Double Stallion Games

Double Stallion was an enterprise I poured myself into for over a decade. I co-founded it, spun out of the Execution Labs incubator and grew it from four people to thirty, serving as CEO and general manager as the company grew.

Early Days

The studio stayed small during our first two titles on mobile — Big Action Mega Fight and OK K.O.! Lakewood Plaza Turbo. I acted as producer, technical director and company CEO during this time. I pitched our studio to investors and customers, secured funding including a $150,000 convertible note from BDC and managed all our operations including vendors, contractors, payroll etc.

Move to Consoles - Speed Brawl

After shipping our mobile titles, we set our sights on more traditional premium games. This meant a shift to PC and console, plus a big step up in production value. We applied for and received funding from the Canada Media Fund which meant our studio had the necessary capital to develop a new title.

We initially worked on a puzzle-platformer called Luna, but after taking a hard look at the market and getting input from peers, we decided to pivot the game back toward a brawler, which is a genre we knew well from our previous titles. Speed Brawl was born and became the focus of the studio for the next 3 years.

During Speed Brawl, I managed a bigger team of around 10 total employees. We hired a marketing director and grew the team to meet the higher quality bar. Speed Brawl wasn't an easy game to ship, and we managed to get it running smoothly on three consoles and PC as a small team.

Strategic Partnership - Riot Games

The launch of Speed Brawl led to an introduction to Riot Games and their new label Riot Forge. I negotiated the partnership with Riot at a crucial moment in the studio's history, and this project became an engine for our growth to 30 people in 2023. The partnership was to deliver Convergence, a game that built on our experience from Speed Brawl, but featured key characters from League of Legends and involved time manipulation.

As we were scaling, our production practices hit a ceiling around twenty people, so I restructured the studio into agile pods that recovered velocity and proved durable as we grew. I also made the hardest calls a leader has to make, leading the team through a sharp industry downturn while protecting as much of the talent and the mission as I could.

Building and Developing the Team

The most durable thing I built at Double Stallion was the organization and the culture. I treated it as something to be built deliberately, and it is the work I'm most proud of.

• Recruited and onboarded a leadership team of six directors personally, aligning each role to their own ambitions and giving them real ownership.
• Built a talent flywheel. Our selective hiring practices plus a culture of learning and pushing boundaries meant that we were able to develop our juniors into great teammates and give our seniors the opportunity to deliver their best work.
• Installed an operating system, with quarterly priorities, weekly leadership cadences, and structured feedback, so the studio could scale beyond founder-driven decisions.

The proof for our culture was the low turnover we experienced during our growing years. In the Montreal games industry, our talent is recognized as some of the best.

The Technical Backbone

My time at Double Stallion also allowed me to build many foundational systems: Networking, physics, procedural generation, and animation tooling. These technologies enabled many of our most ambitious product features. Several of those are explored in their own pages: Surfpunk, Convergence, and Speed Brawl.