perhaps subconsciously there was a part of me that was like, okay, there are people here making interesting things, making interesting games I already want to play. But I don’t think I made a direct line between becoming a game developer and attending UChicago. I was just like: seems like there are cool people there, and I want to be around them.
For three years, I was taking film courses and pre-med courses. I’d go and take my History of International Cinema course, then run across campus to do an organic chemistry lab later in the day.
I don’t really think I had a good reason for wanting to do pre-med. I think it comes from my background — my mom’s from the Philippines, I come from an immigrant family. I think sometimes with immigrant families, kids are put onto a certain track because certain careers make a lot of “sense.” They’re very stable. If you’re smart, they say, here are career paths like medicine or law that will guarantee a good career, a good paying job, you know, the ability to consistently pay rent.
So it was a similar deal for me. I don’t really think I thought that critically about whether I wanted to do medicine, it was just kind of thrust upon me. I was looking for a sign from the universe during undergrad to tell me to pursue something else. But you know, there’s no cavalry coming. Nobody was going to shake me and say, “Don’t do it!” So I just kept going.
But in my third year of undergrad, there was a course that was being offered about transmedia puzzle design and similar topics. When I was younger, I had participated in some alternate reality games — like I Love Bees for the Halo 2 marketing campaign. And I thought, this is amazing. This is a chance to actually build puzzles and also get course credit for my major. It was the fastest I had ever signed up for a course, even though I had never made puzzles before.
So I took the class, which was incredible. We spent time building puzzles and talking to famous puzzle makers like Will Shortz, who’s the editor for the New York Times crossword. And that transmedia puzzle design course turned out to be a semi-covert way to recruit students to actually build an ARG for the university over the summer. It was an unbelievable offer, one that felt like a complete no-brainer: if you’re giving me an opportunity to be a game designer, where do I sign?
That spurred me onto the path. It was pretty late into undergrad — the winter of my third year. But it turned into the first real job I ever had working in games.
I just remember, especially at the conclusion of the ARG later that September, being incredibly tired. Running an ARG is exhausting. But I also remember thinking: whenever I do anything in medicine or research, it feels like I’m using 10% or 20% of myself. But when I’m building puzzles, building games, this feels like an opportunity and a creative outlet to bring 100% of myself into what I make. And I thought, how can I do more of this?
At the same time, I was just starting my last year of undergrad. What do I do? All my experience up until that point had been very medicine-focused, working in labs or shadowing physicians. I’d built some things here and there, but I hadn’t interned at a game studio or any entertainment company, because I thought that wasn’t what I was going to do after graduation. That was the crisis of my first quarter of my last year of undergrad.
Choosing CMU and Applying to Grad School
Xiao:
That’s fascinating! Liam, I got to know you at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Entertainment Technology Center. I’m curious, when did you decide you wanted to go to CMU and apply to that program? At the time of application, did you already know you wanted to be a game designer?
Liam:
I had a moment right at the end of the parasite where I was like, okay, I probably don’t want to go to med school. I felt very certain about this. I knew I would much rather be doing whatever it is that I just did for the ARG, but to get paid to do it as a career.
Of course, the next question was: what next?
I benefited from the fact that one of the key people working on the parasite was a person named Ashlyn Sparrow, who’s now the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago. She’s actually an ETC grad from the class of 2011. Ashlyn changed the trajectory of my life. I basically went up to her and said, “Ashlyn, please help me. I know I want to do something in games, but I have no idea how to get from where I am now to some sort of career in entertainment.”
She sat me down and very pragmatically said: look, here are the different approaches you could take to pursue a career in the game industry. She asked about my background and resume, and then was like, okay, here’s a potential position at Rockstar working on cinematics, here’s one at 2K, here are a bunch of positions you could apply for in games that are relevant to your background. Or, if you still want to pursue higher education and get more experience under your belt, here are a bunch of master’s programs you could apply to as well.
