Hat tip to Kevin Bunch: https://bsky.app/profile/atariarchive.org/post/3lnzvdhowhc26
Currently, in our bank account, we have £2100 (around $2800). It’s not even enough to pay the rent for one month," explains Joseph Redon, head of the Japanese Game Preservation Society. He’s describing the end of the non-profit organisation he set up in 2011 with the aim of properly safeguarding Japanese gaming history before it is lost forever.
To be fair, game development is one of those professions that should’ve moved to remote-only years ago.
As a gameplay programmer I fully disagree. Just the ability to quickly ask a designer near you for clarifications or to if modifying the design slightly to save on time is worth soo much.
Asking over slack just isn’t the same as it adds more friction, takes longer, and makes it easier for misunderstandings to sneak in.
To be fair though it can be worth sometimes working from home to give you less distractions if you need some full focus time… And other jobs in the industry does gain a lot more from being fully remote…
I know this is going to sound weird, but if you didn’t work on a game I care about or worse, worked on games that I think are bad, then I will not take your development experiences seriously.
I’m not saying they didn’t happen, just that I would be foolish to value a process that produces products I don’t like. The fact that you have such strict separation between programmers and designers leads me to believe your company hires a lot of people they don’t need to do jobs in a poor manner. I have very little respect for people who ‘design’ but can’t create. I’m not saying all of them are worthless, but the vast majority of them are. I have a lot of respect for the handful of exceptional designers that actually justify their position with good ideas. Most designers I’ve come across are stupid meme-chasers who actively make whatever they touch worse.
I enjoy plenty of games that were made by fully-remote teams, such as Mordhau. Did you work on anything like that?
