Women in Game Dev Community Spotlight: Yin
To celebrate Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting talented women in game development from our very own community. Read this exclusive interview with Whitney White aka ‘Yin’ to discover her journey into game development, her inspirations, and some of her tips and tricks for those aspiring to join or newly entering the industry.
From Creative Writer to Game Studio Founder
Meet Whitney White aka ‘Yin’
Founder of White Guardian Studios. Game developer, mom, music junkie and food lover.
“When the gaming industry embraces unique and diverse experiences, we can all benefit from everyone’s ideas, stories and perspectives.”
Q: Tell us about yourself and what got you into video games
A: My name is Whitney White and I am a game developer, mom, music junkie and food lover. I am also known as “Yin” or “Yinyamina” on the internet. I am the founder of White Guardian Studios and creator of the Celestial Tear Universe. I have worked on games like Demon’s Revenge, Omori, and The Revenant Prince among others.
I have been playing games since I can remember with my first memory of playing games being Q-bert. That game still holds a special place in my heart. Later on in life, I discovered Tomb Raider, FF7, and Suikoden 2 and I’ve been hooked since.
Q: When did you decide you wanted to make games and why?
A: As a kid, I was really into writing poetry and stories. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been writing fanfiction. I was also throwing my own characters in there too. I eventually went from fanfiction to all original characters and worlds.
I had always wanted to be a writer and that seemed like the creative thing my mom allowed. My mom is always supportive, but usually back then when I brought up a creative future, she’d say always have a plan B, but I felt like she respected writing more than other creative careers.
Fast forward to me discovering Final Fantasy 7: I knew at that moment I wanted to write for games. The world, the characters, the dialogue… It captivated me in a way no other game did. (It was my first RPG). It opened my eyes to what games can be and do and I started writing for my own games even though I had no idea how to actually make one. RPGs were a way to tell a good story and make it interactive.
There weren’t many schools for game design aside from some super expensive and super far away ones, so I went to one about 21 hours away (on a greyhound.. ugh) from home that offered game art and design with an emphasis on art. Unfortunately, I could not draw, so they put me in graphic design first so that I can have an idea of some of the basics like color theory, perspective and all that jazz despite me not actually going for art, but more for the design and writing aspect.
Unfortunately that didn’t pan out. So while I learned a lot formally, I am mostly self taught and it is my own passion that continues to drive me forward. My self-taught journey has brought me many places besides writing. My new favorite passion that I didn’t think I could ever do was coding. This started because I was paying people to write code for my game, but they’d disappear leaving me with half the job done and an unusable piece of code. So I went digging into the code. Change a number here, add a line there. See what it does. That developed into me knowing Ruby, JS, C#, HTML, CSS + more and the ability to learn any other language that I would need to know to get a job done.
At this moment, I think I know just about everything, but marketing when it comes to developing and shipping games… And that’s more because I’m an introvert. It’s really hard for me to keep in contact with others. I don’t really know how to talk to people about my games.
Q: Do you have a favorite programming language so far?
A: I think I really like JS. It is a pretty lenient language and iteration is quick, sometimes instant. C# comes at a close second.
Q: Who are some people in the industry that inspire you?
A: This is probably going to seem weird, but Nobuo Uematsu and the SEGA team musicians who made the Sonic and PSO and PSO2 soundtracks. I listen to old FF OSTs and the PSO Ep1 and 2 and PSO2 OST literally daily. I’m listening to it RIGHT NOW and when it’s not on, I hear it in my head and hum it all day. The storytelling that comes with the music is incredible and I feel like my playlist is the soundtrack of my life. I’d like it to be buried with me at death so I can listen to it in the afterlife. I’d like to also shout out the lady who made the Suikoden 2 OST. It’s always growing, but I actually had to remove a lot of FF songs because it played more of that than anything else. So it’s in its own playlist now.
Q: What has your game dev journey been like so far?
A: My game dev journey has been filled with ups and downs. Here’s a rushed summary of said ups and downs. I started writing poetry and stories as a kid. Then I discovered FF7 and decided I wanted to write for games. I eventually went to college to pursue that dream, but it was not in the cards for me. I ended up teaching myself with all kinds of different engines and stumbled upon RPG Maker and MUGEN. These seemed simple enough to use and required minimal to no coding, came with a ton of assets, and allowed me to just dive right into making my stories. This is when Demon’s Revenge was started.
