How to distinguish a worthy job from digital hard labor?
An epic longread about how I, after spending 5 years in gamedev, rebooted my experience and found something new and amazing.
Hi! My name is Paul and I recently found a job. It’s tempting to say “for the first time”, although by the age of 30 I managed to change many jobs and many specialties, but it seems that now I have found exactly the job that one is supposed to dream of in childhood. “When I grow up, and I’ll be doing something cool, I’ll be making mischief and enjoying my freedom, and no drab adult rules will stop me from having fun!”. And so, it happened — I grew up, got into game development and became a copywriter at the Donut Lab studio. And everything here turned out to be special…
Getting to love job interviews
If you ask me what pisses me off the most when looking for a job, it’s job interviews. Because job interviews are a nightmare.
No matter how many motivational articles and lists with ways of overcoming stress are written, going through an interview remains a painful, and often humiliating experience. For a long time I thought that this was exclusively my trait, but in a casual conversation with colleagues, it suddenly turned out that no one likes interviews. The main problem is most likely hypocrisy: both applicants and employers put on a smile or, on the contrary, business-like equanimity and pretend that all of this is routine.
The reality, however, is far from it! For a candidate, an interview is an exam worse than anything at the university. And the stakes are completely different. Essentially, it is my social competence that is assessed during an interview — whether people are ready to accept me, whether they value my skills, my behavior.
For an employer, an interview is a clash with reality, because the interviews are attended not by “sets of characteristics from a job description”, but by real people. And “real” is the key quality here, because no one possesses a final set of characteristics, people are constantly changing. And the strongest changes will occur within the first months of work — judging by my colleagues and myself.
It turns out that you have, in fact, only one meeting with an applicant. At work, this person will most likely become different.
This frightening instability is, of course, a shameful thing, so most meetings and interviews come down to building walls: we hide behind our mental armor, suppress our feelings and play roles that are alien to us. This has always been my job hunting experience.
Thus, the moment of my acquaintance with Donut Lab stays in my memory as something out of the ordinary. The same goes for my colleagues! Here is what our SMM manager Catherine writes:
Thank you, Catherine, your quote helped me understand what was such a revelation for me during my interview at Donut Lab. It’s simple: we immediately began to discuss specific tasks. As if I was already employed there. And they didn’t ask me strange and abstract questions about the future, they didn’t give me a test sheet like at school, they didn’t stage provocations and interventions, and they didn’t make promises of a bright corporate future — none of that was to be seen in Donut Lab, unlike numerous interviews before coming to the donut studio.
When I got settled in the team, I managed to reflect on the experience of the interview. Donut Lab is still a small studio, and we don’t have our own HR. This greatly simplifies communication, because you can talk to everyone directly. Vika, an executive assistant to the founders of the studio, is in charge of head hunting. And during one of our conversations, she told me a very simple thing: interviews are stressful for everyone, and unless you try to escape this feeling in a conversation, it becomes easier for everyone. By the way, this is what Victoria has to say about what inspires her the most in her work:
Relying on your friends
If interviews are a nightmare, it’s logical to assume that the first days in a new place are sheer unfathomable horror. But my experience is that the difficulty of entering a new company is greatly overrated. Your support, at first, is the work itself, the tasks that you perform. And only later your colleagues become that support.
Actually, the wonder of the first days at a new job is to meet people who are not like you at all. They have different interests, hobbies, pace of life and temperament. But you have a common cause, and work is the fuel that brings you together and strengthens your ties. And love for your work plays a key role here.
In my early days at Donut Lab, I was faced with a lot of new tasks. And although I already had experience in game development, I had to (and still have to) learn many things from scratch. It seems that game development in general rarely involves moving along the beaten path — this is true for all specialties. And in addition, game development teams are always motley: anyone on the scale from techies to soft science guys.
And this, to be honest, is a ticking time bomb — cases of production hell in game development, all leaked games and wasted potential are often the result of broken communication within the company.
And the only thing that can defuse this “bomb” is love for the project. During my first months at Donut Lab, my responsibilities required talking to testers, game designers, managers, artists, animators, composers, community specialists. Everyone here has their own language, and we would never be able to solve any issues if we were not united by the desire to make everything cool.
This is exactly how friendship, a sense of support and a strong team are born. So even the guys with whom I don’t have overlapping tasks seem to me as a reliable support and inspire confidence.
When we conducted an internal survey about what the guys think is the most valuable in their work, all as one gave similar answers:
Overcoming problems
A pleasant atmosphere in the team is a direct consequence of the flat organizational structure. But even it can’t resolve all the problems that arise.
Game development, as Jason Schreier succinctly put it, is “blood, sweat, and pixels”. It is difficult to say what is the main cause of stress in gamedev (and, more broadly, in IT). But my experience suggests that it is primarily due to the lack of clear boundaries between professions and sometimes a blurred scope of responsibility.
Of course, in general terms, it is clear how a game designer differs, for example, from a location designer, and a tester from a unity developer. But when it comes to a specific project and hundreds of small tasks, it can be very difficult to figure out who is responsible for what.
For example, I work with text. And if there is a mistake in the text, it is easy to correct it, right? Yes, if we are talking about a word processor, a post on social networks or a page on a website. But in the game, even a small typo can turn into a huge disaster, because in one case it affects the processes of an integrator, those of a game designer in another case, and those of a tester in yet another one. And that’s just an example of simple chains, in practice everything can be more complicated. The example with text is part of my personal experience, but those who work with code, graphics or sounds also have similar problems.
And if you can establish a simple human connection at the earliest stages, then it can take months and years to build a work communication. And the larger the company, the more questions there are. Sometimes it’s not possible to immediately understand what some colleagues do. And who you should address your questions to.
