One week ago, I left the games industry. I waited a week to talk or write much about it just to be sure I didn’t go scampering back to it like a frightened squirrel, heartbeat racing, eyes bulging with terror. But I haven’t. This could stick.
I walked into the industry in January of 1999, through the door marked “nepotism.” I did QA, until some designers with better things to do asked me to start fixing content bugs myself. Soon enough, had learned the design tools and they started asking me to design stuff as well. A long fourteen years later I was a lead game designer.
I have worked my whole career in the relative industry backwater of Denver/Boulder, Colorado. I’ve worked a team of 8, and on a team of 80. The gamesI worked on, you haven’t played. More than half were never even released. None were hits. Perhaps one was profitable, barely.
I am neither a visionary nor a genius. “Workmanlike” is a fair description of my output. I helped make games for studios that made games for publishers, who paid the bills and selected the projects. I worked on several games I’m very proud of, but had my doubts about all of them, at the time.
There are many eminent game designers and developers on this board who can tell you about good game development, good game design, and tell good stories about exciting projects. But perhaps my experience is more typical, and less spoken of.
It’s self-indulgent, I know, and I hope you’ll forgive me for wanting to somehow mark the occasion and to manufacture an excuse to reflect, but I thought if anyone had any questions about what it’s like in the kind of career I just described, you can ask in this thread and I’ll answer candidly.
I have worked in a lot of different jobs - but the one thing I have found to be true - I either loved the job but the people I worked with not so much – or I loved the people I worked with but not the job.
On reflection I think working with good people is the best.
You may want to write a list of what you learned - that can be very helpful to put things in perspective.
i wish only good things for you on a new and rewarding occupation and I hope you find one where you like both the job and the people at the same time!
You’re right in my case, though I always kind of regretted not playing Auto Assault. I like the idea of playing a post-apocalyptic driving combat game, but I have an MMO allergy.
To the OP: I guess you could work on your own little project now. No time constraints, no design compromises, complete creative freedom. And if it’s good, the credit is all yours.
The only problem I’ve seen time and again is that if the job’s not fun, people leave for greener pastures as soon as they can.
Ok, being a bit more serious, I’ve always wondered if there is a point to an individual going into a career in gaming with high hopes and dreams of making the next big blokbuster (considering how big the industry’s gotten in the past decade).
I also get the impression (from all the bad news and overworked whistle blowers over the years) that you can’t get a steady paycheck unless you’re an executive or marketing person in the games industry. How are things really like?
Thanks, GeeWhiz. I agree that the people you work with are the critical thing. I might add to your formula a distinction between those you work WITH and those you work FOR. Early on I worked with great people in the trenches, but the studio heads were kinda bozos. But the last place I worked was full of great people (many of whom had to be let go when Warrior’s Lair was cancelled) and the ownership and management were honest and hard-working… it was very hard to leave. More on that below.
I don’t know, Jon, why Detroit? :) I grew up here. It’s where we wanted to raise our family (4 kids). There are still a handful of companies in the area, so it’s not impossible to find work, but the options are limited. However, I think I always kept in the back of my mind that eventually I would have to leave games; I got used to that idea, so it wasn’t terrifying that I finally had to jump. I guess that family stability was more important than a specific career.
Thanks. Ironically, that’s the one I had the least to do with! I did some testing on it and a little bit of design feedback early on (most of it was ignored).
Wow, can’t believe you played that. I was lead tester on that one. It’s pretty amazing what they did with that premise, which literally, I shit you not, started as a joke in an executive meeting. The lead designer who crafted that gameplay (whether he wants the credit on it or not) was Chris Cao, who went on to lead EQ2 and DC Online.
If you start in the industry, it’s pretty easy to predict whether you’ll be on the next blockbuster: Is it in a franchise you’ve heard of and has sold a billion copies? If not, it probably won’t be a huge success. If yes, you’ll have a very, very small part in determining what it’s like (which is okay, but maybe not the vision you have).
Games don’t pay tremendously well unless you’re at the upper echelons, in my experience. Especially in design. And especially in Colorado. I worked my way up from about $26,000 a year as an entry level tester, to around $80,000 as a lead game designer (although I did that job for about $70k for quite awhile).
Yeah, that’s fair. Auto Assault was interesting because I came onto it late, when most of the vision and core systems were established. I was hired to write missions. (If you played much on the Biomech side, you played a lot of my content.) While there was a lot of good stuff in there, tech and content-wise, I never could figure out who was going to play that game. But there’s not really anyone you can blame. It’s kinda crazy how projects–especially big-scope, long-schedule projects–get steered by a number of different people who throw in their pet idea here or dictate that we should follow X formula there.
Awhile after Auto Assault I worked as lead designer on another driving game for THQ in the Saints Row franchise. (It was only ever announced for the 3DS, which we hadn’t even pitched it on, so I guess that was a sign of its ultimate fate.) When I played Renegade Ops, I said to myself, “THIS is how both Auto Assault AND Drive-By should have looked and felt!”
Thanks for the questions everyone! I’m tackling a couple bigger ones in separate posts.
Well, a lot of people haven’t played PAIN, but I’m glad you think most people at least heard of it. I’m really proud of that game. If you followed it through a lot of the later content, it turned into this weird physics laboratory for us. Making new game modes that were totally unlike what came before was a real pleasure.