I met my husband in college and he joined me in my game development journey. Together we founded White Guardian Studios. We helped run a small MUGEN forum and created a bunch of characters for the engine for people to use. We then got serious about our own stuff and put up a kickstarter for our own game. It failed 3 times, but my husband, ever the optimist, said ONE MORE TIME. I succeeded and also got picked up by a publisher. We released Demon’s Revenge together, our first game, my baby. I’d been working on it before I’d even met him. We took the game to PAX, showcased it at events. It kinda seemed like I was living the life I dreamed of. Once released, it flopped. Too ambitious for the engine apparently (RPG Maker VXAce), but really I just didn’t know how to fix the issues that were present. So I went digging in the code to attempt fixing things. Made things worse, made things kinda better, but not good enough to update on steam. BUT I did learn how to code, as amateur as it was. We eventually took the ability to purchase the game away and put it on hiatus. From there we were aimless for a bit. I took on commissions for coding and worked on other peoples games. One game of note was Omori which turned out to be hugely popular. I’m always in awe of how great the game turned out and proud I was able to work on it in the capacity that I did. My entire family has a cameo in the game haha. Check out Mina and Rell’s house if you ever play it.
The success of Omori was not enough for me though. I wanted my games to be successful too.
We had so many different games in the works: ERUPT, The Union, Lost World, Lunaris, and a bunch of other things in many different genres at many different stages of development. Entered into contests, applied for funding, etc. Anything to help further our careers in game dev. Then again it happened, our game Lost World got picked up and got some prototype funding from Humble Games. For that year, life itself was a rollercoaster with Covid ravaging the world and personal health issues cropping up at every corner. Getting the Lost World prototype done was a fun experience, but also stressful. We got it done though. Then it was time to send it out for real funding. We got a lot of interviews and spoke with a lot of people for advice, but ultimately after a year of pitching, we had to stop as we had a family to feed. That left me on a downwind and as much as I love game dev, it really took a toll on me putting in all of that work for a bunch of rejections or ghosting and little to no feedback.
So because of that, we started focusing on smaller games as well as worldbuilding and writing. We started working on Equan - The Watchful Guardian and also put up our worldbuilding website, celestialtear.com. We also started training our kids in the ways of game dev. Our oldest was always an artist, he designed most of the monsters in Lost World after all. But we decided to really start including them in the dev process and we started a game called Alchemic Beasts together with our oldest designing every beast so far, keeping to our Celestial Tear universe, using the characters and the world we started and expanding upon it. Now we have a team of developers. Our oldest is now doing pixel art VFX, tiles and concept designs. Our daughter is doing tiles and we’re trying to get her started on marketing. Our second oldest is writing and brainstorming ideas for the stories and gameplay as well as getting started on marketing. The younger ones are morale support, getting started in pixel art, and voice acting. My husband has taken on the new role of trainer (he’s the main artist, so of course he’s doing most of, if not all, the training since nobody’s really interested in coding). I’ve also taken up the new skill of making music which I’ve always wanted to do, but always thought it was one or the other. People really like Alchemic Beasts, so that is exciting for not just me, but for the whole family. It was also included in the Dames 4 Games showcase a while ago where me and my daughter presented and announced the project to the world.
Recently we started having friendly competitions at home, a private game jam, if you will call it that, with two teams of four. Between our two teams, we came up with two game concepts based around stories that we had comics for. Now we are going to finish them, polish them up and release them, so keep an eye out for that!
A few days ago, we released the demo to Equan - The Watchful Guardian and I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks about it! So now we are just trying to get some of our smaller games out so we can really deep dive into our larger projects like Lost World, Demon’s Revenge, and Alchemic Beasts. I still work with RPG Maker for most of my story driven projects.
That ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be for a short summary haha… But yeah, a lot of ups and downs along the way.
Q: What has been the most rewarding part of game development for you?
A: I get incredible highs just working on my projects. So just being able to do that is my reward and my husband affords me that luxury. It would be REALLY nice to get feedback on my projects from an outside party though.
Q: What has been the most challenging part of game dev for you?
A: Getting feedback seems to be really hard. Marketing is also really hard for me. When you want to take game development seriously and make it a full time career, you need to know marketing, but for some reason, it’s just been so hard for me in particular. I’m trying to learn how to be more talkative and open about this stuff so I can meet people and network.
Q: Do you have any goals you’re hoping to achieve?
A: Right now, I am trying to have way more releases. Demos, games, comics, stories, etc. We have been spending money on and creating many different things. We have so much done, but not much publicly shown or released, so we’ve been polishing things up and releasing them as-is just to get some feedback. My main goal I’m wanting to achieve is re-releasing my game, Demon’s Revenge. We’ve gone as far as to change the graphical style of the battles because the original one was too large for one person to handle. We want to finally establish our Celestial Tear franchise and bring it to the world in every way we can.
