August 20, 2010
Furious Birds had exploded.
The dashboard numbers were surreal: 6.3 million downloads, over $270,000 in revenue. Forum threads, gameplay videos, fanart, mods—there was a whole ecosystem sprouting around the game. People were emailing him from Brazil, Indonesia, even Poland.
But it wasn't all celebration.
"Bird freezes midair after level 14. Please fix."
"Can't unlock Boomy even after three stars. Help!"
"Game crashes on Galaxy Y when tapping start."
The emails were endless. Reddit DMs, Facebook messages, even some handwritten letters sent to the PO box he hastily rented for "Espector Games". His inbox had over 3,000 unread messages. Bug reports. Feature requests. Angry rants. Praise. Confusion.
And it was just him.
One man. One laptop. One brain. And it was no longer enough.
He sat back in his chair, staring at the list of issues he had jotted down on a yellow legal pad.
"Backend sync bug... duplicate purchase error... translation issues in Japanese..."
He rubbed his eyes, then opened a spreadsheet filled with patches he had to push. Some fixes were easy. Others would take hours. One bug in particular had him banging his head against the table two nights ago—an error that only triggered on a specific Android firmware he didn't even have access to.
This wasn't just bad for his health.
It was bad for business.
He had seen it before in his old life—brilliant indie games that shot to stardom but collapsed because their solo dev couldn't handle the scale. One-man teams crumbled under the weight of success. Updates slowed. Support stopped. Players left.
He wouldn't be one of them.
He knew this would happen eventually. The moment he crossed a million downloads, he already began preparing.
It was time.
Time to build a studio.
Not a corporate skyscraper. Not yet.
But a core team. A squad. People who could help with development, art, testing, support. A foundation.
He needed talent. And he knew exactly where to look.
He stood and grabbed his phone.
The new one.
He opened Facebook and typed out a short, snappy post in local dev groups:
Looking for freelance Unity devs, pixel artists, and testers. Paid. Remote okay. Must be chill, passionate, and not afraid of grind. DM me with samples. - Espector
Within the hour, the DMs started flooding in.
August 22, 2010
It took only two days for the resumes and portfolios to overwhelm his inbox. James—no, Thomas—spent an entire afternoon filtering through them. Most were amateurs. Some were students. A few stood out.
And three?
Three were exactly what he was looking for.
The first to arrive at his newly-rented co-working space in Ortigas was Yuri Han, a Korean freelance programmer who had recently moved to the Philippines to escape the rigid corporate structure of Seoul's tech world.
She stepped into the office with a quiet confidence, dressed in a plain turtleneck and black jeans, her bob-cut hair swaying with every step. She had a mature charm—elder sister vibe. Calm, experienced, and in control.
Thomas stood and extended a hand. "Yuri Han?"
She nodded and smiled faintly. "You're Espector? You look younger than I imagined."
"Technically older," Thomas chuckled.
Yuri quirked a brow but didn't press. Instead, she gestured to the desk. "So. Where's my machine?"
Just like that, she was hired.
The second was Airi Fujimoto, a Japanese illustrator with a delicate touch for character design. Petite and soft-spoken, Airi was the kind of girl who looked like she walked out of an anime convention—complete with a soft pink cardigan, pleated skirt, and oversized glasses. Her voice was so quiet that Thomas had to lean in just to hear her properly.
"I-I really liked FlapFlap Hero…" she murmured, fidgeting with her tablet bag. "The way the bird's wing flapped was… um… expressive."
Thomas blinked. Then smiled. "Expressive flapping, huh? You're in."
Airi flushed pink. "R-Really?"
"Yep. Welcome to the team."
The third and final recruit was Samara "Sam" Velasquez, a Filipina game tester and coder from Cebu who had been modding old PSP games and uploading walkthroughs online since high school. She had caramel skin, short tousled hair dyed streaks of purple, and a pair of wireless headphones always slung around her neck. Unlike the others, Sam had no filter.
"You're the madman who made FlapFlap and Furious Birds, right?" she said the moment she walked in. "I didn't expect that you would be a fellow Filipino. Why not announce yourself to the world who you really are?"
Thomas smirked. "Because I like winning in silence."
Sam scoffed but nodded approvingly. "Respect. I stalked your code last night, by the way. That bird physics? Clean as hell. You even fixed the object pooling leak in the latest patch."
Thomas blinked. She noticed that?
"You read my Git commits?"
Sam grinned, flashing a peace sign. "All of them. I'm not just here to click around—I want to build something."
That sealed the deal.
With the team assembled, Thomas formally welcomed them to what he now referred to as the first division of Espector Studios. He had splurged for a modest co-working space with three desks, fast internet, and a working air conditioner—luxuries he'd missed during the early weeks of ramen-fueled survival.
Yuri immediately took the role of co-programmer and backend fixer, digging through his Unity projects and optimizing them without even being asked. Within the first two hours, she had rewritten his collision detection scripts and shaved off 15% CPU load.
Airi, though timid at first, bloomed in front of her Wacom tablet. Her sketches of Bam-Bam, Zip, and Boomy took on a life of their own—rounder, more expressive, and charming enough to make players form emotional attachments to literal balls of feathers. She even gave the raccoons silly ninja masks.
Sam? She broke things. On purpose. Every feature they tested, she stress-tested to death. She tapped like a maniac, tried every cheat and glitch, and documented bugs as if she was a dedicated scientist.
By the end of the first week, the trio had already become indispensable.
Yuri handled deployment, Airi redesigned the UI into something clean and nostalgic, and Sam found an obscure crash bug affecting older Alcatel phones—which, if left unchecked, would have tanked their rating.
And somehow, amidst all that chaos, the office found a rhythm.
Yuri brought tea every morning. Airi decorated her corner with tiny plushies and pinned fanart to a corkboard. Sam played loud P-pop remixes through a speaker until Thomas bribed her with snacks to use headphones.
And Thomas—James—loved every second of it.
August 31, 2010, in the meeting room of the office. The three girls were looking at James, who was sitting at the head of the table with a document in his hand.
"Okay team, thanks to our efforts, we were able to resolve a lot of the issues affecting Furious Birds," James began, tapping his pen against the printed report. "Crashes, level bugs, asset misplacements, lag on low-end phones—all of it's been addressed. User feedback is overwhelmingly positive, and our rating on Google Play has climbed to 4.7."
Sam pumped a fist in the air. "Hell yeah. That's what I'm talking about."
Yuri smiled faintly. "Our app stability is now at 99.3% uptime. That's higher than most commercial studios."
Airi, who had been doodling in the margins of her notes, lifted her head and added quietly, "And I've finished redesigning all the birds and raccoons. They're ready for the holiday update, if we're still doing one."
James nodded approvingly. "We are. But first, we need to talk expansion."
The word made everyone sit up a little straighter.
Yuri was the first to speak. "I was actually going to bring that up. If we plan on pushing new content regularly—updates, patches, seasonal events—we'll need more manpower. Right now, we're operating on bare minimum."
"Don't worry, we are getting there. For now, let's celebrate that we have fixed what needs to be fixed."