So I left because I just didn’t feel like the industry in this area was very stable, and because I got a decent offer outside of the industry that didn’t have me moving back in terms of salary. I figured if I rode things out at my current employer and things didn’t work out, I would be so desperate I’d have to drop back on a career path. It’s very hard to sell your skills from game design in other disciplines, especially when your focus was on systems design (“Anyone need a combat system designed? No?”) and to some degree content (“World building, then?”).
In the fall, the company I was at (having lost Warrior’s Lair with Sony) was within a week of shutting down. To their great credit, they had kept kicking for a long time, working on new ideas in the mobile space. And they did finally secure a new project. But after that, I couldn’t be real sanguine about the future. I shouldn’t say a whole lot more, except that since I announced I was leaving, they got a lot closer to securing at least a couple more projects, which is great news for a lot of really talented friends. I look forward to them demonstrating how wrong I was.
so it’s not the wild west/gold rush kind of atmosphere it used to be in the '90s. That’s kind of sad, always thought I had the chance to save up some money on the side and do an awesome game with a small studio. This was assuming “some money” meant a hundred thousand for a year’s worth of income (assuming that a small 3-4 man studio wouldn’t be able to pay people). It seems that nowadays “a little bit of money” to make a modern hit is in the two million dollars and up range.
that’s not that bad considering the horror stories I’ve read online. $80k is about what I make as a web developer (biding my time till I emerge from the cocoon as a “consultant”). Still, it’s half of what my younger early-twenties sister is making as a “community manager” of a B2B website for an MNC. Puts things in perspective :/
I actually thought they answered that question quite clearly, I just didn’t like the answer. I would have loved a MMO/auto assault/Mad Max game that really focused on driving skill. It was apparent this wasn’t going to be that sort of game long before it came out.
It does look pretty good, doesn’t it? It WAS pretty good, actually, although I’m the furthest from unbiased you can be. I had been lead designer on a couple of aborted projects before that, but this one was actually within sight of being finished. I had been involved from the very beginning and had helped develop the concept.
It had a year of full development on it and was (by our schedule, anyway) 3 months away from being done when it was cancelled. There were 50 or 60 people on the team. I led a team of 8 designers and 10 junior level designers. Suffice it to say, Sony had put millions of dollars into it when they killed it.
I can only speculate about why they did so, so keep in mind this is just how I’ve been able to make sense of it. First, I assume it had to do with the weakness of the VITA. Sony internal studios, to me, looked like they never had much faith in it. As far as we were concerned, the game was primarily a PS3 game; we weren’t going to bank on the VITA. But it sure did look and play nicely on the VITA. And the cross-play feature–which was the biggest part of the marketing push for the game–would have been great.
Like I said, we were three months from going into final test (this was one year ago). A LOT of stuff was coming online at that point. We had tuned combat, the classes, and enemy AI for a long time, but the RPG elements of leveling up and equipment, etc, had been missing for a long time. The story progression was just being implemented. But our tools were in awesome shape, the game was quite playable, and we had a ton of content (which had been planned on paper for months beforehand) going in. But I think our partners at Sony weren’t close enough to the project to see or understand a lot of it. They just saw how far we had to go. They were upset that we had had to push the schedule back once earlier by a few months (on one hand, understandable, on the other, I think a case could be made that the original schedule was unrealistic). To be honest, it would have been a rough few months of finishing and polishing. I think we would have made it and would have had a pretty decent game by the end of it, but again, I can’t see things too objectively. I’d say Sony was right to worry, but ultimately made a poor call. I don’t know what other internal considerations might have been affecting them, but it’s definitely the case that around that time there was a lot of bad financial news from Sony Corp. But I have no idea if/how that affected the SCEA studios. There was also a rumor that VITA games in development were given a Metascore rating to hit after the first few games got middling reviews, but I don’t know if that’s true or if it affected the decision.
When they killed it, they said they were going to finish it at their San Diego studio. This was also the story they put out to the press, saying it wasn’t cancelled. While they owned all the work we had done, this was always an absurd suggestion. No one in San Diego knew anything about our tools, our technology, or our design. So I don’t know how serious they ever were about that idea, but a few months later we heard through the grapevine that they had no plans to do so. It’s extremely unlikely the game will ever be released.
Warrior’s Lair (we hated the name, which came from Sony marketing) was going to be a light ARPG. It had all the core features of the genre, although it might have been missing a few things that are common with some of the genre stand-outs. But it also had a couple of innovative features. The combat was inspired more by beat-em-ups along the lines of God of War than by Torchlight or Diablo, with combos and more mobile characters. Killing stuff really was fun. And then there were the social features. You were matched up with rivals, with whom you could compete. Primarily that meant raiding their Lairs, which were dungeons whose properties were determined by relics, collected while adventuring, that you installed in the lair to make it more difficult to defeat. You could pick what monsters you wanted to guard your lair and then a random dungeon was generated based off of that and the relics you had chosen. When someone raided your lair, you split a reward–the more times they died in the raid, the larger your percentage of that reward. All this stuff was working (if not tuned) when the project was shut down.
Warrior’s Lair wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It did not have the budget to compete with a Dark Souls, much less a Diablo. It probably had a number of weak spots. But I also think it would have been worth playing. I think it might have been a bright spot on the VITA line-up, too. From where I sit, it’s a shame that gamers didn’t get their hands on it. While I stumbled my way through that project, learning along the way how to be a lead designer–how to make decisions, when to delegate, how to adapt to schedule restraints and stakeholder opinions–I’m most proud of the design team I had and the work they did.
