My very first job in the game industry was working on a game in a genre I had little personal interest in, programming parts of the game I never had any particular interest in. I was quite far away from the kind of games I grew up playing or dreamed of making, but I did my best anyway because I knew that it was the best opportunity I had to get to where I wanted to be. Since then, I’ve worked on projects that I thought were great until they got cancelled, projects where I didn’t see eye to eye with the creative leadership, and all sorts of other projects besides.

Even if the big picture game isn’t in my particular wheelhouse, that doesn’t mean I can’t do my best to solve the problems I’m tasked with. I enjoy coming up with creative and engaging ways to grab the attention of the target players. Even if the game isn’t to my taste, the problems I solve are still interesting and the solutions I deliver can still be clever, elegant, and robust. I can still do work that I can be proud of. This is what it means to be professional - I’ll always deliver high quality work at a shippable level, even if I don’t personally enjoy the game I am making.

Taking a step further back beyond the personal circle, I’ve also learned that the project itself doesn’t mean much if I’m not working with people I can enjoy collaborating with, no matter what dream IP or concept it might be. What really matters are the people I work with, not the project itself. If I work with great people, the project will be great. If there’s no team cohesion or camaraderie, the project can’t be great. I remember going from a team with little cohesion and noncommittal leadership (leading to terrible morale) to a team with stronger leadership and cohesion. I know that my morale palpably improved after transitioning off of the first team and onto the second.

That’s really the long and the short of it - on a personal level, I get more job satisfaction when I’m solving interesting problems and challenging myself to level up as a designer, engineer, and developer. On a project level, my morale is higher when I’m working with people I feel I can trust to do their jobs and that we can all work towards well-defined common goals. The particular game idea, story, genre, etc. tends to take a back seat to both my role and my team. Without a good role and team, I’ll be miserable and even the most interesting game idea or IP in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep me from looking to jump ship.

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