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
just took that initiative i was like wow do you want a job this is your job interview so i literally offered them the position right then and there and ever since they've been helping me with small tasks and also helping me bug fix which is truly the most painful part of my game that being said i am still programming my game unfortunately i did not yeah i'm still working on that
Like,
Yeah, so I am self-taught on everything. I did go to college, but I went to college for English, which is, I mean, technically I do. There's a lot of narrative in my game. But when I went to college, it was more for analyzing literature and not very much creative work. So I actually feel like I didn't really gain a lot of English skills from attending university.
So I will thank UCLA, though, because they have a game development club. And that's what led me to making games. Oh, wow. So in that, they have students kind of teaching each other. So in that way, I definitely got a lot of mentorship. But I've never taken a course. I've never paid to learn anything. If I don't know how to do something, I Google how to do this thing. On YouTube.
So I started just doing writing and games because that's all I knew as an English major. And then slowly I got to designing them. And I actually worked briefly for a mobile game doing some...
community management writing and design and that's actually how i got i actually so before i became a full-time indie game developer i actually also worked at meta for a while i actually got that job at meta because they saw me design for a mobile game and they thought oh maybe you could design a mobile app for us too so i just got into that more naturally and then in terms of other aspects
UI design, which is a huge aspect of my game. I just taught myself how to use Figma. In terms of Unity, I also just taught myself. I mean, coding, I had one friend. I was like, you know, about eight months ago, I was like, I need to learn how to code for this game. And I have a lot of friends who code. So I asked one of my friends to just come over and give me like a few coding lessons.
And I just go, great, I'm going to figure the rest of it out myself. And then I just Googled a lot.
I will say, so, you know, I get a lot of people asking me, oh, what should I major in in college? Cause I want to make games. What course should I take? And I'm just like, I literally didn't do any of that. I just YouTube university was the way I learned.
Yeah. So I guess to tell the story of how I got started on social media, a few years ago, I made a game called the taste of the past and I wanted people to play it. So I thought, okay, short form video is popping up. And so I should make some videos promoting the game. So I asked people in my team who would like to contribute to making videos about a taste of the past. And everyone said, not me.
So I was the one who had to do it. And I saw it as the biggest chore in the beginning. I hated it. I resented it because I don't know. I just like to sit in bed and be relaxed. And, you know, in the videos I have to pose weirdly and wear outfits and just, it felt very unnatural to me. And I did not like it in the beginning. A lot of people ask me, you know, like, how did you get started?
It's just like, I didn't want to get started. I was forced into getting started. So after a while, I realized that people weren't just interested in my game. Some people were like, oh, well, you know, you're the developer. How did you do this? How did you do that? So
For the first few months, I grew a small audience on TikTok by answering questions like, you know, how did I get started making games, advice for beginner game developers. And eventually I thought I should post one of these to my Instagram. My Instagram had 800 followers at the time. It was just friends, coworkers. It was more just to show them that I had been working on this thing for
So I reposted one of my videos. And then that video got 2 million views. I gained 6,000 followers overnight. And in three months, I gained 50,000 followers.
So it was like, I guess, slow-ish in the first few months. And then it was like explosion. And... I learned to like making the videos, I should say. Eventually, I stopped seeing it as a chore. And yeah, I'm in this extremely fortunate position where I think for a lot of indie developers, getting that first initial hump of recognition is very difficult.
Because there are so many games coming out, so much competition. And I think because of my social media following, it does really help that I have already a built-in community who is excited about my game. But that being said... You know, it doesn't guarantee that my game is going to sell a lot of copies or that people are interested.
But it really has helped me get a gauge about if my ideas are in the right place. So actually, for Lily's World XD, this is even before I knew the title of the game. This is before I had any official art or anything. I just had the idea. I've always... I've been fascinated with games that take place in a limited surface.
So for example, I made a game about a couple of years ago about that takes place in a phone. So I had this idea, oh, I should take place in a computer. And I'd really been getting into horror. So I thought, okay, a horror game that takes place in a computer. You know, I was coming up with some of the ideas, right? So I made a video just saying, hey, I have this new idea.
I showed off some of the early designs I had. Looking back, they were so ugly. I don't know why I felt comfortable sharing them. And then that video got 2 million views off just like a couple of really, really, really ugly designs and just an idea. And that's what validated to me, whoa, like this idea has legs.
And I think that's one big benefit because for a lot of people, they actually have to make the game and then see if there's interest. I just made a video and I already know that Hey, there's an audience for this idea.
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