For old time’s sake, let’s link an old video! This is from 11 years ago!

This was before I got a job in the industry and I was just goofin’ with stuff and trying to develop some proficiencies in gamedev and Unity. How the time flies…

Rofl! Do you see how you can see the background plane for the sky and how the ocean doesn’t quite reach the edges? That STILL HAPPENS if you zoom out too far! That’s kinda funny, maybe we haven’t grown that much after all, but then again, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! I’ve had my sky and water assets for many years at this point and i’m not really in a hurry to revamp stuff when we have so much on our plate.

WHY AM I BLATHERING ABOUT THIS ANYWAY WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TALKING ABOUT BURNOUT IN A LONG, SKATTERED BLOG THAT GOES ALL OVER THE PLACE!

Gamedev more than any other medium, more than movies, more than AI tech, more than rocket science, more than ANYTHING is expansive, while being simultaneously cohesive.

And that’s what makes gamedev so mind bogglingly volatile.

I mean, our topic at hand is “burnout” but it lends itself to every aspect of game development. How we create them, how good they are, how big AAA studios manage their staff, how great games fall to ruin, and why games never finish, or finish late, or finish in a dilapidated state.

Gosh that was another topic we could cover. Where do good games even come from?!

We know a few names, Shiguro Myamoto, Gabe Newel, Notch, Toby Fox, Cliff Blazinski.

If you’re a fan of music, you know names like Neal Peart, you know Jimmy Page, you know John Lennon, you know Jimmy Hendrix! And you hear these names and you know that distinct sound, you know the kind of soul that’s gonna resonate in the music and the lyrics, and the sort of swagger they might carry, and you know they’re going to channel a specific energy, a flair, an emotion with soul.

Who the fuck devized the combo attack? Who was the mother fucker that came up with the limit break? Who came up with health potions and special attacks? Who was the person who invented the Unique item in diablo 2? Who invented dash attacks and air juggles?

We have this initiative to “SAVE GAMES” to preserve their history, to ensure the creations of the past are not lost to time.. But honestly, it feels like no one really gives a damn about the true history of games, where the bits and bytes came from, where the logical practices, and the team building methodologies and where we found talent, and how the best of the best rose up the ranks.

Isn’t that utterly fascinating!?

Like I’m a huge game dev enthusiast, and I don’t recall ever stumbling across any sorts of retrospectives aside from maybe the legacy of Doom, and Carmack and Romero. What do we know about the history of Everquest? What do we know about the coders who were perfecting the jump in super mario? What do we know about how Squaresoft came together and found their composers and artists and coders?

There are years worth of documentaries about music. About how Tom Petty had a rough childhood and went through hell with the record publishers and fought addiction. You can deep dive damn near any single band member on any band that produced a song you enjoy, you can understand the DNA of that music, know how it came together, the inspirations of those band people.

Isn’t it so weird that when it comes to games…

It’s nothing.

A dar void, 

a cave, 

with a cage, 

From which light does not escape.

We were supposed to be getting to work and instead we’re going deep into this blog! 

F*CK!

Oh well, let’s just get it out of our system.

So the world doesn’t know what games are, most people don’t know what code is! People don’t know why some code is better than other code, people don’t know why certain practices are better for prototyping and finding the fun than others.

Like there are BILLION dollar studios that don’t know SHYT about DACK when it comes to making a fun game.

They think they do. They spend BILLIONS of dollars employing a throng of people with fancy titles, and people who are good at regurgitating words and agreeing with the right people to kinda convince the layman that they know what they’re doing.

But when push comes to shove, this industry, from top to bottom, is full of people faking it till they make it.

It is so insanely crazy to me!

WHY ARE WE BLATHERING ABOUT THIS! WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE TALKING ABOUT BURN OUT!

Well people don’t know about burnout, just as they don’t understand what good code is! Games are insanely complex. While simultaneously being INSANELY simple.  If you zoom in close enough to any bit of logic in a game, that component is nothing but a trivial little sum. It takes into account this vector which is nothing more than a vector 3, and then you do a bit more logic to extrapolate a force value, and you modify that force value over time, and it is only once you begin to view these entities through the dimensions of time and the various scopes upon which they exist that things begin to become harder to wrap your head around.

