Interview with Leonard Lin, Founder of Tyler Projects
March 8, 2007 by SGEntrepreneurs
Filed under Entrepreneurs, Interviews
Are you interested in joining the game development industry? If you are a startup in this industry, what are the kind of challenges and obstacles that you have to face? After the E27 IV: You are the Media, we managed to get hold of Leonard Lin, founder and managing partner of TYLER Projects Pte Ltd, to share with us his thoughts on the game development industry, web 2.0 and being an entrepreneur in Singapore.
SGE: Welcome to SG Entrepreneurs blog and thank you for accepting this email interview. Can you share with our readers about your background and what you are currently doing?
Leonard: Most of the time I’m working as a managing partner at TYLER Projects, we develop games for PC and mobile phones. In my spare time, I’m a final year student at Singapore Management University pursing one degree in Information Systems Management and another in Business Management.
SGE: What is the story behind Tyler Projects Pte Ltd? How did your team get started in the first place?
Leonard: We actually started out doing games as a non-profit venture and it was just me and my 2 friends, Ronnie and Tianyang, developing games for fun. Back then we didn’t have an office or anything so we would just meet at McDonalds on Sundays and just do our programming on our laptops.
My Professor Desai heard about what we were doing and he told us we should get a company registered and apply for some funding the university was giving out. We did and became the first SMU start-up company.
SGE: What products and services do Tyler Projects provide in general?
Leonard: We do games and software development as well as mobile solutions. We’ve done work for companies like DBS, UOB, OCBC, Sony, etc. We’re always like the 3rd or 4th party vendor so no one ever gets to hear about the great work that we do.
SGE: In your website, one of your products, Mobile Weapon is an online RPG game. How did that come about? How difficult is it to design and write the software for the game?
Leonard: From my experience it’s more tedious than difficult to create a commercial game. Our game system isn’t technically complex. By the way, let me take the opportunity to promote our game; you can play it for free at our website, Mobile Weapon.
SGE: In your initial setup, as an entrepreneur, what kind of difficulties & challenges have you encountered and how have you overcome them?
Leonard: Working and studying at the same time is hell if you’re serious about either. Sometimes I would have to skip class to attend a client meeting, conference or attend to some other crisis. Some of my professors were understanding, some weren’t. I lost my ability to study after NS and I don’t watch TV so I have had a lot of extra time to work on my company.
I’m also thankful that my staff and business partners were understanding and didn’t complain that I didn’t contribute as much during busy project / exam periods.
SGE: What are your thoughts on the game development industry in Singapore? Perhaps, a more interesting question, is Singapore ready for this kind of industry?
Leonard: At the moment, Singapore’s game development industry seems to have decided that its competitive advantage is in producing mobile games. My hope is that TYLER will someday produce a big hit MMO like Maple Story or get our games on consoles like Nintendo DS.
I think there’s a lot of societal stigma holding back people from entering the games industry in Singapore. Singaporeans have to stop thinking of games as a waste of time or that the industry isn’t a lucrative one. World of Warcraft makes about US$297,000,000 a year, I rest my case.
SGE: There has been an influx of game development companies coming into Singapore, most notably, Linden Labs which is responsible for 2nd Life. In your opinion, what are the challenges for your company to carve a stake in the game development industry?
Leonard: I guess the competition from firms coming in will be for the limited game developer talent we have in Singapore but I’m not too worried because we’re still quite small and highly productive. I’m not sure what other game companies offer their staff but we offer no fixed working hours (work as long as you want anytime you want), time to pursue personal projects, higher than IT industry standard pay and LAN gaming after 7pm twice a week.
We’ve managed to carve a niche as the (I dare say) best casual game RPG maker in the world. Our primary market is North America but we’re developing mobile games for the Asian markets.
SGE: What are your thoughts on the web 2.0 industry? Do you think that the wave is already over and we should set sight on something else?
Leonard: I was presenting at a business plan competition in July 2006 when the “expert†judges asked me how our company intended to keep our content fresh. I told them we had a lot of user input and user contributions for our games. They looked at me like I had 2 heads, but I only had one and it wanted to involve users in our game creation process.
Then YouTube got acquired and whole user generated content thing became really hot. I guess I got the last laugh on that one.
I think starting a web 2.0 business with nothing else special to offer will not impress anyone anymore. But the concepts of web 2.0 (such as user created content) will be very important for companies to consider because many have already used them to create competitive advantages.
SGE: Finally, it is not easy to be an entrepreneur in Singapore. Any lessons or experiences which you will like to share with our readers?
It’s especially scary when you’re doing R&D and have staff on the payroll but you’re not seeing any money come in. We had to do all kinds of odd jobs to pay the bills and keep the business running.
When we got our first funding of $20,000 we went on a spending “spree†of sorts, hiring more people than we needed, working on projects that weren’t part of our core business. We ran out of money and we had to do major cut backs and “rough it†out for more than half a year doing odd jobs before we finally managed to launch our game and start getting product revenue.
Here’s my advice to other start-ups (or aspiring ones): It’s exciting when you successfully secure your first round of funding and get to “play companyâ€. But don’t lose focus on what you got the funding for in the first place, set your goals right and work towards them with minimal wastage. If you’re not in the money yet, you should still be as thrifty as possible.
SGE: Leonard, thank you for the interview, we wish you all the best with Tyler Projects in the future.
About Leonard Lin: Leonard Lin is a founder and managing partner of TYLER Projects Pte Ltd, which develops web/mobile games and also provides customized IT solutions for companies. (Team Photo of Tyler Projects Pte Ltd, left)
Leonard began working freelance doing design and development work during his JC days. He programmed TYLER’s first game engine working many late nights from his claustrophobic hostel room. Together with 2 programmer friends, they started to develop games for fun and named the collective “TYLER”, an acronym formed of the founder’s names.
In 2004, with some encouragement from Professor Desai, Chairman of SMU BIG, he turned TYLER Projects from a non-profit venture into a small start-up with a mission to develop cross platform games using their proprietary technology, Neoplanet.
Today the company is now 12 strong with 5 members working full time on the game development. Their games development unit has garnered more than to 1.8 million players playing their flagship game: Mobile Weapon which was only released in July 2006. TYLER’s software solutions unit has also scored contracts with large corporate clients such as DBS, UOB, OCBC, Sony and SMU.
Leonard has also taken part in several competitions coming in first place for the Asurion Entrepreneur’s challenge and third for the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition. He was a finalist for the SCS IT Youth Leader Award and IDA’s in2015 competition.
Leonard is a hobbyist hockey player and illustrator.
Editor’s note: You can read about their further adventures in the Tyler Projects blog.
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