Of course, since she was an ETC grad, she talked a lot about her experience in that program. And for me, I thought that it sounded amazing, especially the more I read about it.
When I looked at those industry positions, I didn’t feel qualified for them at all. I had spent the last three years of my life in labs, doing research on things like brown adipocytes. None of that was transferable to what those positions were asking for — I had no concrete experience, no internships, no shipped projects. I didn’t have anything relevant to games, aside from the ARG.
So the clearest path I saw was to apply for grad school. Which is how I ended up at the ETC.
Family Expectations
Xiao:
I’m curious, you come from a doctor family, and I suppose your parents hoped you’d eventually go down the doctor path. But you ended up choosing gaming. Were there any clashes or arguments with your parents? How did they think about it? And how did you persuade them?
Liam:
I think they probably still harbor some hope that I might reconsider and go back to med school. But they’ve been supportive. There was never any major disagreement.
They were definitely surprised that this was what I wanted to do. I think their biggest thing — and the older I get, the more I understand their perspective — was: medicine is an industry they understood. My mom knows what it’s like to work in the hospital system, or to run your own practice.
The minute I said, “I want to do something in a totally separate field, one totally divorced from anything you could possibly understand,” they were like: we can’t help you. There’s nothing we know about that industry where we can try to give you any advice or support. But we support you if this is what you want to do.
Life at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC)
Xiao:
Liam, you went to CMU. You moved to Pittsburgh to attend the Entertainment Technology Center, which is a two-year master’s program. Looking back, how would you describe your experience there?
Liam:
Looking back, I would say very positive. A lot of the reasons I’ve gotten to where I am now are because of ETC.
When I first got there, I was kind of surprised. At UChicago, many of my friends went into academia. They got PhDs, became professors. So much of my undergrad was about ideas, about making weird avant-garde things, which I loved.
The ETC was very different. It was very applied, even from the beginning. Early on, they told us: you want to be T-shaped in your skill set. Think about what title would go on your business card.
In the back of my mind, I thought, well, I’m interested in everything. I want to be a generalist. I want to make weird, experimental stuff. That was very much my undergrad mindset, so I kind of chafed against some of the ETC pragmatism.
But in retrospect, the project-based structure was incredibly beneficial. It taught me that:
I liked working on small, scrappy teams.
It gave me some degree of clout when applying to jobs due to the client projects I worked on while in the program, such as with Google Stadia.
It forced me to pick up production skills and learn how to lead a team.
When you have to deliver something real and playable in 11 weeks, you learn very quickly how to steer a team, help a team succeed, creatively problem-solve, and get something over the line. You don’t have an infinite amount of time to just “explore ideas.”
Favorite Project at ETC
Xiao:
I’m curious, what was your favorite project? Because I know ETC is project-based. Looking back, which one did you enjoy the most?
Liam:
All the project semesters I did were interesting in their own way. But the one nearest and dearest to my heart is Cutting Edge.
For context: at the ETC you can do client projects with sponsors (professors, game companies, tech companies) or you can pitch your own. Only a few pitches are accepted each semester.
After our first semester, some classmates and I pitched Cutting Edge. It explored using film editing techniques — cuts, transitions — in VR. We were really interested in VR storytelling, and were huge fans of directors like Satoshi Kon, who used jump cuts and match cuts in really interesting, dream-like ways. We had heard the traditional advice that cinematic editing in VR was “impossible” or destabilizing, so we wanted to push back on that and explore what was possible.
It felt like pitching a startup. We built a deck, convinced faculty that this was pedagogically valuable and on the bleeding edge of tech. And after multiple rounds of pitching, our project got accepted.
This was also the first real project semester for most of us. It was hard, but because we were all so invested — we’d been talking about it since week three of our first semester of grad school — even the hard parts felt meaningful.
There was camaraderie. We even pulled an all-nighter to get a build ready before faculty demos, which was exhausting. But we all just wanted to make an incredible experience.
