Can’t stop thinking about something awesome @Elliot_K_Hudson said yesterday: Stories and narrative are the what every human intrinsically understands and cares about, so shepherding a team through the process for a game narrative takes extra care and compassion.
Meaning that because we are all storytellers in one way or another, we all care about stories, it’s the one thing everyone will have the most feelings on within a team and acknowledging that in the process of developing narrative is good leadership.
Sorry got distracted and didn’t finish this thread... 😅
What I love about that is this: Having compassion for the fact that everyone on your team and your players have told, been engulfed by, and made up great stories is a lovely way of leading narrative efforts.
That doesn’t mean that everyone gets to make decisions on it - sticking with the vision for it is still important, but knowing that it will affect people’s emotional engagement with the game more than other aspects of development helps how we talk about it and engage with people.
A gentle reminder that believing people who work in gamedev are in it for the money is ill-informed for the vast vast majority of us. Gamedev is the least lucrative job you can take with a tech skill set and money is one of the main reasons people leave the industry.
Especially indie productions are run with little to no money, tons of indie devs put their savings into their projects and it’s not uncommon for contributors to be paid very little or nothing at all.
Very very few indie releases make the money and effort back that was put in.
Almost none of us get rich from this work. If you work in AAA you CAN get to a comfortable salary but will likely live in high-cost areas too where gamedev competes with regular tech salaries that are often 2-3 times the amount you get paid in games.
The black community has a history of distrusting medicine, especially when it comes to new ones because white medicine has used the black community many times to "test" out vaccines and more on marginalized communities. There is a real reason why black folk are skeptical.
Knowing that a black scientists was part of leading the efforts of this vaccine and broadcasting that aspect openly will literally safe lives and invoke more confidence in the work among marginalized communities. There.
Some have been wondering why I’ve been a little quiet about the current crunch culture debate, so let me be clear:
No game - NO GAME! - is ever worth sacrificing the health and well-being of your employees for. That is an immovable fact for me and many others.
I’ve said this before though and I’ll say it again: I love that we are all talking about this so much more, but I also find it unhelpful to trample on individual studios or people in this discussion instead of addressing this from a cultural perspective.
Be critical of studios and individuals for sure - the cultural aspect I mentioned is influenced by each of us and making an active effort to make crunching culturally unacceptable is important. Talking about why we crunch and how it’s often addictive for people is important.
I just lost my job at ArenaNet as of today as part of a re-shuffling of projects, which means I am looking for a job as a Game Designer pretty much immediately.
If you have any job openings, any leads, any recruiters around.... I need to find a job that takes over my visa within the US within 60 days, otherwise I need to leave the country.
Being laid off on the spot is an extremely traumatizing experience.
I was locked out of my work computer within 10 minutes and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my colleagues.
Also, this is the only access I currently have to a computer...
I don't know how much it is on people's minds right now but some of my circles are talking more about crunch conditions because of Cyberpunk and while I don't want to add to that specific discussion, some thoughts came up about understanding phases of development better:
There is talk especially about recent trends where many large-scale games have a particularly long pre-production phase and pushing the development of the actual content production far back into the last year or so of development before release, which often causes crunch.
Often referred to as "the grind", it is the most difficult part of many dev cycles because it's often devoid of any new creative stuff and requires a team to just "make the game", work through all the content creation which is kind of a trot and can be tough to get through.
Just... fuck these people. Fuck these people for being clueless, cruel, controlling trash. Get the fuck away from my goddamn uterus.
If you think that taking our birth control is an unthinkable scenario, please let me remind you that this country and administration has performed unwanted vasectomies on immigrant women already. They will not stop for anything.