Author: helava

Hiring Fields You Don’t Understand

How do you go about hiring a game development team, if you have no experience with #gamedev?

I’ve seen MANY companies over the years, be scammed – sometimes out of *millions* of dollars, because they hired a development team that promised things that they weren’t equipped to deliver. And it’s not just game developers – on one project years ago, before I’d joined the team, they hired a team of “experienced Hollywood writers” to write the script for the game.

The work they turned in nine months later was a failure in so many different ways, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. The writing was awful, juvenile crap. It wasn’t suitable for the targeted rating of the game. It was full of racism, homophobia, and otherwise wildly inappropriate content. But it was also completely unsuitable for a game where the player-character *is the player* and doesn’t have a prescribed personality.

We had to scramble to rewrite as much as we could in the six months we had left. I ended up redoing three characters *from scratch* in that time, writing *all* their dialogue while ALSO implementing the script into game logic. It was bananas, and if we didn’t have a team of dedicated, excellent developers fixing the problems, that game would never have shipped.

But other projects? I’ve seen “devs for hire” claim experience they simply don’t have. They’d say one thing that was technically true-ish, but where the text implied something that was explicitly untrue.

And it sucks to see companies invest their valuable time and resources into a team that’s essentially scamming them.

But how do you keep that from happening, when you’re trying to hire for a discipline you *don’t understand*?

I think the best way to think of it is “How do you buy a house?” Sure, there are some folks who will buy a place with no inspection and no contingencies, and hope for the best. Some get lucky, some get very, very screwed.

But most people who have a finite amount of money and care about risk get inspections. And they have contingencies. So if you’re looking to hire a dev studio, you have to find someone with knowledge to vet that team.

I don’t know of anyone who provides that service.

But on a project a while back, I had questions about the dev team – the project wasn’t working, and the claims they were making were raising the rest of the team’s suspicions. So I did a deep dive just into their website and their LinkedIn profiles. At first blush, things looked okayish. A sort of B-grade team with experience.

As I looked closer, though, cracks started to appear. Yes, they worked on that game & have a credit on it, but as part of the IT staff. And yet that person is the “Creative Director” here. Is that fatal? No – not by any means. But as I went further, it turned out everyone’s titles and experience were … illusions. And once I realized this, it became clear what the right questions to ask were, and the whole house of cards came falling down…

Why didn’t the project work? Why were the dev team’s answers to the rest of the company’s questions so evasive? Why did things they said with certainty and confidence make no sense?

That ability to say things definitively had snowed the inexperienced entrepreneurs who’d hired them. They used a bunch of fripperous bullshit jargon to make arguments from authority to justify their awful decision-making, but those arguments fell apart the moment they encountered someone (me) with actual experience.

So, I guess my point is this, and when I started writing this post, I had no idea where it was going:

If you want a “house inspection” when you’re hiring a dev team, hire me to do it. It’ll cost you a thousand bucks, and I’ll spend a day looking into the team’s experience and bona fides. I’ve had 20 years in games, led and built multiple successful teams, and while my background is primarily in game design, I’ve worked with every stripe of game developer at every scale out there.

I’ll tell you whether the team is what they say they are, what experience they *actually* have to back it up, whether what they’re proposing makes sense, and whether you should actually work with them, or find other teams to interview.

The worst thing about this: I was thinking of two specific situations, and only later realized that two OTHER specific situations could be described exactly this way, but were even worse, I’d just blocked them from my mind at the time.

This happens a LOT. Seriously, if you need someone to validate a dev, I have even more experience than I think at finding bullshit artists, apparently.

Preordered a Vision Pro

I preordered a Vision Pro. Mostly because as a potential developer, I’m always curious about new platforms and their potential. “But what about the Quest 3, which does almost everything Apple’s talking about?” The answer to that is actually pretty simple: I don’t want the Quest 3. And it has very little to do with the technology.

I don’t want the Quest 3, because fundamentally, I don’t trust Meta. I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg. Do I think he’s a terrible guy? No – I know folks who know him, and I believe he’s sincere and well-intentioned. But I don’t trust his judgment on matters of data and privacy, and a real XR headset is a privacy nightmare.

I know folks who worked on the privacy side of the Quest. They were incredibly smart folks, who thought hard and deeply about the subject. But I also never trusted the end product, because *fundamentally* I don’t trust Meta and I never will. And I know that whatever those smart, caring folks did, it wasn’t *their* judgment that made the final decisions. It was Zuckerberg, it was the $.

It doesn’t matter what they say, because what they’ve *already done* with Facebook tells me everything I need to know. And because of that, nothing they say will ever carry any weight.

