On May 3, we visited KIEYE in San Francisco. KIEYE is a game company that develop popular real time strategy browser games. One of their famous games is called “Backyard Monsters” which is a tower defense game that you build your own base to defense monsters sent by other player and you can also attack other players’ base by your own monsters.

We had a tour around the company, and this let us know more about the nice working environment of KIXEYE and also the people worked there. They had each team sit close to each other, so it’s very easy for them to communicate. And they got whiteboards on their walls which help people to bring up new ideas any time.

After that, we talked with some people from the company. Adrian Herbez, engineer from KIXEYE, also a CMU alumni, told us about how he started to work at KIXEYE, and he also gave lot of useful advises to us. We also talked with Lauren Lamonica, another CMU alumni, she was very nice, and she told a lot about how she do production. She said everybody in the KIXEYE is encouraged to contribute new features to their games, no matter you are engineer, artiest, or designer. It’s a very cool things that you everybody can join into the process to design their game. From these talks, we know that KIXEYE is a company that really encourages employee to create new things, they expect something new, and they appreciate creativity. When you are new in the company, they also let you take time to find out what you want to do most, and the position that fit you best. They also gave us great advises about how to find the things you interested in and how to work on them.

It’s a great afternoon of visiting KIXEYE, we met a lot of amazing people, and we learned a lot.