Adventures in game production.
Dreams and Reality. Unlike the title may lead you to believe, this is not my dream game. Did you ever have a dream game you wanted to make when you started your path in game development? I most definitely did — but I absolutely failed at making it. I learned a lot from that experience, and I still find these lessons useful today. To tell this story though, I’ll have to go way back to the…
Via KnowYourMeme. You might be familiar with the classic quote from Paul Valéry that goes something along the lines of “A work of art is never completed, only abandoned.” It’s a quote that resonates widely because pretty much all disciplines can relate to it one way or another - one my favorite variations on it came from a friend back in college lamenting before sitting for an exam that “studying…
It's a weird time to be talking about getting a job in the games industry. With nearly 60,000 layoffs since 2022, I couldn't help but feel a bit conflicted when I was invited to our local gamedev meetup to give advice on how to get a job in the games industry. Is now really a good time to encourage people to try to get into game development professionally? Then again, it made all the sense in the…
Final Fantasy V During the past few months, I had a great time as part of the Game Production Community’s mentorship program. It was actually my first time as a mentor (and that might be a topic for a future blog post) but it was a great learning experience to have to organize my thoughts to be able to present them in a way that’s useful to someone else. In particular, I was chatting with one of…
The tools you want your team to use v.s. the tools they actually use. Via Daily Mail. There’s this joke I saw on Twitter once that I always think about that went along the lines of “Hey, I sent you a message on Slack. I tagged you in a thread with a link to the Jira issue. Don’t forget to check the comments on the Google document. We updated the priorities on the Airtable. The latest design is on…
If you read my first post or the introduction on the home page of the blog, you may recall that I mentioned wanting to talk from time to time about stuff besides production, like games I liked. Well, this is the first post of those! Hope you enjoy . What is the Greatest RPG of All Time? No, I’m not asking you to think about whether you think Final Fantasy , Baldur’s Gate or some other game is the…
"Work, work." Hello everyone! Happy to be back. You might have noticed I was gone for a couple of weeks and probably thought to yourself “he said he was going to do weekly posts but that only lasted for a month…” but hey, I was gone for a good reason: I was starting a new role as a contract Junior Producer at 2K! I’m extremely excited to be here, and so far the team has been extremely welcoming.…
Via Game Dev Academy You’ve probably heard of the phrase attributed to the U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Plans are useless, but planning is everything”. While this quote was originally delivered as part of a speech talking about the U.S. Army and military exercises, the general idea is highly applicable to any domain: even if the details of a plan turn out to be incorrect when put into…
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) A while ago, I had an interview for a producer role where they asked me a question along these lines: You currently are 4 weeks away from having to send a final build of the game, and have roughly around 100 bugs in your issue tracking tool. Based on previous experience, you know the team can close roughly 10 to 15 issues a week. How do you handle getting…
Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire (2002) Roughly a couple of months ago, Smarto Club launched our second commercial game, Bubblegum Galaxy, on PC and consoles. As someone who was around from the inception of the project up to nearly the release, it was definitely a challenging project, but we’re super happy with the positive response. If you take a moment to dig a bit further though, you’ll see that Smarto…