As things like XR and AI and the general total pervasiveness of phones & IOT and what have you gets … more, the thing I want out of a company is to believe in their efforts around privacy and trust. I know Apple is not a saintly company by any stretch (I’m with Epic re: store & monopoly, for instance) – but when it comes to trust and safety, it’s no contest. I’d easily pay significantly more for an Apple product than a Meta one, solely around how I perceive they will treat the data that’s necessary for deep interactions with this kind of product.

I know that for a lot of people, price beats everything, but I think more and more, how much companies can be trusted with data will become more critical, and right now, Apple’s sort of the only game in town.

Layoffs & Frustration

Sorry to hear about layoffs at Riot Games. I’ve known a few folks who’ve worked there over the years, and it’s always been a bit of a mystifying place, to me. Super frustrating to hear that the cuts are super deep, and that the folks in charge are basically taking no personal responsibility, but I guess that’s one of those things that I’ve always found mystifying about Riot. Some parts of it produce incredible things (I loved Arcane), and some things seem toxic AF. The consistent bit is that the leadership never actually takes what I’d consider “actual responsibility”.

But hey, game industry, am I right? Kotick made that his whole career and won a glorious and lasting victory for himself at the expense of everyone else, so others taking that playbook and running with it shouldn’t be surprising. Disappointing, sure, but hey, what the fuck do I know?

(Here comes the turn!)

What I *do* know is that if you’ve been impacted by this, and you’re looking for another job, you might need help with your resume. You’ve worked on huge, impactful products that helped define the industry, and everyone undersells their experience and impact. I wrote this doc, and it will be helpful if it’s been a while since you’ve polished up your resume.

While this seems like it’s a turn into cynical self-promotion, here’s the other turn – https://lnkd.in/gddfND3x It’s totally free. If you read through this and want personal help, reach out – send me a draft resume & provided you’ve ALREADY read the entire doc, I’ll help you for $0. (If you haven’t read the doc, it’s $1k/hr.)

So yeah – sorry that the never ending onslaught of layoffs keeps never ending. Maybe it’s about time we take a deeper look at how collective organization might give workers some actual leverage in this industry that relies *entirely* on the creative hard work and value that the workers provide.

Boy! This is a post that isn’t likely to go over well. 😛 I’m just disappointed that the rich keep getting richer by fucking the folks doing the work and saying that they’re somehow taking “responsibility” because gosh, laying people off sure “feels bad” like that’s equivalent to stripping 500+ people of their livelihood.

So yeah. If you need help with your resume, I’m here for you. If you need help talking through deciding to start up your own company to do things differently and BETTER, hit me up, I can help with that, too.

The ONLY good thing about the last two years is that this is the environment of desperation and chaos that creates the next big thing, and I hope whoever figures it out takes the opportunity to create something better than this garbage structure we have now.

I wanna put my previous post in a bit of context. When I started in the game industry, I worked 60-80 hour weeks, slept in the office, got paid for shit. I was called into the office on weekends when I’d busted my ass all week getting my stuff done, just so that managers could have “butts in seats” to show off to the execs who were wandering around the office on a Saturday for some reason.

This was all bullshit.

It was a stupid, awful way to run a team & a business, and when I had the opportunity to run things, I swore I would do things differently. At Self Aware, we made a *billion-dollar game* and crunched ABSOLUTELY NEVER. And that’s not an accident. That’s a series of choices. We had to have some artists stay late *one night*. It’s literally the only blemish on that record while I ran the studio. It was a couple of hours, they knocked it out of the park, and the Art Manager and I talked about it afterwards, relieved and proud of the team, but I made it clear that this was a failure on our parts, and we needed to do better in the future.

These kinds of layoffs are the consequence of choices. They’re a failure on the part of leadership. And yet, leadership *keeps getting off scot-free*. Worse, Wall Street *incentivizes* this mercenary bloodletting and *rewards* it with money for the people holding the axe. Leaders make a choice. They’re making record profits, they choose to cut to keep the stock price up, they cut to keep their exorbitant compensation. They say, “Oh, I feel so bad,” but they *chose* to do these things.

Wall Street won’t hold them responsible. And workers, for the most part, can’t, either. If they’re hiring, in an environment like this, they’ll find people willing to fill those roles.

So the cycle continues.

But people are going to come out of this and create new teams with an animating purpose. What was “crunch” for me will be “layoffs” for them. They’ll do whatever is necessary to run their teams in a way that values the team, and puts their needs *ahead* of the share price, and *ahead* of their personal comp. And those changes will create better studio cultures, and people will be excited and happy to be invested in that company, and the results will be *better*. Just like our results were better. We crushed the competition – Zynga – at a time when they had gobs of money and hundreds of people crunching nonstop to try to hang on to their lead.

