Dev Profile: Chip Bumgardner

The RYL Executive Producer Shares His Experiences

Chip Bumgardner, the Executive Producer of Risk Your Life (RYL), has submitted to the latest in a series of developer profiles here on MMORPG.com. Within, Chip talks about his experiences at Planetwide Games, his game and his history.

My Current title is Executive Producer. I am currently managing RYL: Path of the Emperor, RYL: Battle Lohan, the 1 Million Dollar Grand-Prize Skill-Based Tournament (our president has given me the nickname “Million Dollar Producer”) as well as other un-announced titles.

My day to day responsibilities include working with a team of translators to ensure proper translation of both of the RYL games (they are originally from Korea). I manage the patching / testing process as well. We have 2 separate servers set up that are solely for testing each version of the game. I make sure that the game, website, forums; basically any form of communication that goes out of the building has a unified message. Working on an MMO is drastically different than working on a “normal” PC game or any of the platform games (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, etc…). Once an MMO goes live, that’s when the real work begins because we need to monitor the game and more specifically, the tournament server CONSTANTLY. This requires a great deal of work and I’m thankful that I have people like Kyle, Damien, and Ning around to manage a lot of those issues.

Strangely enough, I credit my career in the game industry to a back injury!!!

I was working for a grocery store and I hurt my back unloading pallets of milk. While I was out of work, I spent a LOT of time creating Doom levels for my friends. I called one of my friends named Kurt to see if he could help me test my new level and he told me that he had to get rid of all the games on his system to make room for work. I asked him where he worked and he said “Interplay”, you should come down for an interview. I went to the interview for a customer server representative and they hired me on the spot because I was a tester for Win95 that hadn’t been released yet and they anticipated the need for somebody with the knowledge of the new OS.

I quit working for the grocery store that same night and I’ve never looked back.

After Interplay, I went to Crave Entertainment for 9 months where I worked on Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, Soldier of Fortune, StarLancer, and Razor Freestyle Scooter.

My next stop was Activision where I worked in the O2 Sports division on the following titles: Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 3, Mat Hoffman’s Pro-BMX, Mat Hoffman’s Pro-BMX 2, and Mat Hoffman’s Pro-BMX 3 (never released).

I then went to Gratuitous Games where I worked on Soldier of Fortune II for Xbox. We lost funding for a Mad Scientist game we were creating and had to close down.

After Gratuitous Games, I started working for Unrivaled Entertainment on 2 games that never made it to market. A short time later, 5 of us from Unrivaled formed Planetwide Games and hopefully, this will be the last job that any of us will ever have.

Currently, I would say the language barrier. We are an English company that is distributing a Taiwanese game that is developed by a Korean company.

We strive to be perfect on anything we request / report as it has to go through 2 translations in order for work to be done. Fortunately, I have Don here and he has been a GREAT translator and all around champion for what we need.

I love working with people. It’s amazing all of the different personality types that I encounter each and every day. Sometimes it takes some creativity dealing with issues because every person reacts differently to the situation at hand.

I’m pretty sure that I have A.D.D. My job allows me to do a little bit of everything and sometimes, a LOT of everything. This keeps me busy and interested in whatever I’m doing.

At the end of the day, I’m making games. I get to create something for people to escape reality with. With this product, we get to escape reality together with thousands of other people at the same time. It’s a great time. :)

As a start-up company, we didn’t have a gigantic marketing machine behind us or the launch of RYL: Path of the Emperor. We started this contest for 2 reasons… 1) To get attention and to get people to notice our game. 2) We want to change the way a typical game company interacts with its customers.

Most companies take the money and run. We want to give back to the community. We’ve partnered with MANY companies in order to reach this goal. We will be giving real-world prizes for events in all of the games that we are making.

One other thing we’re doing that is just started to get buzz is that we are allowing people to not only play RYL: Path of the Emperor for free, but actually MAKE money to play. We’ve partnered with a company called GMI to run a survey program. Basically, the player participates in weekly surveys and this will earn them money to play the game. Final details on this program should be released within 2 weeks.

We’re also working on our “Comic Book Creator” project that will allow people to create a comic book out of the screenshots from their favorite game! This is a great project and many people seem to be very excited about this.

We are building momentum every single day. Our customer service is 2nd to none. You will not find a company that interacts with their community more that Planetwide Games. Fortunately, most of our staff has been performing whatever job it is that they do for many years. This has allowed us to be a lean machine and perform our jobs MUCH more efficiently. Don’t get me wrong, we have obstacles to conquer just like every other company, but with our tenacity, we are usually successful in working through the issues at hand.

Over the past year, we’ve all learned to work well with each other. We aren’t the type of company that allows people to hide in their position. No project is started and then handed off to somebody, everybody here strives to finish projects and tasks and all of us back each other on whatever it is we’re doing as a team.

Like I said above, we are not your typical game company. One of our goals is in everything we do, do it better. We’re trying to do things differently and we hope that we will be successful in doing so.

Make sure you stop by our booth at E3 2006 for the finals of our $1 Million Dollar Grand-Prize Skill-Based Tournament. It should be a great time!