Blade Symphony: What sound does a successful Kickstarter make?

There's a joke among Taiwanese nationals, Chang says, that goes like this: If every man, woman and child in China spits in the ocean it will drown Taiwan. It's part of the reason he's a first-generation American, the son of immigrants who came looking for opportunity outside a sphere of influence that practically smothered them.

"For a lot of Taiwanese citizens you either stay there due to pride, or you don't have any other reason to stay there," he says. "It's your hometown, but for a lot of people it's their dream to move to America. So that [was] my parents' dream. They wanted to have a yard and cars and stuff."

Chang helped to build the family business in high school. His parents import easels from China and sell them to artists online in the U.S. using a website he built when he was a teenager, something he laughs about now.

"It's terrible," he says. "It's made in Dreamweaver out of templates. It works, but it still hasn't changed. Like any kid at that time my parents were like, 'Hey you know computers. You can make websites!'"

E-commerce wasn't his passion. He wanted to be an animator at Pixar, to make the kind of movies he grew up watching. His parents convinced him to do something a bit more practical with their stack of easel cash. That's how he ended up at UCLA in the Design Media Arts program. He studied programming like some would study oil painting — as a medium for expression.

"It allowed me to take my artistic skill set, but then to transform it. ... I became this sort of jack of all trades kind of guy, where any problem that presented itself just sort of clicked for me."

His specialty was procedural animation, a way of teaching computers to draw on their own.

"Instead of painting a painting," Chang says, "it's more like I'm teaching an animal to perform. And the animal might do what you want, but it won't do the exact thing every time."

One of his first tastes of success was building a program that made simple drawings come to life. As soon as the user lifted their pen a creature would begin to swim around the screen. It was exactly the kind of work that appealed to Will Wright when he was conceptualizing Spore.

"It was during their prototyping phase," Chang says. "Wright basically had a bunch of people look for hacker programmer types. … I've been a Will Wright fan for my whole life and I'd played SimCity. So I applied instantly, and I got the internship.

"The art director would have us go and print out some random imagery," Chang says. "During lunch … there would be these printouts laying out of fucking ramen noodles and a basketball and the Space Shuttle or whatever. He'd say, 'I want you to take each of these images and shuffle them and sketch out a planet made from those things.'"

Chang went on to design many early versions of the user interface elements that went into Spore's Creature Creator.

After college he joined the new elite of mercenary work-for-hire programmers in Los Angeles. He traded the chance at a steady job and medical benefits for a string of highly paid projects. As a result his work history is certifiably weird.

Chang has done data visualization for Yahoo: "They collect so much data about their users," he says. "They want a way of plotting it. And they want to see it in a cool, Tron-like way."

Chang has worked in the advertising industry: "Instead of hiring a hundred animators to animate all these tiny bits of graphics they hired three programmers," he says.

Chang has worked for the Church of Scientology: "It was in a Disney-like castle in the middle of the desert," he says. "They put all of us non-Scientologists in a separate room with no access to the internet. It was sort of a sweatshop where I was creating propaganda 3D art."

Chang worked from Shanghai for a startup that he cannot name: "I wanted to travel," he says. "It just seemed really cyberpunk, and I already spoke the language. ... Our clients included Sony and Microsoft, the usual guys."

And he did all of that, and much more, before he turned 30.

But the whole time he was also making a game.

"In 2006 a friend and I were sitting in the living room," he says. "Super bored. We're saying to ourselves, 'Look, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast was a great game. It happened, but people stopped playing it. We really need something to scratch the sword fighting itch that we have.'" And so they began to make a game together.

When the Source Development Kit (SDK) was released in 2004 it opened the floodgates for game "modders" to come and play with Valve's code. People had always tinkered with Valve properties, adding new skins on familiar units or introducing other game modes and tweaks. There had even been so-called "full conversions," modifications so dramatic that barely any of the original game art or mechanics remained. The Team Fortress series started out that way.

But the SDK opened the programming language to more users, and gave even the most experienced modders powerful tools they had never had before. Chang's project was part of a boom in Source mods.

He and his friend wanted to make a fighting game that played a lot like Jedi Knight 2's multiplayer lightsaber duels. No hokey religion, just saber to saber. Steel upon steel. The duo trawled modding forums looking for help and built up a small, revolving team. In 2008, after two years of work, his friend dropped out of the effort. Chang stuck with it.

