A Survival Guide for Game Developers

Notes on a talk by Richard Vogel of Certain Affinity

• Observations:
  • You have a 90% probability of being laid off within your first 5 years at least once.
  • Your average lifespan in a company is around 4 years.
  • Change is inevitable.
    • E.g., today we have streaming coming, VR, AR, etc.
  • Game companies have little to no onboarding, training, mentoring, or career counseling.
  • Work/life balance can be miserable (much better today than 10 years ago)
  • The “hierarchy” in game dev:
    • Programmers are king
      • Programming is measurable, but design/art/QA is harder to judge
    • Then designers
    • Then artists
    • QA is the bottom rung, get no respect
    • Bonuses are the most obvious way you see this hierarchy playing out
    • Ideally design would be king
• Tip 1: Culture
  • Learn what the culture of your work (or prospective work) is
  • Top-down: Groups are separate, people take orders
  • Bottom-up: Collaborative
  • Can be either design-heavy or tech-heavy
  • Make sure as you hire you’re bringing in people that fit with the way you work
  • If you’re not a cultural fit at a place you’re hired, you’ll be constantly trying to swim upstream
• Tip 2: Soft skills
  • Hard skills x soft skills = value to the company
  • Hard skills may actually be less important, because they’re way easier to acquire
  • Emotional intelligence:
    • Need self-awareness foremost
      • Necessary to be able to leave your ego aside
    • Relationship management: need to be able to get along with your coworkers, have a good relationship with them
  • Adaptability (building games is chaos)
  • Being collaborative—especially in a small studio, conflicts become amplified
  • Humility—ego doesn’t work well (despite their presence in the industry)
  • Confidence—need to be able to persuade people you can do the job
    • …despite maybe feeling insecure
    • You still need to be able to ask for help if you don’t know how to do something
  • Balancing humility & confidence
    • You should believe in what you’re doing
    • It’s okay to have strong opinions (with a good rationale, data that supports what you’re doing)
    • Need to have humility to recognize when you’re wrong
  • Communication: be able to get to the point, without writing a thesis
    • Non-verbal matters
  • Two dimensional spectrum of communications: introvert vs. extrovert, rational versus emotional
    • Need to be able to identify where other people are on the spectrum, and how to handle it
    • If someone’s emotional, try focusing them on the facts
  • If you want to advance your career, this is a prerequisite
• Tip 3: Dealing with WTF moments
  • Take a breath, go for a walk—don’t send that email!
  • Deal with it after you’ve calmed down, so that you don’t regret what you say later
• Tip 4: Work/life balance
  • Managing stress: when someone calls your baby ugly, you get super emotional
    • Fear that when you launch, it isn’t going to go right
    • Fear of losing your job
    • Put it in perspective
    • Look for solutions or a way out
  • Exercise!
  • Crunch happens because schedules are top-down, not bottom-up
    • If your schedule isn’t realistic, the importance of your date doesn’t matter if you release a really problematic game
• Tip 5: Reflect, but move forward rather than looking back
  • This stuff isn’t life or death
  • Don’t get “abused puppy syndrome”—just because things were bad in your last job doesn’t mean this one will be bad too
    • Leave your baggage at the last job
  • Always look out for yourself, because no one else is
    • Your company isn’t loyal to you, so don’t turn down a new opportunity
    • Make sure it’s not just a “grass is always greener” situation
• How do you talk about past experience with a bad boss?
  • Always ask questions (like “what do you think are the issues?”), don’t make statements
  • If the boss is very emotional right now, wait
  • Know whether you should ask something one-on-one or in a group
• How do you assess the culture when looking at a new job?
  • Ask to go to the bathroom, then get lost
  • Watch how people are interacting
  • Go hang out with the smokers during a break and ask them questions
  • Find other people who work there on LinkedIn and ask what it’s like—also look for people who worked there in the past
• Advice for improving issues in the industry?
  • Make a big issue out of work/life balance problems
  • If it doesn’t change, don’t stay—find another job
  • It’s always going to be chaotic, you’ll always have overtime—but it should be a very finite duration