What’s Up Wednesday: Second Season
What’s up everybody?
I’m in a bit of a weird place right now.
Project Maiden is out in the world. It’s my job to promote it, take criticism well, and fix it. These things interfere with each other.
Or rather, these things make it easy for me to interfere with myself. I am starting to understand why these jobs are all separate in that there games industry.
Promoting your game requires knowledge of everything that’s great about your game, fixing your game requires knowledge of all your game’s problems. Discovery of both comes externally through criticism. I need to do all of these jobs.
The majority of my time with Project Maiden, however, has been spent developing it. And the developer process of “Identify problem, hypothesize, test, repeat till solved” is super great for fixing bugs and compatibility issues. When I stumble with promotion and criticism, however, it’s because I am stuck in Developer Brain.
Developer Brain knows all the problems with Project Maiden. When I write an email to a press person, Developer Brain says, “Next update will be better,” and I struggle to find the right words to talk up the game. I only know what’s wrong.
This is because, as far as Developer Brain is concerned, if something is good leave it alone.
Similarly, when I’m taking criticism, DB thinks every critique or problem is a bug. Bugs are different than critiques. “The game is hard,” is the most common comment I hear about Project Maiden, and there are absolutely ways that I can make Project Maiden more fair but I don’t want to make PM less hard.
Because I like hard games. But that’s a deep topic. And not this topic.
To get to the point, one of the perils of working on your own or even just wearing different hats for a job is that you can easily get locked in the style of thinking that you use for your dominant task.
You cannot have just one problem solving philosophy that works for all your problems. You have to change your tactics to fit the battle.
Sun Tzu probably said something about that. Sounds like him.
When I let Developer Brain do the fixing and Hype Brain do the promoting and English Major Brain do the critique-getting, I can almost be a functional small business human.
But getting those wires crossed is a really quick and easy way to waste time and not feel like you’re good at anything.
Thanks for reading this week and thanks for following me to the new(ish) blog. Project Maiden is due for an update soon, so keep sending those bug and crash reports, I’ll let Developer Brain handle it.
KC