I look back on that fondly. Of all my grad school projects, it’s the high-water mark. Maybe that’s what I still chase in startups.
Entering the Game Industry
Xiao:
That’s awesome. Yeah, because that project is so similar, of course it’s under the school setting, but the team pitching ideas, iterating, documenting the process, building prototypes, releasing it and even making release videos… it looks so much like a real startup. After ETC, Liam, did you think about maybe turning that project into an actual startup, or were you more like: okay, I want to work in the game industry and see what it’s like?
Liam:
Yeah, what’s interesting is that even though I came into the program being like, “I want to make games,” while I was in the program I started thinking: is it really games I’m interested in, or is it interactive entertainment more broadly?
I was going to art installations and thought: maybe I want to do TeamLab-style installations, maybe I just like playful experiences, not necessarily games. So in grad school, I challenged myself: maybe I won’t just do the “general game thing.” Let me explore other areas.
But to your other question — if I was going to try to make Cutting Edge into a startup — there were some exciting moments. Two Magic Leap engineers tried it and said, “This is incredible. What’s the GitHub repo?” They were furiously taking notes, asking for a link to our SDK. That was part of our deliverables — not just a story demo, but also an SDK for VR storytelling cuts and transitions.
But as enjoyable as some of this attention was from people in the industry, I didn’t think of it as a startup idea. More like: maybe this could be a bridge to other interesting XR experiences later. In retrospect, maybe we could have made it a startup — this was 2019, pre-metaverse. I really did love working with those teammates.
Xiao:
Well, that’s incredible. I think the startup practice aspect planted a seed back then. And now, after some time under the soil, it’s become something else. So you graduated from CMU. You went into the game industry. What were you thinking at that time? Did you know you wanted to be a game producer? And in what type of company? There are so many options: Riot, Zynga, mixed reality, Schell Games… How did you choose?
Liam:
Some of that was chosen for me, circumstantially.
My last semester of grad school was at the ETC’s Silicon Valley campus. They held it at Electronic Arts for students who wanted to do client projects with Bay Area game companies or tech firms.
That semester started in January of 2020 — right about when COVID hit. We were all working from home by the second half of that semester. It was a weird feeling to graduate over Zoom and then just drift back into daily life. The transition from graduate school to post-grad life felt blurry.
At the time, my girlfriend and I were living in a 450-square-foot studio apartment in San Mateo. Everyone was locked in. We tried to occupy ourselves by learning to make bread and growing plants on our apartment's balcony, like a lot of other people during this time.
Studios were also shutting down, hiring freezes were everywhere. No “remote work is the future” talk yet — just complete uncertainty.
And so post-graduation, in the midst of this uncertain environment and already here in the Bay Area, I applied to a countless number of jobs that were based here in the bay. Some of them were game jobs, but most were in mixed reality.
As far as working in production, in our first semester at the ETC, everyone has to take a course called Building Virtual Worlds. Teams had two artists, two engineers, and one sound designer. Since sound design can be changed the fastest, all sound designers worked double-duty as producers. I did some audio work in undergrad (editing, sound for films), so naturally, I wanted to be the sound designer. That also made me the producer by default. I had no idea what being a producer meant, but I had some strong inclinations towards guiding teams. So I sort of fell into that role.
At first, I wasn’t that great at it. I didn’t know what Scrum was. I ran horrible, hour-long stand-ups, a lot of “fake” sprints. But I learned especially through my mistakes.
By graduation, most of my skillset was in production, not design. There’s a huge oversupply of aspiring game designers and very few junior game design roles, especially now. And I didn’t have the internship pedigree of classmates who’d been at EA or Blizzard, so that made the odds of getting a job even harder.
So the first position I landed — thanks to a classmate’s recommendation — was at an early-stage mixed reality startup called Enklu as a product manager.
