Meet Dohyoung Kim, CEO and founder of Buff Studio

Seoul-based Buff Studio is a creative chameleon in the indie scene, trading the "one-size-fits-all" playbook for high-quality, high-impact experiences. Rather than sticking to one lane, their focus is on what makes a game stick with players. Whether it’s a strategic tower-defense or an emotional narrative adventure, every release in their catalog is a fresh discovery and a leap into something new.

We sat down with the CEO of Buff Studio, Dohyoung Kim, to learn more about the studio’s unique approach to making games – from their creative inspirations to the key takeaways derived from years of diverse projects.

Dohyung Kim: My first encounter with a computer was with an Apple II Plus when I was 10 years old. Naturally, I started playing games on it, which sparked an interest in programming and inspired me to attend an academy for computer learning. I gradually developed the desire to create games and become a game developer.

I held onto that dream as I grew up, but since universities didn't have game development majors at the time, I decided to enroll in Computer Science instead so that I could learn how to program. I officially entered the game industry as a game programmer in 1998 after graduation.

I worked at various game companies up until 2014, and was exposed to many indie games during that time. It made me want to try making one too, and that pushed me to start developing games in my spare time. Initially, I formed a team and got to work on developing a PC game, but the project fell through and I was left unsure how to proceed.

Around that time, Flappy Bird became a huge hit on mobile. I thought, “I could make a game like this by myself”, so I started developing mobile games on my own. The fourth game I made was Buff Knight. It turned out to be a bigger success than I expected, and became the foundation for establishing Buff Studio in 2014.

Buff Knight can be considered our first game and the one that laid the foundation for the company. Since then, we’ve created games across a wide variety of genres, including story games, tycoons, defense, solitaire, strategy, and healing idle games. The mobile gaming landscape has constantly changed over the years, and we’ve tried many different approaches to adapt to those changes.

With mobile being the most accessible platform, I believed it would allow us to showcase our games to the largest number of people possible. When I started the company, the Korean PC game market was dominated by large-scale online games, while most other development was shifting toward mobile. Naturally, I felt that mobile was the right platform for taking on a challenge with a small-scale team.

Following Buff Knight’s success, we received the funds to develop a sequel. We hired people to focus on a single project for about a year and a half, but didn't get the results we hoped for. I felt a sense of dread that the company might not survive if it failed. So three of us prepared a "Plan B" – the project took us about six months, and its success was key to overcoming the crisis.

That experience made me realize the risks involved in putting many people on one project. We shifted our strategy to splitting into small teams of two or three people to develop projects that could be completed within six months. We also developed a chat-style story interface for our games. After two of those titles became successive hits, we began to focus heavily on story-driven games.

So far we’ve mainly created single-player games, but I’d like to try making online games that people can enjoy together – specifically in the survival or extraction genres.