Emily Sondering
speaker
543 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 18 Sep
Emily Sondering’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'd taken a quarter off UCLA, and I was back in my hometown, and things were different but the same. And I think that was really pivotal because it was the first time I felt that a game was actually telling my life story. Because The Last of Us, it's very relatable and touching, but I don't necessarily see myself in those characters. And it's also depicting a zombie apocalypse.
Versus Night in the Woods, I felt like it was depicting my life and it just felt so special and I realized that I could use games as a medium to tell the story of my life or dreams I have or things that scare me or just, you know, it could be used as a vehicle to express myself.
Yeah. I would say from a young age, I knew I always wanted to tell stories, but I was never sure of what medium. So in middle school, I would make these cringy short films. In high school, I was really into poetry. And in college, I thought maybe briefly I'd work in entertainment. I entered at NBC, realized it was not for me.
And it wasn't towards the end of college that I thought, you know, I've always loved games. Maybe I should try making them. And that's when it really happened. really clicked to me when I started making games that this was the medium for me. And I think it really is about what you touched on, which is the player agency.
I think it's so cool that instead of just admiring a character or watching them on a screen, you are the character. You make decisions as if you were the character. And I think game design can be really interesting in what it allows the player to do, but also what it doesn't allow the player to do to tell a specific story.
Yeah. Well, firstly, I do want to clarify, I don't do every single part of the game. I consider myself more of a mostly solo dev or like a solopreneur. Because, for example, like I hired someone to do some of the sound effects. While I am doing a lot of the art, like a couple things here and there, I've contracted. And I've also had someone help me code a couple parts of my game.
But in terms of like what... you know, I would say the game is vastly solo developed. And in terms of like what led to that decision. So before this, I've worked in teams for every game I've ever made. And I was working on a game and it never ended up coming out, ended up being canceled. And I was reflecting on some of the failures of that project and why it failed.
And I actually started Lily's World XC as just like my escape from that project I used to be working on. And The main reason I did it solo was honestly, it was just such a weird niche idea. I figured no one else would want to work on this except me. But ultimately, I actually have found a lot of joy in solo developing. Before this, I thought it would never be for me, but I'm really enjoying it.
I think certain things that I really like about solo dev is actually how fast moving it is. So I thought that... Working with a team would be faster because you don't have to do every single discipline. But for example, in the game that I was working on, let's say we wanted to do a design for the main character. We would have a concept artist do 20 variations of that main character design.
And we'd be like, okay, we like the eyes of this one and the ears of that one and the clothes of this one. And then she'd have to do like five more designs based off her preferences. And then this process could take a really long time versus for Lily's World XD. I'm the only artist or main lead artist. Right. And so I thought, okay, um, you know, I'm not gonna, you know, I approve everything.
I don't have to go through all these rounds of feedback and it actually can lead to creative, creative solutions. So I do enjoy doing art, but I didn't want to do all the art of the main character. So I came up with the creative solution to use my face. So Lily's World XD uses real pictures of the young girl, which are of me as a teenager.
And so in a weird way, even though I'm doing everything, the process of approval is so much faster because it's like, Hey, Emily, do you approve this? Yeah, I approve that.
can just finish it actually a lot faster, surprisingly. And I think like one big benefit is that You know, I could do playtesting so much easier because it would take so long in my previous team to even get to a place where we felt comfortable enough to have others play the game and then give their feedback. Then, of course, we have to iterate on the feedback.
But for me, because I'm just deciding it all, I can have so many more rounds of feedback because it's, you know, build, feedback, build, feedback, build, feedback. Like it's so much faster, actually. And I think actually the game is turning out better because I can just... rely on player feedback rather than getting in like five.
I remember in my old team, we had this like three hour debate over whether a chicken should talk.
Yeah, so in terms of music and sound effects, I've never done that in my life, and I know I would suck. So that was an obvious one to contract out.
And I have been working with a programmer to help. They have helped me code a couple of the things in my game. So in my demo, there's going to be a dress-up game. They coded that. And then they also helped me code the tab system in my game. Cause the game takes place in a computer. So like how the web address works. And that's actually a very interesting story of how I met my programmer.
So last year I went to the game developer conference and my flight got really delayed because of a storm. And so I was just sitting at the airport and then this person goes, are you saundering Emily? And it was someone who actually watched my videos. So we had this like two hour conversation at the airport and we were, we both live in LA. So many, many, many, many, many months passed.
And I – so Lilith World XD is actually how I'm learning how to code. Before this, I've never coded. So as you can imagine, I suck. So in my Discord, I had this problem and I was like, hey, does anyone know how to code this? Yeah. So various people tried to help me, and every person made some progress on the issue, but didn't solve it completely.
And then eventually, this person, Kirk, who had met me at the Game Developer Conference so many months ago, was like, do you want to just give me access to your project? And then the next day, just did it all themselves with no... Just like...
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