They failed. We won.

In the future, look for the teams that are built to make positive change. Someone’s going to get it right and eat the dinosaurs’ lunch.

Too Much is Too Much

I have too many interests.

I want to spend time:

  • Making a game
  • Simracing
  • Making music
  • Spending time with the kids
  • Boardgaming
  • Videogaming
  • Reading comic books & Sci-Fi
  • Wingfoiling
  • Biking
  • Paddleboarding
  • Archerying
  • Drawing
  • Playing old games I never got around to on what are now “retro” platforms
  • Cooking
  • Organizing and fixing stuff up around the house
  • Making pottery
  • Swimming
  • Writing (Resume stuff, novel, leadership/game design book)
  • Blacksmithing
  • Learning arbitrary new stuff
  • Getting in better shape

I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And I know that everyone’s got a huge variety of hobbies. And one thing that’s different, is that more than most people, I have time.

I don’t take that for granted at all. But what it causes is this kind of persistent analysis paralysis and inability to focus on one thing and go deep to the degree that’s necessary for me to improve at anything. And sometimes, worse, that analysis paralysis prevents me from doing ANY of these things out of a weird kind of FOMO that I might pick something and then have an opportunity to do something better.

And I think that served me alright when the kids were small, or time was more scarce. But now, I have a bit of time where I could “go deep”, and find myself constantly pulled in different directions. There’s another bad impulse, which is, “I’ll do this when I have it all set up “right”.” Which sometimes is “the right gear”, which is almost always the incorrect impulse. Do the thing, get better to the point where you’re limited by the gear, then change the gear. But “new gear” feels like progress, and it often serves as a proxy for real progress. This is bad, and I’ve come to be better at recognizing it in myself.

But in any case, the thing is, it’s too much. That whole list of shit above? No one could be great at all that stuff. No one could even be competent at most of that stuff simultaneously. It’s just too much. Getting good at any two or three of those things would be the work of a lifetime.

I love getting “competent” at things, though, and I like that I’ve had the opportunity to dabble in a LOT of things, and become … not “fluent”, but maybe “conversant” in a ton of weird shit. But I would like to get better at a few things – probably making music (though narrowing it down between guitar and generalized music production is hard), and getting in better shape are the two things that I’d like to focus on the most that aren’t “explicitly spend time with friends and family”.

Maybe that’s just the goal in 2024. To figure out how to put the rest of things *aside* for a year, and just focus on those two things.

2023

Definitely a mixed year. My aunt passed away. My dad had a bone infection that needed surgery, and is likely going to need to move into an assisted living facility in 2024 due to his cognitive decline, and my mom getting older & being less physically able to take care of him full-time, plus the six years of accumulated stress. We had a life-changing trip to Korea & Japan. We went to both Maui (Spring Break) and Oahu (Winter Break). The kids are great. We had some touch-up work done on the house. Most of the day to day stuff was great. We got to see friends, play games, have a lot of great food. J&K are growing up quickly. 2023 felt like an “Oh, shit – time is going FAST” year, as both kids grew up a lot this year, I think.

J’s been making some really impressive games. K’s reading ALL the manga with a kind of rabid aggression I didn’t expect. Both are finding their social circles and spending more time with friends.

For 2024, my resolutions are pretty simple, and mostly a recap of 2023’s, which I largely failed at:

* More exercise, less junk eating. Goal weight is again <210.
* Make something start to finish. This will likely be a VR ARPG (think Diablo-lite) that takes place around the player. Not a first-person game, but more of a Moss-like “diorama” experience. I’ve been less and less interested in 1st person VR, TBH.
* Do a revision of the resume book and actually try to sell it. This will be a more or less complete rewrite but with a solid example and a kind of work-flow that the reader can follow along with. Same basic ideas & content, but largely different structure.
* Be helpful in a way that I find enjoyable. I’ve found I’m not a huge fan of 1:1 mentoring for individuals. Doesn’t feel impactful enough. But through Christy, we had some chances this year to talk to groups of entrepreneurs about our experience, and both of those events were really satisfying. I also had a chance to connect with some early entrepreneurs, and some of that has been genuinely rewarding as well. So, more of that, and less 1:1 stuff. Try to submit to some speaking engagements re: team culture & product dev stuff.

So yeah. 2024. More conscious engagement, less “do the default”. More exercise, more winging, more focused projects. But I don’t expect it to be *radically* different – just challenging some things I “feel into” in 2023, that ended up being habits I don’t want to continue.

QA Is Important

Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.

Interview Questions

As we go into the new year after a disastrous year for game industry workers (but not games, or game industry execs!), a reminder:

Your and your company’s values aren’t what you say. They’re not even what you do much of the time. They’re only genuinely tested when living up to your values costs you something.

