My name is Jason Thor Hall but I just go by my middle name of Thor. I started in the games industry in 2004 and have continued to today. I’ve worked for Blizzard Entertainment, Amazon Games Studios, and the United States Department of Energy. Across those jobs I have been in Quality Assurance, Test Engineering, Automation Engineering, Red Team, and Game Development. I’m used to corporate environments and how oppressive and terrible they can be for the creative process. I left all of that behind and started my studio Pirate Software in 2017 and I haven’t looked back since. As the studio head I wear a lot of hats. I’m the programmer, writer, designer, game director, social media manager, and tons of other jobs. I feel extremely confident in running my studio and in how far we’ve come and how everything has turned out. Any decision that I ever make is based on analytics and research over anything else.
Right now we are working on an RPG called
It’s an adventure that focuses heavily on player choice and I work on it off Stream every day and release monthly updates. Heartbound made it through Steam Greenlight in 11 days as the top voted submission across the entire platform. We then ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that hit 385% of its funding goal.
Listed below are all of the bits of advice that I have for anyone wanting to get into making games. Understand that this line of work is not for everyone. It’s not easy. It can be boring at times. It can be soul crushing at times. Just like any other job. That being said it can also be the most fulfilling thing you’ve ever done in your life. There is nothing that compares to someone playing your creation and enjoying it.
Skills Required
What if I told you that you didn’t need any? Well guess what. You don’t! We live in a time where you can learn anything you need to make a game with relative ease. Despite what you may think none of that comes from natural talent. We all just pour our hours into getting better at what we do. You can do the same. Below you will find some examples of games that are already out there that help reinforce this.
We help game developers learn & grow
We’ve helped more than two million aspiring game developers, from over 150 countries around the world. And thanks to you, we have the best job ever.
Our core 20-person team is a rag-tag bunch of weirdos, spread across Europe, North America, and Australia. Everyone on the team says they shower every day, but we’re not entirely sure.
We also team up with dozens of rad partners who help bring great courses, cool assets and useful insights to our community.
Oh and hey, we’re always looking for motivated folks to join our team so if you feel you’ve got something to offer, send us a message and show us what you’ve got.
DailyonlineplaY.fun was founded in 2014 by Ben Tristem, in Cambridge, England. He tells us he did this in his underwear.
The first big success for the team was our Complete Unity Developer course. Thanks to your support during our successful Kickstarter campaign, we launched it on Udemy for aspiring creators around the world to learn from.
In 2019, we branched out and started selling online courses on our own website, using Teachable. Then, in 2024, we launched our brand new Learning Management System and website, with better tools and support for our students.
e have more than 300,000 individual five-star reviews, which should tell you how much people like our stuff.
Some of our secret sauce is our very hands-on project-based teaching philosophy—people learn by doing, not by just watching. That’s why in all of our 100+ online courses, we put an emphasis on projects, challenges and creation.
We also believe that as a student you should never get stuck. We have an army (well, more like a rowdy squad) of Teaching Assistants (real “alive” ones, not AI ones) who are there to answer questions and keep you moving forward.
We genuinely care about your success, so if there is anything we can do to help, please let us know!