Studio 2 - Week 10

What have I accomplished this week as a developer?

This week we had our first major playtest for Heartland and overall it went well, unfortunately for every team what was meant to be an “Internal Systems” playtest was anything but. We not only had students from Studios 1 and 3 but we didn’t get any feedback on the actual systems we had implemented other than that the character moved too slow. This was frustrating and I believe could have been handled better but what did come from it was incredibly beneficial to the project moving forward. Our entire concept is the same but we have pivoted quite a bit and personally I believe added a huge amount of work to the project. This is by no means a bad thing and I think it's something that the team can pull off. But with a huge undertaking like this as well as other subject commitments and side projects like Crowd Control these last few weeks of Tri are going to be hellish.

What have I learned this week about development and being a developer?

This week I learnt that work in this industry can flip like a coin. Gazillion the studio behind the diablo-esque Marvel Heroes game had set to shut the game down this December. But after laying off all of its staff the day before Thanksgiving they pushed the closure down to this Friday. With these huge layoffs and so many Game Devs out of jobs at what's meant to be a joyous time of year what I really learned this week was the strength of the Game Dev Community. When I first saw all of the new breaking on Twitter some of the first things I saw was other companies like Blizzard tweeting out their open job vacancies and urging Gazillion employees to apply. This comradery in the industry really showed me why this community is so great and reinforced how much of a privilege it is to be a member of it.