So when folks come to interview at your company and ask, “How did you handle the pandemic?” Or “Tell me about that round of layoffs you did, and did your compensation change as a result?” Or “You previously said “Work remotely forever,” but then “recalled” employees into the office. Tell me about how you made those decisions?”

Those are questions that are asking about your values that matter.

And to folks searching for employment, I know it’s a hard time to ask tough questions, but *no* “theoretical” questions about values will ever be useful to you. The only questions that will illuminate anything interesting about a company are questions about what they *actually did* in difficult situations that are real. And frankly, going into the interview, you should probably already know the answers. You’re asking because you want to make sure that the folks you’re interviewing with are honest, and capable of telling you the truth.

To the execs & folks in positions of power: If you’re laying off folks, and then out of the other side of your mouth calling your employees “family”, I implore you to reconsider. Doing this is abusive, and exploits employees’ enthusiasm and/or naïveté for your explicit benefit. It is manipulative and exploitative. Don’t do it.

Be Specific

Hey, folks who are looking for jobs: Be specific.

If you say “I’m a recently laid-off Creative Director…” and you expect that folks will be interested based on your title… you could do better. Your job here is to hook peoples’ interest (and if you’re a Creative Director who’s not doing that in a post like this you’re not showing off your talent like you should).

What is it that people are looking for? What is it that YOU provide that others do not? For me, for instance, I can say, “Co-founder, Creative Director, Team Lead”, and it says something about me, sort of.

But if I specify that I have an established track record of building really effective multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative teams, that shows a kind of specificity. If you’re not building a multi-disciplinary collaborative team, great – I’m not for you. But if you *are*, you’re a lot more likely to ping me than you would if I just said, “team lead”.

But I can get more specific. I also work best in very early-stage teams, because a lot of my process is about building things and learning super-fast, which maximizes potential for success on projects where folks are building something genuinely new. Again, if you’re a huge company working on some iterative thing, great – I’m not the guy for you.

It’s a trade off – telling people your strengths means you aren’t going to be aligned with everyone. And that is a luxury in some cases. Sometimes you need to be everything to everyone, because you need a job – any job. But I’d also suggest that right now, it’s more important to stand out than it is to be “in the running” for a lot of roles.

So be specific. Tell people what your unique strengths are. How your experience and worldview have shaped who you are and what you do better than anyone else. Your job is to capture peoples’ attention and make them NEED to hire you. It’s not enough to say, “I’m a person who’s available.”

This is something most people are really not used to. If you’re struggling with this, I can help. No charge. DM me (with a copy of your resume and a blurb you’ve written for yourself) if you’re looking for a hand with this, and I’ll be happy to spend an hour with you working on it.

Touch-Ups

Had the front of the house repainted. They’re almost done – front door & crawlspace doors and one window in the back that needed some help left to go. Basically got the front and the right side of the house redone, back and left left as-is.

A handful of years ago, we had a neighbor repaint the front trim, but the paint he used was really not durable, and he did a pretty sloppy job. I’ve always been a little annoyed with it, even though the sentiment behind giving our friend & neighbor some work before he moved away – I don’t regret that at all.

But so last winter, we had a little water leak during the absolute worst storm we’ve had in ages. So there’s some stuff in the front that needed touching up – stucco was cracking, and a lot of wood was exposed to the point where there was significant dryrot in the stair “caps” – the wooden bits where you might put your hands.

So all that got fixed and then painted. We hired a “name-brand” company to do it, and indeed it was about 3x the cost of the neighbor doing it, but the quality is WAY better.

Because we were only doing two sides, changing color was a no-go, or we’d have to have repainted the eaves all the way around the house.  So it’s weird to have spent $$$$, and have it sort of feel like a no-op, but it’s also kind of like it went backwards in time by a decade, so that’s alright. :smile:

Funny thing is, a few weeks ago, we also spent a bunch of money to get one of our cars essentially mostly re-painted. Turns out BMW’s clearcoat just breaks apart after a while, and the car was looking really bad – broken clearcoat all over the hood, trunk, roof, and then little holes all over the doors and fenders. So we took that in, had everything essentially totally repainted. And then last week, one of the few little bits that *wasn’t* resprayed just broke. So I have to get that fixed eventually. But for the most part, the car is good again – got new paint, and then went in for service so it’s good inside and out. And the other car got new tires.

So it’s basically like we just spent enough to have bought a bunch of new stuff, but instead spent it maintaining old stuff. Which I feel alright about. Keeping the house and cars in good, safe, working order so that they’ll last us as long as possible is more cost-effective and environmentally-conscious in the long run.

QA Matters.

Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.