To add insult to injury, there is no single correct algorithm in game development. Many projects in this field are akin to a naval expedition to unknown lands. In an unpredictable stream of events, even the captain can start rowing, and the cook can grab a cutlass. This can cause tempers to run high, for if today your competence is enough, tomorrow you might be overwhelmed by tasks you cannot fulfill. And if the colleagues are snowed under with their own work, chances are that you will have to deal with it all by yourself.
Fortunately, Donut Lab has its own safety system, which is aimed at smoothing rough edges and maintaining balance in the event of a storm.
At the core of everything lie syncs, i.e. regular and confidential conversations with the product manager and team leaders. One step up from that is Donuts Retro — general meetings to reflect and speak out about sore points.
If a problem is urgent, unexpected and peculiar, it has to be solved manually. It’s painful, but there’s nothing to worry about. We switch on our sympathy and strive to help, rather than run away from one another. It is here, of course, that the strength of the team and the feeling of support play a key role.
For example, I work on the localization of texts for the game. If at the initial stages we simply turned the text over for translation, then as the game development progressed and became more complex, it became necessary to draw up individual technical assignments, which took time. But now numerous translators can have a more insightful approach to the process.
It’s the same across the board: patience, attention and professionalism help to make one’s way through obstacles.
Taking care of everyone
But sentiments aside, there are also prosaic things about work. It so happened that I never really thought about the organization of work, planning, meals in the workplace. There was simply no time for such thoughts: I am a creative person and at the same time a humanities major, so the very opportunity to work in my specialty always was enough for me. There are few worthy job offers, developers of casual match-3’s are more likely to hunt for narrative designer. Writing for games like these requires a special talent that I never had, which narrowed the possibilities even more. Thus, I bit into the rare offers where there was at least some alternative to cute casual worlds, and I got used to stoically turning a blind eye to all the rough edges and shortcomings that accompanied my previous places of employment.
But things changed, when I joined Donut Lab. I suddenly knew what caring is.
That I, for example, don’t need to look for a workplace myself, to dig for an old keyboard at the warehouse nor to pull out a network cable from under the trim. Because they prepared for my arrival at the office.
On the very first day, I was also able to get all the answers to boring questions, such as “Where can I get a letter of employment?” or “Who has info on work accounts?”. Because all this is already described in the onboarding docs that I was carefully guided through.
My work tasks do not come from the unknown bowels of the Universe, but pop up in Jira, and there is always an underlying logic that ties them to the game development plan. And technical assignments! Oh, if only you knew how nice it is to work according to a technical assignment.
And there’s no fuss with lunches, because everything is delivered to the office. Here’s a quest for you: come to the center of any big city and try to find at least one free seat in a cafe at 2 pm on a workday.
And here I should note that everything described above is the norm. This is how it should be everywhere. Praising the employer for such an approach is a gesture of about the same level as applauding the pilots upon landing. If you are reading this, and you work in gamedev and it’s the same in your company, then you might be perplexed. Why write about this at all? Because my experience tells me that when a team is passionate about the project they are working on, people tend to forgot how important working conditions are.
And this is the reason for my enthusiasm. However, both components are in place at Donut Lab: here we care about the process organization, and we are truly passionate about what we do. All of it is merges into one — the game we are working on — Donut Punks.
And making it cool
I belong to the already graying generation of players, and the grass for me was definitely greener in the past. I grew up with games from the heydays of Bioware, Blizzard and Bethesda. I was blown away by Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 4. And to summarize this saccharine nostalgic experience, I would highlight the consistency of the favorite games of my youth. Moreover, this consistency manifested itself primarily as separate elements. The music, the artwork, the plot, and the gameplay — everything swept you off your feet in its own way. There was no sense of an offhand approach, there were no generic elements.
Luckily, games with such a set of qualities are still being released, but much less often than we would like. The lack of 3D RPGs and single-player adventures is extremely noticeable, but in contrast, we see the rise of other genres: rogue-like, metroidvania and looter shooters are in the catbird seat. Many of these games are great, and yet they are different.
I think it’s a personal trauma of my generation. Games in general have not gotten worse, but they have changed a lot. It seems that now the focus in development is shifting to one of the following: you either get a splendid art design, or incredible gameplay, or delightful music. But very rarely all at once.
Now that I work at Donut Lab, this trauma suddenly became more obvious, because the first time I started Donut Punks, I was overcome by the sensations reminding me of those same “old” times. The same consistency, when every element of the game sought to express something. The sound, the artwork, the interface, and the gameplay — everything has its own features.
And here it is worth returning to the issue that it is difficult to develop games. That is why inequality of priorities becomes inevitable. The mechanics and convenience of the game are always prioritized, everything else is leftovers. I think this is, in many ways, the reason why there are so many generic elements in modern games — especially in terms of artwork and music. Many elements are simply neglected, maintaining a certain acceptable level of product quality.
Donut Punks is great just because the team has the resources and the ability to make super efforts. Spend one day more on it, but make it more fun. Don’t just draw a beautiful skin for a character, but add some kind of joke to it. Don’t just add sound to game effects, but give some zest to them. And so it is in everything: from global mechanics to individual pixels.
Actually, this reminded me of the old days when I used to play my favorite Space Rangers (Elemental Games, 2002), where even the names of the characters and the names of the planets would get burnt into my memory because of how odd they were and how well they reflected the game world.
Behind the variety of such trifles and details, an incredible mountain of results grows. And it is obtained, of course, at the cost of many efforts and doubts. Obstacles can be overcome through attention, care and transparency. Through the realization that we make games because we ourselves love to play. Because we want to share this joy and share the freedom of expression that is not found in other art forms.
Looking at my colleagues, I would like to assure you that people who are ready to create new IPs, invent unusual mechanics and create incredible universes exist. Because that’s the coolest thing about gamedev.