Everything about gamedev is a contradiction, and found in shades of grey, nothing is absolute, everything you think you know will invert and change as you grow and ping poing between pratices. This solution is the best, until you run into this road block, or have this epiphany, and then all you know is edge cases. And then you sit down to write a blog about gamedev and you’re 3 pages deep and you haven’t even written a single sentence about the subject at hand yet.

It's so strange. As you create games, your mind starts to become attuned to the functionality of larger and more complex systems, while always having to bear in mind the nature of human nature. Our attention spans, our base natures to seize upon flashing lights and hefty sounds. And though you may start this journey just expecting to create a plumber that jumps on goomba's somewhere along the way you may start making larger discoveries as your capacity for overarching systems expands, and as you begin to understand the underlying nature of the industry and the social paradigms that form the bedrock. 

Contradictions upon contradiction, it's no wonder this industry is so rocky.

So anyway... As you make a game, you will get tired of working on it and refactoring it 30,000 times, and then after refactoring that code, changing the dash values, now that the math is optimized and the prior values got nuked from existence or you need to translate them to a new data format.

So if you’re a solo developer, when burnout strikes, you take a couple weeks off, sit down to work FINALLY and realize, FOOK, I’M STILL BURNED OUT! No work has been done, you’re project is stalled, and that mountain is still sitting there, taunting you, imposing and insurmountable just as you looked at it.

If you’re on a small team, you come back, and WOW! Look at all this cool new art! Look at these new levels you have to integrate! Oh sweet! We found the problem causing that bug! I can fix that no problem!

But if you’re in a big company, you don’t get to be burned out, you’re meant to come in, punch in your hours, and write your daily with everything you got done. And boy does that draw out the burnout. And you come to realize, well, I’ve been faking it, and pretending to do these easy tasks, and my bosses are actually HAPPIER with me, when I lay low and pretend to do work. So why the heck am I working so hard?

Anyway, I was certain in my head we were building to a bigger payoff in my head with all those blathers, I was going to have this big crescendo about how big studios have their heads up their asses and no one cares and it’s just a bunch of people pretending to care and hoping no one else notices, but htat’s literally EVERYONE in the company, so everyone just sails on collecting easy paychecks as the walls burn in. It’s so fucking sad.

And I’ll say it again… isn’t it so fucking weird the darkness of all this? Most every dev session I have I upload to youtube, anyone can hop into my YouTube channel and see what I’m doing, what a work day looks like. 

One thing I’m proud of with SeaCrit is we are developing in the light of day. If anyone wants to know our workflow, how we work in Unity, how we attack problems and prototyping, build our content creation tools, finagle our dash attacks, they can simply look!

And yet at every other studio it’s just total darkness.

Isn’t that strange?

Like let’s say you liked the Rolling Stones and you went to a live show. You would see Keith Richards shredding on that f*ckin’ guitar, playing all those sweet licks he devised. You would get to witness first hand their competencies and abilities as they whooped ass on the stage performing their craft, and the vocals the percussion, and the riffs would harmonize together and you would get to listen in awe to these artists coming together, to intermix their craft together to create these wondrous cohesive wholes.

Because we as a society give a damn about music, we want to know where it comes from, we want to know how it’s made, and we take great interest in those rising guitarists and drummers and who’s going to be the next big front man?

NONE of that happens in gamedev. No one gives a crap about that next coder, the next great sound FX person, the designer who’s going to have those cool new ideas.

Not in the big companies interests, gotta keep all that personal and all those ideas in a cave, gotta slap your logo on it and keep it in the dark.

And year, after year, after year, as the money rolled in, and the quality games got taken for granted, even the studios themselves forgot what games were, where the secret sauce came from.

And now we don’t have wondrous teams executing in unison to make next level awesome stuff. We don’t have players excited for the next genre revolution, the next great IP, the next great graphical revolution.

We don’t know how to do that any more. We don’t understand the technology. We don’t understand the human condition, and don’t give enough of a fuck about art, and history, and psychology to understand.

Our attention spans are too short, our expectations are too low, our pain tolerance is non existent.

It’s been too easy to conjure profits out of thin air for too long, the discernment of the consumer is in the dirt, so why try?

