I live for game development. I spend every wake moment. And most of the time I dream about it as
well. I could never live in a world that wouldn’t let me spend more than 40 hours a week on development.
When I’m not doing work for my own job, I work on my own hobby projects. Or I volunteer to help other
teams at other studios with their projects.
I find it extremely hard to have patients or respect for anyone who has a job in the game industry but
doesn’t want to spend every wake hour on game development. I get really annoyed by them.
It’s awful to say but true.
I especially have a hatred towards students. Who played games when they were younger, and then went
on to study game design. I find them to be very ignorant. They have no idea what companies exists in
the local game industry, they don’t know the heroes. They don’t have or follow the hacker ethics.
They never went through the pressure and stress it takes to work on games at night while following school
or working at daytime. They don’t know what it takes to teach yourself to program.
In my eyes they kill the game industry. They kill the passion and romance.
Now that I think about it, it’s all about the following piece :
“Because some people in an industry are willing to devote sixty hours of their life a week to their passion,
does that mean everyone around them should as well? Is it better to turn away someone who does forty hours of
high quality work in a week and replace him with someone who does more, but lower quality work?“
I would answer yes to that question. Just image the following scene :
It’s 20:30 your at the office, looking over a box with cold pizza, you can see a artist working his butt off.
In my eyes that would feel magical. I feel like he too thinks we have a ‘classic game’ in the making. And
he puts in any effort he can to assure the game becomes a classic.
This on its own would completely re-energy me, and motivate me to work on the game. I would feel really excited
to work on cool new features. Because I know the minute I show it to him, he will use the feature to it’s full potential
(I’m mainly a graphics programmer) even if it would cost him his evening to make it work.
If he would have left at 17:00, I wouldn’t get motivated to put in that extra effort.
Also if this guy would have asked me to code something for him (so he can do his work better) I would easily sacrifice
my weekend to do so. Even if the thing I needed to code isn’t really challenging or fun for me to do. Because if it’s
worth his time and effort, then it’s worth mine.
So in the end, even if this guy does the same amount of work in 60 hour, what somebody else could do in 40 hour.
It’s still a better solution. Because it’s motivates and triggers other people on the team.
Jesus, this became a very long rant
it’s past midnight, and it’s time for me to get back and code some more now
Author
