Tired from the Studio... and then wanting to return.

Have you ever been burnt out of game development? The boring environment, the uninspired projects, the management, all contribute their part in creating the ultimate storm that just sweeps you up in the funnel of constant strain and office turmoil, only to come falling down bruised and broken.

After a period of time in working in the game development scene for 6 years as a game/level designer, event and combat scripting, I decided to take a break from it and venture something else; hosting, streaming, writing, singing, etc. It was a welcome change and refreshed in my ways such as working on a childhood dream of sharing my singing with the world, or my commentary and humour with the Internet.

But my passion for games never went away; my singing consists of recognizable song covers of games like "The Wolven Storm" or "Heaven's Divide", or the majority of my streaming and video content on my YouTube and Twitch channels are my Let's Play sessions and Shout-casting of various games. In fact, in my current employment (not a game studio) I chance upon some of my colleagues being tasked with designing some mini-games under the orders of the upper management. For whatever reasons pertaining to that decision I will not discuss here; rather is the design and development approaches to the games that have me concerned.

Not the faults of the interns that got 'hired' to work on the games, the initial premise of the designs by the founder were and still are, troubled with several questionable design choices that were heavily defended by its creator with what seemed to be stubbornness and ego. Granted, game design may be subjective to a certain extent, but when there are numerous opposite opinions which are similar to my own being raised to the upper management and the same responses continued to beat down on any sincere hopes to bringing a fun game to life, this continued to repeat the same scenarios that what caused my departure from games development.

I cannot say much for you folks since this is my personal account of what happened to me, probably just a portion of the larger scope of things, but with how things have happened to my career thus far it would seem that I am doomed to only be accepted into half-hearted companies/studios that are just looking for cheap, replaceable labour.

As I write this, I continue my lonely path in applying to studios and companies with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I will be part of a team, a family if you will, that understands what fun is in a game as I believed in my youth.