Enklu: Mixed Reality Startup
Liam:
At first, I applied as a project manager. But after my initial interview with the CEO, they noticed I had strong product ideas and inclinations. I was notified that they had instead decided to interview me for a product manager role. Honestly, I thought: “That sounds way cooler than a project manager. Also, I have no idea what a product manager is.”
Enklu had previously been an events-based business, creating AR experiences for HoloLens 2 for brands and other events. Then COVID killed events, and their main business disappeared overnight. But they had built solid internal tooling. So they pivoted: put it on web, sell it as SaaS to enterprises. We worked with a lot of enterprise clients across multiple verticals to essentially build multiplayer mixed reality experiences, from handwashing simulators for educators to teaching technicians to build automotive engines. But the vertical I loved working with the most was entertainment — especially when we worked with Meow Wolf. That felt full circle to my undergrad and grad school motivations.
So that was my start — falling into product management because of my background in mixed reality projects.
Tempo Games: AAA Live Service
Liam:
Around mid-2022, a friend working at Tempo Games reached out. They needed a producer. I thought: here’s my chance to actually work at a game studio.
Tempo Games had originally been an esports org, but now they were in the process of converting the company into game studio dedicated to building The Bazaar, a live-service autobattler. The COO had been an EP on Halo Infinite, and the rest of the team had industry veterans from places like Blizzard and Riot. I thought if I was going to learn how to make games properly, and in a startup environment, it would be here.
So I joined Tempo Games in April of 2022, and was there for about three and a half years. At times, it was a rollercoaster. I remember pacing the room ahead of our announcement at the OTK Expo, our website only stabilized and ready minutes before our launch trailer was about to play. And our player community could be at times incredibly kind to the developers, and at other times hostile due to changes made. It was definitely an educational experience.
At Enklu, roadmaps were scrappy. At Tempo, I was building full Jira databases, milestone schedules, long-term plans for big-budget production. It was definitely closer to AAA development, though it certainly could get pretty scrappy at times.
Side Projects and Frustrations
Liam:
At the same time, I kept doing side projects. I love small teams. But the hardest part of making games is finishing them. Everyone loves prototyping and building a v1 of the game. But then you realize: to polish this takes a year, even if you’re full-time.
Indie games on average take at least a year, usually more. If you’re part-time, it stretches much longer. Burnout happens especially when there’s no end in sight. So I worked on a bunch of side projects that eventually just fizzled out and died.
About a year ago, I was working on another startup idea — basically a multiplayer SDK, plug-and-play that could be used across multiple engines and game libraries. That was my dream: I love multiplayer games.
But after nine months, we had no momentum. My cofounders had run into some personal issues. And I was frustrated with the product’s state, and also with myself. I was the dreaded “non-technical” founder — the least useful for building a SaaS product.
People always say: if you’re non-technical and building SaaS, your chance of death is near 100%. But if you’re technical, maybe you don’t need a non-technical cofounder at all.
I was in that unenviable position: I really needed technical cofounders, but they didn’t really need me.
So I asked myself, what can I do to bring more value to the table? How can I learn how to build things on my own?
That’s when I started exploring AI coding tools.
Discovering AI Tools
Xiao:
The last time we reconnected, you showed me a viral video on Twitter. Can you share the story — after you left VR and Tempo, what happened in between, and how did you arrive at that video?
Liam:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, after the multiplayer SDK startup fizzled out about a year ago, I started trying to use AI to build a bunch of side projects. At first, it was literally me typing into ChatGPT, getting GPT-4-generated code, and copy-pasting it into my IDE. Later, I discovered Cursor. I thought, this is incredible.
I wanted to eventually build a game with code-gen tools, but as a warm-up, I thought: okay, let me build something small to test myself.
Building LevelUp.FYI for Gaming Industry
Liam:
At the time, I was also casually job-hunting. There’s a site called Levels.fyi for software engineers to look at salaries in tech, but nothing equivalent in the game industry. There’s no central source of truth to compare salaries as a game designer, artist, or producer.
