A Thousand Tiny Actions: Petricore’s CEO Ryan Canuel

It’s been a month since our studio Petricore released Mythic Realms. Mythic Realms is our mixed-reality roguelite RPG, where you can live out the life of a mythical hero in your very own room. In real life (and in this modern era), being heroic doesn’t necessarily involve taking up the sword and shield; it can also be guaranteeing everyone is at their best. Ryan Canuel, Petricore’s CEO, is heroic daily as he ensures that our development team is always “armed”, healed up, and ready for any adventure. You know, like any good CEO does.

Meet Ryan

Ryan, in his final form as a Lawful Evil storekeeper with his Chaotic Good(boy) Leroy.

Ryan’s journey as a CEO began 10 years ago during school, when he met some of the other founding members of Petricore, Christina, Oliver, and Spav. “I did an internship through MassDiGI, where we worked on games together in small teams acting as game studios. It was a great experience, running a small team and trying to ship a game together.”

From there, Petricore was born and has grown in size, projects, and certainly ambition. Mythic Realms remains a prime example of the studio’s upward trajectory. Before this game, Petricore had never built their own game from start to finish and on such a large scale. That doesn’t mean the team is inexperienced, though. With nearly 100+ projects in various shapes and sizes under their belt, Petricore has helped bring countless clients’ work to fruition and a number of their own smaller games. Three of their mobile games were given a front-page feature on the app store, so this team is by no means inexperienced.

While the actual ‘core’ of Petricore was small for Mythic Realms (a full-time team of roughly 5 people plus a few part-time contributors and contractors), this didn’t mean Ryan’s job was any less important. Ryan spends his days doing a lot of ‘external’ work, including speaking at events, attending conferences, meeting with partners, and building relationships across the industry, “I work to make sure people know who Petricore is, what we’re doing, and help position us to work with the partners we want.”

But it doesn’t end there, Ryan also takes on some less conventional CEO responsibilities: finances, bookkeeping, HR, sales efforts, stocking the office, and even cleaning and watering the plants. Ryan’s work acts as the grease to the squeaky wheel, taking care of all the tasks that would otherwise get in the way of development work.

Ryan chooses to do these things to allow for a financially thriving, widely recognized and “built to last” studio. “I also put a lot of focus into our culture and long-term goals…It can feel like it just organically formed from some kind of Petricore primordial soup – but in reality, it’s the result of thousands of hours of thought, conversations, and intentional actions. You’re constantly tweaking, trying to get things just right.”

Some of the MANY plants that sit around the office, kindly watered by Ryan.

The ‘What’ of Leadership

What tiny actions and necessary tweaks were taken to create the comfortable and kind environment present in every Petricore meeting?

“For a long time, people would ask what our culture was like, and I’d just say ‘good’, but that doesn’t really tell you anything.” After taking the steps to sit down and truly define what the pre-existing, but not ‘spoken’ culture of the studio was, Ryan realized what he valued and wanted most deeply for himself and the team: “being extremely transparent as an organization – everyone should know what’s going on, and everyone should feel welcome to ask tough questions about how Petricore is doing.”

For Ryan, transparency and culture go hand-in-hand. Ryan had noticed that team members wanted to know how and why decisions were being made, especially ones made by leads, where context might not be obvious. “We ran a lot of postmortems and feedback sessions, and before we even defined our culture, we had a studio-wide brainstorm – what do we like about our culture, what could be better, what’s core to who we are? Those kinds of honest, open conversations give you a sense of what people actually care about, and help make sure the culture reflects them too. I also think a good cultural document lays out not just what we expect from you, but what you can expect from us.”

As mentioned in the previous blog highlighting the work of our Project Manager, Christina, the Mythic Realms team’s continuous midmortems and feedback sessions are what initially led them to postpone the game’s release. In the previous blog, you’ll also note how these few additional months of work allowed the game to go from middling to extremely positive feedback from content creators and press alike. It’s clear that taking and giving feedback is an art, but Petricore have become practiced in this two-way communication. To both voice and accept challenging information can be the ultimate gift to the right team.

Ryan and Christina working away at the game Battle Billiards.

Square One

Looking back on Mythic Realms’ original launch date, the team was “behind”, overwhelmed by a mountain of bugs to squash, and ultimately, was crunching. After the decision was made to move the launch date, Ryan decided that a week-long break was overdue. “We ended up crunching, something we really aimed to never have to do, so that we could hit the deadline with something we’d be reasonably proud of. Still with all that effort, we couldn’t quite hit the mark we wanted for the game, and decided to delay so the game could launch in a better state.”

After the team returned, Ryan made it clear to everyone that the crunch that had happened was “a failure of leadership”. They opened a group discussion around the why and what of how to avoid that happening again. From there, they listened to one another and discussed what changes needed to be made to avoid ever making those mistakes again.

What followed suit, after the eventual release of Mythic Realms was another postmortem about how the team felt “round two” of ramping up to launch went. Ryan and the team were thankful to see that their initial group reflection did make a difference. “When we finally launched, the team reflected on how much smoother it all felt – no crunch, more focused planning, and time to actually finish strong. To me, leadership is about owning mistakes, asking for honest feedback, and then actually changing your behavior so you don’t make the same mistakes again. It’s sometimes just subtle little tweaks or suggestions, but they can make a big difference down the line (hopefully positive haha!)”

I asked Ryan if he were to make Mythic Realms from the beginning, what he would do differently. To my surprise, Ryan admits he wouldn’t change a thing: “I strongly believe that the mistakes you make are what really teach you how to do things right”.

Ryan instead shares with me his top takeaways from building Mythic Realms, Petricore’s first original IP game:

• Your scope is wrong. Pad it, pad it to what feels like an uncomfortable level of padding. Then pad it again.
• What sounds fun at first likely won’t be fun right away. You’ll need to iterate. (See above!)
• Marketing is hard. It needs to be thought about alongside the game idea, not after. It’s also expensive, so set aside more of your budget for it than you think is reasonable.

Then, conspiratorially, but mostly humoursly, Ryan tells me “…there are a million other small things, but you’ll need to make those mistakes yourself to unlock those secrets. I’m not giving them all away!”

The ‘Why’ of Running A Company

“I always think of that Futurama line: ‘When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all’”, Ryan notes. However, some might say that there is an abundance of advice for studio runners that may contradict these words. However, the ten-year streak that Petricore has survived is a testament to the fact that Ryan and the team may have cracked some of the code. Still, it likely depends on the individual CEO and the goals they have in mind. for their company.  “That said, I think the timeless piece of advice that always holds true is this: your success is entirely dependent on the people you surround yourself with. No one person can do everything alone. You need a team of people (smarter and more talented than you) working together toward a shared goal.”

In congruence, it’s also important to make those smart and talented people feel respected and valued for their contributions. Petricore earns its studio members’ respect through the level of transparency they provide one another. When team members understand the studio’s goals, the state of the company, and the “why” behind choices, they can do their best work.

That being said, Petricore seems to make tiny moments of team joy on the daily: a bi-monthly show and tell, weekly lunches as a team, a “news share” day, seasonal decorations, snacks available, a Slack littered with jokes and customized emojis, and delightful company outings. The “company culture” that Petricore aims for seems to make a perpetual self-feeding loop, where the team and leads have a mutual care and respect for each other.