Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



bruno
@bruno
jaidamack
@jaidamack asked:

Is there something you'd always really wanted to include in a game, but been either shot down by the rest of a writing team, or overruled by management for whatever reason? Is it something you can share with us, or something consigned to deep secrecy and eternal silence?

Not really, I don't think I have a 'one that got away' like that. I think ideas are frankly kind of disposable – if I've pitched something and it didn't go over, I am just going to forget about it because there's going to be a thousand other things pitched and discussed after it. I don't think working creatives tend to get super attached in that way, or at least I don't.


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

I can generally second this in that if you work on a game for any length of time you're going to have all kinds of ideas from silly and implausible to serious and infeasible and either you learn to move on frequently and love the next idea, and the next, or you become the kind of person that producers resent for constantly holding up the production schedule by clinging onto their babies

I think from the outside it's always easy to think of games as an immaculate construction where any deviation from the Original Ideal is a loss (esp because marketing loves to suggest that they ARE made this way), but they're a lot more like jenga towers that you build all the levels of at the same time and by the end there's probably going to be a bunch of pieces everywhere but it's fine as long as it stands upright

I can't even count the number of "oh that would be cool" ideas I've had in my career that not only came and went, but often went, and went, and went, and went until they were so far from what we were making that they no longer even made sense as a thing that we might want to include

In that sense idk maybe the only ones that truly hurt are the ideas you come up with right at the end, when something is fully formed and it's too late to change it

But you learn to get over that, too. Carry it over into next time.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bruno's post:

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

imo most of the ideas you truly like and want to put into a game are heavily dependent on context, so once you're working on something else the idea doesn't have as much appeal or wouldn't apply at all. it's kind of natural for most of those things to just fade away once the project is done, they're not 'for' other projects, they were for that one

I feel like it's a yes and no situation for me in that the specifics of ideas can often fade but the goals behind them, if they're interesting, can stick in your toolbelt until another opportunity to deploy them arises? Whether that's purely technical "Next time I'm on this kind of game I should try this implementation to save time" or "I really like what this plot beat could have been and maybe I can point out a similar opportunity in the future", if that makes sense

I think so many aspiring armchair game developers would clutch their pearls if they knew how often things were made entirely out of sequence during game development. More than once, I had to do full layouts for entire stages and basically 'finish' them, months before the game could even play them, before code existed to make enemies do their thing, etc. So much of game development is eyeballing things, and hoping they come together at the end into a chorus rather than a cacophony. You can't get too hung up on Golden Ideas in situations like this, since you simply don't know what the situation actually is until it's in the rear view mirror. So you pitch small things, and sometimes a thing sticks! I made a dumb suggestion that "we need a loot goblin" and by god, it happened so fast, and next thing I knew I had to make levels for the dumb thing.