I want to share some of the story of how @LeylaCatJ came onboard at Mohawk Games and helped make Old World the game it is today.
Leyla has always been one of the greatest fans of Offworld Trading Company, a game she still never goes a week without playing, which meant a great deal to me as getting that game made was a painful journey in many ways.
Leyla started Mohawk’s community outreach for Offworld as the team was too busy focusing on development because she values interacting with players and finding out how we can make the game better for them.
She lived online during - on Twitch and Discord and Twitter - getting the community organized, running the early public tournaments, and bringing important issues to my attention.
She did all this while working as an award-winning Language and Culture Specialist at the State Department, training our country’s diplomats. (She speaks seven languages, btw.)
I was proud of the work she did for Offworld, which she asked not to be credited for though she was certainly well-known in the community. She was key to giving a number of them a chance to work at Mohawk, including the programmer who is currently building the UI for Old World.
She flew to Sweden to help us pitch Old World to Starbreeze, landing an amazing publishing deal that potentially setup the company for a decade of independence & stability, which was hugely important after a year of uncertainty and financial risk the year after Offworld shipped.
When news broke that Starbreeze was going through bankruptcy (which we are now glad to know that they have survived), she volunteered to do anything she could to help the company. She offered to help out as a writer in her spare time. (At her request, all of her work was unpaid.)
We made the difficult decision to buy back the publishing contract from Starbreeze, which meant that Mohawk had only a few months of burn left before we would start bouncing checks, so Leyla travelled with me to GDC to meet with all the publishers we could and save the game.
We had a great meeting with Epic which led to Leyla and I driving down to NC shortly thereafter to make the official pitch to them. We are a great team as we compliment each other. Leyla is genuine and would never pitch something she doesn’t believe in. Trust me, I know.
End result: we got a deal that saved the game and the studio and once again setup the company for a decade of independence if Old World was a success. I was very proud to have her at my side during the process.
In the mean time, Leyla worked as the lead writer for the game, creating new events, helping to extend the functionality, looking for other writers that could contribute, and providing guidance to the artists making the amazing pieces that can be currently seen in the game.
For example, she used her cultural background and historical knowledge to direct the artists crafting these amazing paintings, which have received public accolade for how they create the right atmosphere for the game. 
She also realized that the project was way behind schedule on the art front. We only had a couple units and no buildings that looked anything like production quality and had not even begun to look for an animator, so she recruited, interviewed, and hired...
...the artists and animators we needed to have any chance of hitting our production target. The work of these new employees can now be seen in our Early Access product, and the quality makes it clear how much of the art is still a placeholder!
As it became even more clear that there was no way we could finish the game even with the new artists she hired, she reached out to a number of outsourcing houses, and we now have a successful relationship with one that has been helping us get the game done.
She started an initiative to list, report, and track out tasks (and later bugs) using Jira, which was a big cultural change for the company - we were sort of a work-on-what-you-want studio before that - but it is now an integral part of our process.
Speaking of process, we also were not big on communication at Mohawk, which led to a lot of waste and confusion as the employees often didn’t know what each other were doing or what they should be working on. Leyla organized weekly meetings for code, design, art, and all hands...
...which are now a routine part of Mohawk’s heartbeat. Everyone knows the schedule and how to report their work and that every important issue will be discussed. These meetings were a big reason why we were able to ship EARLIER than we planned even after going remote in March.
In other words, she was also working as a producer, a role which she intuitively filled because no one else was doing it, and I had done a poor job of recognizing its importance. She received positive feedback from many employees that the company was finally working together.
She also directed our launch trailer and built a marketing plan to lead to a great launch, which included press interviews (RPS, Polygon, PC Gamer), a variety of podcasts, and getting the game in the hands of key streamers to make our (hastily organized) launch a success.
She manages our Old World Discord server and our company’s Twitter account, which have been huge successes. Our 5-year old Twitter account tripled in size while our Old World Discord is now over double the size of the (still active) Offworld server.
