Meet the team: Mike, Head of Connected Technology

Today, Mike Herron, Head of Connected Technology at ChilliWorks tells us a bit about himself and unveils his plans for the future of ChilliWorks.

“Hi Mike, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what your background is”

My career started about 10 years ago. I went to Dundee College and was there for two years, before completing my degree at Abertay University. I worked locally for a few years; my first job was at the technology park in Dundee working for a company called INPS, working on health care systems. It provided pretty good grounding and set me up to start furthering my career. I then had a bit of a crazy two years where I was contracting in London, working for Adobe Consulting on financial and call centre systems. I then worked in Glasgow at JP Morgan in their investment banking technology division. My previous job was working for GFI MAX (previously known as Hound Dog) in Dundee. Over the space of 6 years I progressed from software developer to senior developer; lead developer to team lead; then in the last year my role was Application Architect. That was probably the most significant period of my career. We worked on a number of large-scale, cloud-based systems that had to withstand high load. High availability was key as our customers were IT companies, so they couldn’t be seen to using a system that had down time as it would reflect badly on them. This meant we had an obligation to keep our systems up and running and be able to operate effectively at scale. There were a lot of technical challenges, but I also had the privilege of working with some very talented and dedicated people. Hopefully that experience will be useful for helping to take ChilliWorks forward.

“So what was it about the games industry that appealed to you?”

I’ve always been interested in games, and have been playing games for almost as long as I can remember, but for most of my career my own skill set wasn’t directly applicable to the games industry. With the rise of social and mobile games however, there is now a bit more of an overlap that allows people with more traditional server development skills, such as myself, to make the jump across in to games.

From a purely technical point of view, my personal interest is in cloud-based systems, designing scalable solutions that make effective use of all the other technology platforms available, such as AWS. In that sense, the games industry is a very exciting place to be. Almost every successful mobile game will have significant server side components for analytics, social integration, and leaderboards for example. Developing these features in way that allows them to scale up massively if you land a big hit is a huge challenge, and something I’m really getting stuck into.

“What is it specifically about ChilliWorks that appealed to you?”

There were a few things. Firstly, I think there is already a fantastic core product there that we have proven internally and have managed to scale for our own uses so far. There is a lot of opportunity regarding what we can do with the platform in the future to take it to the next level. Having the opportunity to work with the team and have a big say in the future direction of the product, both in terms of feature set and technology, was really appealing.

Also, I was really impressed by the technical knowledge and enthusiasm of the team, for ChilliWorks and game development in general. Internally, there is a huge amount of experience in developing successful mobile games here and the opportunity to be part of that team, and help them to put that experience in to ChilliWorks was too good to turn down.

“So currently ChilliWorks has seen the release of the first installment to the suite, ChilliSource. What are your development plans for the other products in the ChilliWorks suite?

Since we’ve built, and continue to build, multiple games with the ChilliWorks backend, we feel we’ve got a good handle on what works and what doesn’t work, what features are essential, and how to make integration with the service as quick and easy as possible. However, we’re also looking to start engaging engaging directly with other studios that would be looking to use either ChilliWorks or another game backend service. We want to give them the opportunity to work with us to get involved early in the product lifecycle and help us shape the direction of the product. We want to make sure that what we’re building is going to be as easy to use as possible and really allow them to focus on their game and not having to worry about developing server side infrastructure.

Feedback is really important to what we’re trying to achieve. We could put our heads down and spend the next year putting out feature after feature, but if we develop something that’s too difficult to use or is only relevant in a handful of use cases, we’ll have wasted our time. Engaging directly with partners as well as our own internal development teams is going to be key to making ChilliWorks a success.

“How do you see ChilliWorks stand up against competitors and where do its features sit in line with their feature list?”

There are a couple of points there. The underlying core services that ChilliWorks sits on top of are not far away in feature parity. We’ve been using these internally for years on some really successful games, so we already have a lot of what you’d expect, such as IAP validation, social integration and asynchronous multiplayer. What we’re doing at the moment is just having another pass over each feature and making sure it is as easy to use as possible, its API is consistent with the rest of the suite, and they sit well together as whole.

For other features that we’ve yet to implement, we’re going to approach each of them one at a time and think really hard about the easiest way to provide those features to our partners. For example, in-game chat is possible with some of our competitors, but to get it set up requires copying and pasting pages of code in to their web console! We really want to avoid that type of scenario and provide features, whether it’s chat, quests or virtual goods, right out of the box with minimum setup. That’s where our ability to get solid feedback on our product is going to be really important.

“So where do you see ChilliWorks in the future, say 5 years’ time?”

Wow, within the next 5 years? 5 years is quite a long time in terms of technology (laughs). I would certainly hope that we are a well-established game backend as a service in 5 years. We’re actually doing a lot of brainstorming internally at the moment on how we can make that initial integration experience with ChilliWorks as simple as possible. We have the core product to deliver first, and a list of features we want to make part of the platform as soon as we can, that’s our current priority. Over the next few years however, once we’ve been able to do that, I’d also hope that we’d have been able to bring some of our more novel ideas to the product, and really change the way that people think of game BaaS platforms.