“Mild Beast Games” is an indie game company formed from the minds of a group of USC students who decided to go from project to product! USC Games sat down with Ted Park, the CEO and Project Lead of “Mild Beast Games”, to ask him about all things USC Games as well as their new game, “At Sundown: Shots in the Dark.”

For some that may not know, can you give us a brief background on who you are and how you got here?

I’m Ted Park. I was in the class of 2017 in the Computer Science Games program. Right now I’m running an indie game company, as CEO, called Mild Beast Games and we just released our first commercial game, At Sundown: Shots in the Dark.

Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with USC games?

Being in the Games Program, it was just really cool to meet other people that think like me. They just like making games, and we had cool professors. It was really nice to feel like a part of the games industry, even though you’re not really in the games industry yet.

If you could describe At Sundown in one sentence, what would you say?

So I would say it’s a hide-and-seek shooter in the dark.

What role did you have in the creation of At Sundown?

I was the project lead. I created deadlines and made sure that the project was on track for release.  I also run the business side of Mild Beast Games, although I do a mix of everything. Right now, I’m just fixing bugs because you need to as an indie company. You end up wearing a bunch of different hats based on needs.

What was the inspiration for At Sundown?

It came from the phrase “shot in the dark”. We just designed a game around [that concept]: “a shot in the dark.” And then we kind of just built it from there.

Are you planning on making more games? What’s next for Mild Beast?

We might have something in the works right now. I don’t want to say too much but we are exploring further out from just PC/Console games. We’re also looking at mobile games. So yeah, nothing nothing concrete to announce yet, but hopefully soon!

Being an Indie Game company what do you do to stand out from AAA names or even to stand out within the Indie Game community?

What I’d say indie game companies should do is try to focus on a niche. Because you could come out and say, “Oh, yeah, we want to become the next Fortnite! We want to compete with Fortnite!” But the reality is: you can’t really be Fortnite because they’ve just got thousands of employees, just working every day to make this crazy big game. But, I think the nice thing about being an indie game company is you don’t have to appeal to a wide audience. You can just focus on a small audience and still be successful.

Any advice you want to pass on to USC Games students?

Yeah. I’d say the main thing is [that] the industry is just way bigger than you think. It’s easy in a classroom, where you could be like, “Oh, I only have to compete with five other games,” or something like that. But the gaming industry is just way bigger than that. There’s just so much competition out there that in the end it’s like really hard to just go at it by yourself. But the reality is you don’t really have to go at it yourself. With this big industry, there’s so many smart people out there that are willing to help you.

“At Sundown: Shots in the Dark” is available now on Steam, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch and on the Discord Store.

Find Ted Park at @RealTedPark and USC Games at @USCGames on Twitter.