Game Dev: Is It Really What You Want To Do? Why?

[zombiegorilla]

@aer0ace

This is actually great, because this is complementary to my other post. I had forgotten to talk about my previous experience at the AAA studio, and this pretty much describes that. It’s always more about the people you work with than it is the actual work. It makes going through Alpha, Beta, and Final that much more endurable. What’s funny, is I always treated working at that studio as a “stepping stone”, just because of the exposure of working with brilliant minds, and other creative thinkers, and that in itself pretty much kept me there for 10 years. Especially near the end of the development cycle, when the game already shipped and you start working on an expansion pack which isn’t the most exciting thing in the world.

I wanted to separate those two experiences, because my first post was all about “going indie”, and @GarBenjamin grouped the two together, as if the reasons to work in the game industry would be the same. Well, in that sense, @zombiegorilla linked passion as being the common quality that game developers have towards their craft.

Very cool. For me the flow was the opposite, I started indie, and as I got better, the games I wanted to build got bigger. I started collaborating with other developers, and with each project the team got bigger. Where I am now is the result of two acquisitions. I’m not sure if I ever would have directly sought a job at a larger company, I really just kinda stayed with my team and took advantage of the opportunities as they arose. One engineer I work with, I have worked with for 12 years, across 4 companies and two states.

[zombiegorilla]

@iamthwee

Yes I’ve heard of that before @zombiegorilla , I believe it is the ‘scrum’ workflow which yields the best results for game dev.
It sounds interesting almost like mini burnouts but it has advantages over the let’s carefully plan the thing from start to finish, where you can end up near the end with something that needs to completely rewritten or changed.

It’s a variation on scrum, but every project I have worked on implements it a little differently. The trick is to match the details to the way your team works. I have been on projects where too much focus is put on the method and teams where too little, its all about finding the sweet spot. We actually do plan everything out from beginning to end, just break it down by sprint. Our current feature planning goes late into 2017. We just finished our largest release to date (RC-17), which we spent about 6 months on, and will go live on “Force Day” (May the 4th).

@iamthwee

Can an indie doing that by themselves stick with such a deadline, or goal without any real motivation? Especially from nobody else.

Depends on the individual. Rent and food can be a big motivator.

[Ony]

@iamthwee

Can an indie doing that by themselves stick with such a deadline, or goal without any real motivation? Especially from nobody else.

@Ony if you would like to share your experiences, preferably something other than for the $$$

Perfectly honest, if it weren’t for the money, I would not have finished my earliest independent projects. I came from the AAA world (before it was known as AAA) and was making a good living before leaving that world to start working independently with my wife. Aside from the fact that we just really enjoyed playing and making games, paying bills and raising our children was the largest motivator to keep going.

When you start in on a project and you’re five months late on your projected delivery date and you’re just about out of money, that is a serious kick in the pants (skirt) to get moving and finish it up. Because of how I am (an experimenter), if it weren’t for the money, I would keep tweaking projects until the end of time, never finishing it because it wasn’t quite “perfect” yet. Then again if it weren’t for the money I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here day after day ruining my eye sight staring at a computer screen for the past 20+ years.

So, when I say “$$$”, yes, I am being short and silly for the laughs, but also completely and totally honest.

For a long time when friends have asked me how to do what I do, I’d tell them to quit their job that day, start learning how to make a game, and they’d quickly find the motivation to finish up when the money ran out. If they aren’t willing to do that, then they aren’t ready for professional level indie game development.

[goat1]

I liked being a busboy much better. Is was more sensible and rational and fewer egos. You never caught me pointing at how clean the salad bar guard windows are and bragging or disappearing on a bellboy call for hours at a time to avoid helping the waitresses when it got busy.

[AngryAnt]

One more vote for the missing “it’s the best 0900-1700 job I’ve had”.

There are terrible gamedev jobs out there, yes, but accepting that as somehow being a natural fact of this particular field is a special kind of depressing.

Startups/indies leading to entrepreneurial levels of challenge and pressure? Yea no shit - none different in other industries. Also not some natural inevitability.

You should not settle for shitty working conditions. Fuck “the experience” and “think about your portfolio”. Is that easy for me to say / type? Quite. Does that attitude magically turn your world into rainbow-candy-land? Not really. Is it hard? Most assuredly so. However that does not change the mission.

Pick up “but it’s hard!” and hang it on the wall for you to laugh at every morning. There are a lot of shit game jobs out there and the only wrong move is acceptance / submission - screwing over not just yourself, but the next candidate for your position once you’ve been chewed up and spat out.

[Ony]

[GarBenjamin]

@Ony that is an awesome flowchart! Never seen one for this kind of thing so detailed. Quite impressive really.

[Ony]

@GarBenjamin

@Ony that is an awesome flowchart! Never seen one for this kind of thing so detailed. Quite impressive really.

Yup I found it today and thought it was super cool.

[Master-Frog]

@Ony

Didn’t see Forum Poster on the chart…

[Ony]

@Master Frog

Didn’t see Forum Poster on the chart…

hah! It definitely should be on there.

[Master-Frog]

@Ony

hah! It definitely should be on there.

[Ony]

haha! So awesome.