About
Philip Zeplin
I build things and I take systems apart to see what they are actually doing. Those have turned out to be the same hobby. Right now it produces a game, but for most of my career it produced rank trackers, data studies and a lot of opinions about the YouTube algorithm.
What I’m doing now
I am building Shogun Exodus, a grimdark, heavily systemic colony sim, at my own studio, Angry Airship Studios. The studio is an apartment in Denmark. The name comes from a Reddit comment where somebody called me “that angry airship”, because of the surname. It stuck, and I stopped trying to think of a better one.
Games have been a slow build. I started messing about in Unreal around 2014, making horror maps, then a procedural survival idea that went nowhere useful. After that I made a comedic RPG in TyrannoBuilder called Samurai Shiba Shinosuke. Then I found Godot, and things finally moved at the speed I wanted them to.
The part I did not expect is how much of it is old work in new clothes. Managing large content networks meant writing automation scripts and keeping databases honest. A colony sim is a database that argues with itself. Different output, same problem: too many moving parts to hold in your head, so you have to build something that shows you what they are doing.
The algorithm years
Before the game, I spent about two decades in SEO and online marketing, and from 2008 onwards mostly on YouTube. That was early. There was no accepted method, so I built a rank tracker and my own data-gathering tools and ran studies across millions of data points, because guessing was the only alternative on offer.
That turned into speaking. Two Google Marketing Conferences in Athens, VidCon in Amsterdam and Melbourne, seminars for funk/ZDF in Mainz and Ketnet/VRT in Brussels. Agency work at iProspect, Vita Media Group and Publicis Media, on brands like Bang & Olufsen, Mercedes-Benz, Huawei and Scandinavian Airlines.
I am not doing that full time anymore. But I have not stopped being the person who wants to see the numbers before believing the explanation. The full history is on the résumé.
Tokyo, and a film called Mtn
I have spent a lot of time in Japan, and about seventeen years ago I was one of the early YouTubers vlogging from Tokyo. Most of that footage should stay where it is.
One of the more interesting things to come out of being there was Mtn, an independent Japanese and international short film. I ran the Kickstarter marketing for it and made some of the graphics. I am in the campaign video too, which I had not planned on. Running a crowdfunding campaign is mostly the same problem as ranking a video: you have a short window, a specific audience, and no way to fake genuine interest.
A design education I still use
I have a BA and an MA in Visual Communication, from the Danish Design School and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. My master’s project was a campaign for a telephone counselling service in Tokyo, which is the poster on the right.
I have not worked as a designer for over a decade, and I would not call myself one now. But the training did not go anywhere. It is why I notice when a game’s interface is lying about what matters, and why I would rather cut a photograph hard than centre it politely.
Photographs
I photograph people, mostly in Copenhagen and mostly without asking first. It is a hobby and it is going to stay one. The two below are from home.
What I pay attention to
Markets, for about a decade now. I was behind in maths as a kid, and my father, Steen Ulrik Zeplin, taught me percentages by trading stocks with me: slips of paper with a number written on them. I still have them. That is roughly the philosophy behind ElephantInvestor.com, which is long-term and deliberately boring.
Geopolitics and world news, daily, which is how AllNewsChannels.com happened. I wanted one place that aggregated the channels automatically instead of me checking twelve of them.
Beyond that: travel, over twenty-five countries and a lot of Japan. Music, which I play badly on several instruments and enjoy anyway, mostly rock. A brown belt in Shotokan Karate and a scattering of other martial arts. Strategy and simulation games, especially Civilization and RimWorld, which is not unrelated to what I am building. And around thirty websites over the years, because apparently I cannot stop.
Elsewhere
The practical way to reach me is one of the platforms below, or by email. Pick whichever you already use.