Year over year, over year, the oligarchy succeeded, big tech succeeded. They shrunk the market, the piled all the consumers into singular marketplaces, they gave them one place to shop, put all their mega media right on the front page, and created this perfectly oiled machine of sustained profits with no moving parts.

Sequel after sequel, mundane project after mundane project this industry has been recycling the same tired forumas.

And holy shit, we are so fucking burned out from this tired sludge.

We are burned out of this soulless monotony. We are tired of corporations that fiegn passion because they don’t know WTF they’re doing.

Good things take time, and hard working passionate developers get burned out, and they get tired of having to fix goofballs bugs that don’t know what they’re doing, or having to put up with idiot corporate decisions that are doomed to destroy the company long term to appease brown nosers who believe their plans for immediate profit are just so damned clever.

The sad truth is, most people who push to make great games aren't very liked by the back scratchers and the brown nosers of this industry. They're "no fun", they're "mean", they're insufferable, they're annoying, some of 'em don't shower, some of them spend all day talking about sonic the hedgehog, and the majority of those who have gotten their claws into this industry just don't want to be bothered by these neckbeards. They just want to chit chat. They want to indulge themselves, they want their easy paychecks. They don't want to have to burn out, they want simple task lists, they want stability, they want the status quo.

But in order to make great games, we have to burn out, we have to light the candle on both ends and set ourselves aflame fighting for that next inch.

Anywho, that’s my meta overview of burnout, and how the industry is screwed and will be for many years on end if they even BEGIN to try to get their act together.

Because it’s not enough to just take a chance on some artists, some developers, to give them the room to grow, to give them the chance to make great works and learn the hard way and become truly incredible, the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Abba, JETHRO TULL, and on and on and on.

Games do not grow in quality by throwing bodies at them, quite the opposite. Everything coalesces, so if someone is making mundane quality contributions, that is going to bring down the quality of the game in a multitude of ways. If someone is laying low and faking participation like is all too common these days, the managers may not notice, the other fakers and back scratchers aren’t going to notice. But those few key talented individuals on the team WILL notice. And they’re going to give up, they’re going to stop even trying, or they will have their hands tied in a myriad of ways as the happy go lucky Kumbaya enjoyers impose their will.

This is taking way longer to get to the actual talk on burnout than I thought it would, and the above isn’t as clever as I had wanted it, but eh, at least we’re getting our little vent out.

Ok, so let’s actually talk about the burnout we’re facing.

Too often we think of the thing we want to work on, we wince, we think “I can’t work on that right now, I’m too burned out!”

But that doesn’t get rid of the burnout, that’s just smashing into the locked door and turning away, hoping it will be unlocked tomorrow.

What is causing me to not want to work on the project?

It’s too broad, there is too much to do!

Ok, so let’s focus, what can we get done that would get us excited to tackle more?

Well we have the shield weapon mostly ready to go, that’s kinda fun, let’s get randomized shields dropping from enemies.

But the enemies aren’t polished with their shield attacks and it’s going to take forever to polish!

Ok, so what, so we’ll just start tuning them until they don’t suck.

We also have to build up more of the world, and it’s a pain in the ass.

Well why is it a pain in the ass? Because we don’t have things layed out in a way that it’s easy to iterate on, so we’ll simply build up spawn setups that aren’t terrible and we can reuse them.

I find that if we can go down these branching webs of issues that form a collective road block, we can seek to start to untangle the burnout.

Burnout isn’t simply a lack of energy, or a state of mind that just passes. It is actually a state you find yourself in when you have made it too hard for yourself to make meaningful progress.

Too often we think of burnout as a period of time we need to wait until we feel recharged, but it’s not JUST that. It is also the feeling of helplessness, that you can’t make meaningful forward progress, or that we are creating content in a way that we are building a mountain of future work that will require revision and reinvention.

So the best way to break out of burnout isn’t to force work, it’s not to just shut your eyes and jump in. It’s the opposite!

How can you make your job easier for yourself? How can you make all future work better and faster and less prone to errors?

What a weird blog, even by our standards. I was hoping by the end of this we would have a more clear idea in our head of what we wanted to get done today, but i’m more scatterbrained than at the start!

Eh, fuck it. Let’s just close our eyes and jump in blind, haha!

Time to get busy devin’ or get busy dyin’!