The end result was that Old World’s launch was a big success - we have been outselling how Offworld did during its first couple months while NOT being on Steam. Our concurrent users are 2-3x what they were for Offworld at the same point.
In the mean time, Leyla introduced a Code of Conduct at Mohawk that made clear that we are an inclusive and supportive studio while also hiring our first (and then second and then third...) employee who wasn’t both white and male.
So, to sum up, Leyla has been working as a marketing person, as a lead writer, as an art director, as a community manager, and as an executive producer. She started doing volunteer work and is now leading the company as CEO.
Just last week, I discovered that - after talking with a publisher that reached out to us - she had dusted off an old prototype of mine from a decade ago and began moving us to become, at long last, a multiple project studio.
And... for all this, let me tell you about some of the reactions she got from (former) employees at the company.
She was told, over many years and by at least four employees, that she should leave her job at the State Dept. to follow my career. (This was an issue because we lived close to her job, which required her to be at work at 7AM each morning. Game development is... more flexible.)
For six years, I had a 3-4 hour commute so that the rest of the team could work near where they live north of Baltimore. When we could afford a real office instead of the literal garage we were working out of, I decided I would like a 2-3 hour commute instead and made plans to...
...move the company 30 mins south. (I would still have the longest commute of all employees.) As this coincided with Leyla’s increased (yet part-time and unpaid) role, a clique of employees decided that she was responsible for this decision and began criticizing her openly.
She was told that we needed to warn the employees before she came to visit the studio because, apparently, her presence was disruptive to the (all-male) team. We were told that she couldn’t be trusted and that she didn’t have enough experience to work as a volunteer writer(?!?).
She tried to bridge the gap by organizing social events to get to know the team better. Instead, she was told that they would prefer to spend that time doing something with me.
She was told that she was selfish, that she was seizing power, that she was unprofessional, that maybe she didn’t understand because she was a foreigner, that her presence was “confusing”, that she was “extra sensitive”, that her presence was “alarming” (these are real quotes!)
That they didn’t trust her, that she hadn’t earned their respect, that if she had a right to an opinion on where I worked, then they all had a right to an opinion on where she lived and worked (!!!) It just went on and on.
It is inconceivable to imagine a women in the games industry talking to the owner or the owner’s husband that way. White men don’t know what it’s like to have their presence challenged like this as work. When confronted over these words, their response was usually...
...”I’m just sharing my concerns!” As if words are not actions. I failed in my duty to protect her, but when she asked other employees for help, they admitted that while she was facing hostile sexism, they hoped that we didn’t do anything about it.
They preferred silence, just hoping that this behavior went away. In one exchange, someone admitted that a hostile email was “sexist”, “misogynistic”, “xenophobic”, and “crossed personal boundaries” but we shouldn’t do anything serious about it b/c he “didn’t mean to offend”.
(The employee who wrote the email apologized to me but never to Leyla. A pattern I noticed again recently when former employees asked ME to have Leyla stop tweeting about her own experience.)
I remember one day in particular where, after weeks of encouraging Leyla to come up to the studio to see everyone in person (and to overcome her anxiety over being judged), she came up and had what we both thought was a very positive experience. Indeed, we were on a high...
...driving back home as we believed that, maybe, the clique was going to give her a chance, was ready to work with her. Our hopes were crushed when later that night, we were emailed that it wasn’t ok for Leyla to come up without giving the team advance warning...
...that her presence threatened the team. Another email said that she had a “commanding” tone which was inappropriate. I knew that Leyla had her walls up and was being as careful as possible with the team. Honestly, it broke my heart.
I blame myself for not taking action and protecting Leyla. I take responsibility for a culture that allowed all of the above. Mohawk is a much different studio now, and I am ready to follow Leyla’s lead. I have much to learn about the invisible walls in our industry.
As a comparison to how I failed as CEO, she discovered last week that one of our contractors had been sexually harassing women online. She immediately terminated him. Who would you rather follow?
I love her as a husband, respect her as a leader, am in awe of her strength, and am ready to follow where she leads.