"The really interesting thing that happened that year was we were actually discovered," Chang says. Another team of modders, responsible for the hugely successful cyberpunk-themed multiplayer Source mod called Dystopia, was winding down its work. When its team members looked at all the games being built for Source, they liked Chang's the best and asked to join his team.

"Theirs was a pretty popular mod," Chang says. "They had thousands of concurrent players back in those days. They had a katana, and you could jack into cyberspace, and in cyberspace you could do cyberspace things like hack doors and cameras and stuff."

The leadership of Team Dystopia stepped aside. Suddenly Chang was in control of more than a dozen highly-skilled part-time game developers who slowly folded into the team, called Puny Human. Over the next two years their game, Blade Symphony, began to truly take shape. The art direction took on the brightly lit, glossy veneer Dystopia was known for.

But it was still a part time gig for Chang. In 2010 he was back in the states at the invitation of Google where he was doing data visualization, similar to what he had done for Yahoo but this time for external consumption. He did everything from Google doodles to 100,000 Stars, an experiment in programming for Chrome that was heavily inspired by Mass Effect.

But that fall his contract was up, and he had a few months off work before Google could offer him a new one.

That's when Newell's note landed in his inbox.

"I fired off an email," Chang says. "It wasn't cocky, but I said, 'You know what? This job was made for me. You have to take me.'"

He was granted an interview. Stephenson's team agreed that the job was made for him. He was working for Subutai Corporation two months later.

Chang was able to create a rough framework for a game in just a few months. Over the course of a year he integrated that framework with the experimental controller, and then began to remove large sections of the game code and replace it with new code, testing various control methods and user interface designs.

The challenge was to simulate the physical feedback you get when you smash two giant knives together. It was a challenge that Chang had already met with his interpretation for Blade Symphony, which leans heavily on the mechanics of more traditional fighting games like Street Fighter.

"These are really big problems to solve," Chang says. "I'm talking research thesis paper big. These are not easy problems. ... They needed that sort of fluidity as far as prototyping goes.

"They needed a programmer/martial artist hybrid who also could do a little bit of animation because the project was clearly going to rely heavily on the quality of programming and animation meshing together. ... Likewise, learning martial arts and sword fighting was just as important."

While he was one of the few programmers on staff, everyone at Subutai was expected to be a swordsman. A core value at the company was to study and keep alive lost European sword fighting techniques through historical recreation. The offices are home to some of the only remaining swordsmen in the world who fight as knights did.

"We did these Sunday practices with longswords," Chang says. "A lot of it was not very rigorous exercise, but they did ask us to practice our swings at home. … We would meet at a park in San Francisco, with all these other people around you looking at you weird, because you have these plastic swords. And we would do these routines there."

So it is safe to say that Chang is one of the few people in the world to have studied under some of the finest living swordsmen, and to have practiced both eastern and western styles under them. But that wasn't the highlight of his year working at Subutai.

"I hung out at Neal Stephenson's house," he says, wide eyed. "Then [Newell] and some of his colleagues showed up for dinner, and I was sitting at this table with Gabe Newell on my right and Neal Stephenson on my left, and I'm thinking, 'Where the fuck am I? How did I get myself into this situation? There's gods sitting here.'"

One year later, at the end of his contract, Chang made the decision to leave Subutai. It's hard for him to talk about the reasons why he left. Given the nature of his work, it's hard for him to even talk about the reasons why he can't talk about it.

"Even to this day," Chang says, "I'm a little bit confused. I know that their Kickstarter was about to start. And I know that their direction was starting to shift from Source engine to something a little bit easier to prototype with, which was Unity."

After Chang left the company the Kickstarter for Clang went on to be funded at over $500 thousand. He says his prototypes featured prominently in the video Subutai used in the pitch.

But a little over a year later the project was put on hold. Many backers were frustrated that the team appeared to have burnt through their Kickstarter money without creating a finished product.

Subutai spun the news as best it could. Its last update cites an inability to find a publisher as a major reason to "hit pause" on the project. Chang says he was making presentations for Subutai in 2011 to publishers. They didn't bite then either.

But he never stopped working on his own game. When he was working for the Scientologists, for Yahoo and Google, even when he was working for Neal Stephenson, the production on Blade Symphony carried on with a core team of about a half dozen contributors.