This blog is turning into a bit of a whinge

It’s 2011. That means it’s now been well over seven years since I last worked on a commercial game that I gave a rat’s arse about (and one of the many reasons I now reside in Indie-Land. See Lemmy’s blog). You might have heard of it, it was… actually there’s no point, you won’t have heard of it because it sold about three copies in Germany.

Unfortunately, the amount of passion you put into a project has no bearing on how many copies get sold. When the box is tucked away at the back of the store in a pile on the floor… that’s generally not a good sign.

On the other hand, in that intervening time I’ve worked on many games which I cared about, quite a lot in fact, for about… ooh… about three months each. Roughly the period of time between your boss telling you about the project along with that wonderful “wouldn’t it be great if…” discussion you have over a beer, and the design document (ahahahaha!) finally appearing in your inbox, in other words.

Oh what a crushing soul destroying moment that is. Knowing that for the next… how long is this stupid project anyway? Eight months? Twelve? Oh please God, not one of those projects – the horribly understaffed cheapo ones where the six months dev time is one long nightmarish crunch period… Anyway, for that time you’re going to be trudging to the office to sit there working on this turkey knowing that the result will, if you’re lucky, slip unnoticed into obscurity so that you can leave it off your CV and pretend it never happened.

Your name sliding up the screen in the credits of such a game is a sight that, you hope, no other human will ever see. Especially when there’s only three other names listed in the ‘Art’ section (one of which had nothing to do with the project and was probably included for padding – poor soul) and so you stick out like a sore thumb.

You might be comforted by the fact that even though the game will inevitably suck, at least your job – making all those fluffy bunnies or whatever, well that’s alright isn’t it? Making bunnies is always fun.

Well no. Most of us didn’t get into making games because we like modelling bunnies. If the game is terrible, that’s a deal-breaker. No amount of awesome art tasks can possibly make up for this.

Now the bit where I whole-heartedly stand with my coding brothers and blame The Designer (because we outnumber them), which come in three flavours:

1) Vanilla. No experience. Why are they even responsible for this? Why is this design only five pages long? This word is spelled incorrectly. And this one. This bit makes literally no sense at all. To quote a real this-actually-got-sent-to-a-publisher section from a Vanilla’s design pitch, “There will be a boss battle of some kind”. Amazing.

2) Coffee. Spews ridiculous nonsense onto a bit of paper and doesn’t even stop to think that some poor sods have to actually make it. Probably thinks themselves amazing. Likes to consider the game his/her baby, gets upset if you even question the decisions. Runs from all responsibility when it all falls apart disastrously.

3) Strawberry. Talented. Affable. Generally swell guy. Horribly jaded. Doesn’t care any more. Leaves games industry and moves to Spain after project.

There’s probably a fourth. The talented, affable, swell guy who isn’t jaded. You probably only get to meet them if you end up at, like, a properly good developer or something. May not actually exist, please send photographic evidence.

3 Replies to “This blog is turning into a bit of a whinge”

  1. The 4th doesnt exist until a screenshot is taken… that is the rule of the internet! sortof like in your PZ game Bob says, “I’ve survived 3 months 5 days and 2 hours!”
    and then you say, “Did you psot a screenie yet?”
    Bob says “No, I’m about to”
    You say “LIEZ”

  2. You posted this article on my birthday… Yay ^.^

    From my experience, it’s the management team that causes most, if not all the problems with a project. If they let the team just kind of work autonomously, only stepping in if shit’s going bad, or someone is not working out, then it usually leads to relaxed and fun work environment. If they insist on managing each individual employee’s time, and their tasks, and make everything work off of the design requirements and not leave a lot of room for experimentation and iteration, then it sucks and the game comes out rigid and not fun.

    That’s been my experience anyway. Never really encountered a problem where the designer was directly responsible for the bane of my existence.

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