So I thought maybe this would be a worthy project to build as an excuse to learn how to use these AI tools. I remembered a site called H1Bdata.info, which had scraped the public H1B salary database. This was huge because employers that are sponsoring employees for an H1B are required to submit their salary as a part of the application process. So even though studios like Valve don’t include salary ranges on their job postings, the H1B database provides a way to see the actual salaries at these places.
So I wrote a simple Python script to scrape H1Bdata.info. I compiled it into a Google Sheet — my “database.” No Postgres, nothing advanced, because I didn’t know how to set it up.
Then I wired it up to a basic HTML front end. I didn’t even know what React was. I built this in a night by prompting ChatGPT and pasting the results back into VSCode.
But after setting everything up, suddenly I could compare Blizzard and Riot salaries. I showed a friend, and they said, “Oh, this is interesting.”
So I kept tinkering. Rebuilt it in React Native, then in Next.js after people told me it’d be more efficient. Learned as I went.
At first, growth was slow. Then I decided to launch it on Reddit on r/gamedev. I wrote a post that said: “Look, the job market is rough right now. Salary info is hidden until late in interviews. It’s frustrating. So I built this.”
I thought maybe 100 people would look at it. Instead, it blew up. The post hit 68,000 views, stayed at the top of r/gamedev for a week. Thousands of people visited the site. Hundreds anonymously submitted their own salaries.
Yes, I got snarky Reddit comments (“Doesn’t Levels.fyi already exist?”). But also tons of support.
That weekend was powerful. I had no web dev experience — my database was Google Sheets! But I built something thousands of people got value from.
Finally, I felt like: after all these hype cycles — crypto, NFTs, where I didn’t see much value — now I understood. AI had empowered me to help people, to build something useful.
From AI Coding to Game Engines
Liam:
Immediately, I thought: this is amazing. I used Cursor for web dev. But what if someone built a purpose-built game engine with the same agentic AI coding experience?
That idea stuck with me. I tinkered with Godot, the open-source engine with its own IDE. I thought: maybe this is the opportunity. Fork it, just like Cursor forked VS Code, and transform the UX into something AI-first.
I started experimenting with it, then in May of this year I teamed up with a cofounder I met from YC’s cofounder matching. We built the first version as a plugin, building on our nights and weekends.
After three weeks, we had a working demo. Friends tested it. Feedback was positive. But we needed eyeballs.
So I decided: let’s make a demo video.
The Viral Launch Video
Xiao:
How long did it take you to produce that demo video?
Liam:
A weekend. Just sitting at my computer.
It might have been faster, but my old H6 mic kept dying mid-takes. I thought: the video can be raw, but the audio must be good. That slowed me down.
Xiao:
I assumed people want sharp, cinematic launch videos. You went raw but focused on audio. Was that from your film education?
Liam:
Partly. But mostly pragmatism. I had $0. No budget for polished videos. I looked at other launch videos on Twitter — many were just people recording raw demos, walking through the product. I was hyper-focused on the audio because I remember watching so many beautifully shot student films in undergrad being ruined by a bad audio track. Good audio felt like table stakes for any demo video.
While recording the demo I realized: the most compelling thing is seeing something being built live by AI. That’s visually interesting enough.
So I used Screen Studio for recording, added mouse clicks, kept it simple. If I’d tried After Effects, it would’ve taken a week.
I posted the video in mid-June. I had close to zero followers on Twitter. I expected maybe 500 views, and hopefully one or two sign-ups.
Instead, it got 10K views in two days. Farza from Buildspace replied to the video, tagged others, which definitely helped to boost it. Founders and VCs started following me.
That was surreal.
Founders Inc, ODF, and Going Full-Time
Xiao:
A few days ago we met in San Francisco at Fort Mason. You were at an On Deck Fellow event, also telling me you’re now in contact with Founders Inc. How did you go from that video to making it a real startup?
Liam:
Oh man, so much.