Q: Why do you think representation is important in game development / the gaming industry?
A: I think when the gaming industry embraces unique and diverse experiences, we can all benefit from everyone’s ideas, stories and perspectives. That’s also how we get more innovation and expansion within this unique art form. Without the representation of what is possible within your culture, it can be hard for people to envision themselves in roles they aspire to.
Q: What's one piece of advice you’d like to share for anyone wanting to start making games?
A: If you are a hobbyist, there are so many platforms where you can meet like-minded people and make games together. Game jams, forums, Discord channels, Reddit, all of that. If you want to make a career out of it, there was a point in time where I’d say go for it! Make your dream game and go hard! But I’ve come to learn from experience that you want to get some XP before you take on the boss. Start small, build up your skills (or your money if you got it like that) and make some small games. Get the skills required and/or the money required to hire someone to do the skills you don’t have. Meet people who are where you want to be because networking is vital for marketing.
Q: Are there any beginner friendly learning programs you’d recommend?
A: I’m the type of person who needs to spend some money to commit my time, so I usually go to Udemy when I want to learn something. Zenva is also pretty good. If you’re looking for free options, I usually use YouTube. You can get whole courses on YouTube. People like Code Monkey are pretty helpful, I also recently started watching Indie Game Clinic, which is less learning, and more insight. The thing about YouTube learning is you have to check the playlist and make sure the course was actually finished because a lot of people start a course and leave you hanging to figure out the rest yourself. That can be a good thing if you’d like to experiment with different ways of doing things, but also bad if you really need that guidance. It can be a waste of time because now, you’re stuck. So make sure you find a tutorial or course that goes to the end with you. There’s also programs like Code Coven. I’ve never actually used it, but heard good things about it. I’d love to hear if anyone has experienced good things with them!
If you learn by doing and you have access to source code, I would encourage you to dig into it. Change some numbers here and there and see what happens when you run it. What’s the worst that can happen?
Q: What’s your favorite video game of all time?
A: This is truly a really hard question… And you’ll probably hear a lot of repeats here because they were so impactful on my life. I think I’d have to give a top 5 because they all take #1. So in no particular order: Tomb Raider 1 or 3, Suikoden 2, FF7 or FF8, Phantasy Star Online Ep. 1 and 2, and Castlevania - Symphony Of The Night.
Q: What game currently has a hold on you / what are you currently playing?
A: I’m a little late to the party, but I just started playing BG3 and the game has me captivated. I wish there was an 8 player mode though, so we can all play! I’ve also been playing FF7 Rebirth and Rimworld. I’d actually got Rimworld for research, but ended up getting addicted and getting one of my kids hooked. The feelings I feel when one of my colonists dies… Playing FF7 Rebirth, somehow brought me right back to that moment I described above. The new renditions of music that entranced me all those years ago as well as the new music almost made me cry lol. I still haven’t beaten the mindflayer challenge. Any tips are appreciated!
Q: What are some of the projects you’re currently working on, or you’ve recently worked on?
A: I am currently working on a bunch of projects. With the MOST current one being a small game called Rootless, born from one of those personal game jams that I mentioned before. Rootless should be coming out next week if all goes well with the development.
I mentioned quite a few games that I am working on before, but here’s a recap and probably also some that I missed. Some, you can even get the demo for right now!
Equan - The Watchful Guardian - a retro platformer focusing on challenge and cosmic weirdness.
Alchemic Beasts, a cozy monster taming game, where you help rebuild a coastal village, but also discover some crazy history about it and its surroundings.
Iron Roots - Another game born from the personal game jam. Funny how both teams came up with games dealing with plants 😀
Celestial Tear - Legends, a digital trading card game based in the celestial tear universe.
Celestial Tear - Lost World, a survival craft drama set on a scary lost world.
ERUPT - A small prequel game to Lost World.
I’ve been working on getting more content on our Celestial Tear worldbuilding website. That is constantly happening and it’s called the CTX, short for the Celestial Tear Experience.
Taking care of our barren White Guardian Studios discord channel.
And our Patreon, where we post early access, behind the scenes, etc.
In the future, at some point, we’d like to get back into streaming. So we’re also working on getting that started back up too.
Q: Lastly, a closing message for readers!
A: Prioritize health. The thing you’re trying to do can’t be done if you’re dead or dying. Then you want to enjoy that thing when it’s done.