I posted the video in June, still employed. Farza tagged one of the Founders, Inc. founders on the video, so we submitted an application to Founders, Inc. about a week after the video launched.
Then in August, Tempo Games downsized 60% of the studio, myself included. That was painful, but it freed me up.
By then my cofounder had left, amicably, due to personal reasons. Suddenly, I was solo and unemployed. But I had the demo, some traction, and a lot of free time.
I applied to the latest batch of the On Deck Fellowship in July, interviewed and got in by mid-August, which was huge. Around the same time, I kept posting my demo video on Founders Inc. threads on Twitter and LinkedIn. Two weeks ago, they reached out: “We’re interested in what you’re building. Want to work out of Founders Inc for a month on a guest pass?”
I said yes. At that point, I was already at 23 users, had forked the engine, and built more features. They told me to pick either tomorrow or a week later. I said tomorrow.
Coming to Founders, Inc. was pretty surreal. Last year, I was in Fort Mason for buildspace s5, dreaming about what it would be like to run a startup out there. At that point, I was feeling pretty miserable at my job, but being around people trying to build their own thing felt so powerful and joyful. Now, a year later, I’m actually working out of Fort Mason on a startup of my own.
Vision for Goji
Xiao:
That’s amazing to hear your journey! You’re always resourceful: never making excuses, always learning new things. What’s next for your project?
Liam:
I’m still figuring that out. Bootstrap? Seed-strap? Fundraise? Those are the financial decisions I’m still mulling over.
But the mission is clear. If you find something with a clear mission, it propels you even if retention is bad or you have no users.
For me, Goji is about helping people build games.
Think of Twine. It was a simple tool for text adventures. That’s how I got started in undergrad. I didn’t know how to program, but I could use Twine. Many amazing developers like Porpentine have built incredible games with it, some of whom wouldn’t even have a career without it.
That’s what I want to do with Goji: lower the barrier to entry.
Yes, AI will lead to lots of “slop.” That’s inevitable. But it will also allow hidden gems to emerge.
Every week I’m pushing updates — fixing runtime errors, increasing game complexity, making the editor better.
Games are complicated, but I want to solve those problems. Because giving more people tools to create means we’ll get more diverse, interesting, incredible experiences in the world.
Favorite Game Recommendations
Xiao:
Before we wrap up, Liam, I’d love to ask: what’s your favorite game? Or any recommendations for people to try?
Liam:
Oh man, I always love this question. It’s hard because there are so many genres, and I play a lot of different things. But I’ll give a few.
So much of my free time has been sucked up playing Factorio. It’s a game where you land on a hostile alien planet with no resources other than the ability to engineer machines from raw materials. In the process of trying to build a rocket to leave, you have to create entire supply chains and automated assembly lines. I realize this doesn’t sound that exciting on paper, but it’s the kind of game where you will start playing at 11 am and all of a sudden look at the clock and find that it’s midnight. It’s definitely a game that appeals to programmers or people who spend their time building efficient processes.
For something totally different, I recently played through Astro Bot, which came out last year. Incredible game, definitely deserving of its GOTY accolades. I’m a huge fan of games like Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey, and Astro Bot feels like a spiritual successor to those games despite not being a Nintendo title. Each level feels perfectly tuned, introducing new wrinkles to the core gameplay and ending long before they get tedious. It has a perfect range of skill expression, being accessible enough for players who are new to platformers, as well as providing challenge planets for seasoned platformer players that frankly made me want to throw my controller in frustration (in a good way!). But most importantly, that game just feels like it was made with such an immense amount of joy and love that’s just so palpable when playing it. Team Asobi is amazing, definitely one of the best studios out there right now.
Xiao:
Liam, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us — from pre-med and cinema studies at UChicago, to XR storytelling at CMU, to AAA game production, to building your own AI-powered tools. It’s inspiring to see how each step, even the detours, has built toward your mission now with Goji.
Liam:
Thank you. It’s been really meaningful to reflect on all of this.