I Don't Want Your Lemons: Optimism Fuel for Weary Devs

our next speaker is no stranger to sharing her stories with the GBC community here to discuss how her teams have found resolve and inspiration in stressful environments and how she has stayed optimistic and motivated through unforeseen challenges please welcome Laura Lynn McWilliams [Music] hi I'm Laurel in and I apologize in advance about the periodically take drinks of water like a politician while I'm talking so when I look at at this group of people I'm absolutely certain that I'm looking at people who feel a sense of purpose not just in being in this room or being a GDC but a sense of purpose and being a game developer and the reason I'm so confident about that the reason I can state that with certainty that we all feel the drive and urgency a sense of purpose is because if we didn't I don't think we would have

tools or be able to deal with all the that comes with this line of work and there's a lot of it sometimes so as of 2019 I've been a game developer for 25 years some of the games that I worked on but what was interesting was my very first professional game ever was cancelled and it closed down the studio that I started to make it so welcome to game development and then after that point probably one out of every three games that I've worked on was cancelled and I rika located long distance 11 times so I've got some familiarity with some of the sacrifices we have to make to do this for a living so I wrote that intro in 2018 when I first pitched this talk and then when I open this back up to kind of finalize it for this talk today yes and stuff has happened it's been a long 20 19 and were three

months in at this point and so I had to ask myself am I really going to stand on stage in front of all of these people and talk about optimism right now and the answer is yes and I'll tell you why because optimism gets a bad rap I think a lot of people think about optimism as you know lemonade from lemons they think about optimism as slapping a heavy face on things that are terrible or ignoring the terrible things but I can say personally that if I had just had a game canceled or part of my team laid off and I encountered that kind of optimism if I ran into that guy I would probably slap that sticker right off his forehead that's not optimism and that's not what I mean when I talk about optimism I talk about the fact that life brings you changes and difficulty you work through them they change you and you grow for me that's optimism so just like some people say comedy equals tragedy plus time for

me optimism and my optimism fuel is the knowledge that trauma is building tools for me so I'm going to share some of those tools with you today but more important I reached out to a lot of developers and I'm sharing their tools with you too I ask developers between 15 and 38 years of experience what gives you hope what keeps you going and what are the habits and structures that you've developed that you'd recommend to others so let's get going optimism fuel number one is to remember your inspiration I like to think of this as remembering the horse that you wrote in on you're a game developer for a reason it takes so much work to be a professional game developer even if you have a degree it's super hard to break in something gave you the drive to do it what was it when I asked Theresa what keeps her going she says remembering why I got into games in the first place to provide better experiences for the next wave of kids to remember the gaming can be wonderfully creative thought inducing connecting and sometimes the disconnecting escapism away from a harsh

reality so a couple specific tips here you need to remember what inspired you this is some of the games that inspired me early in my career before my career there's some of the reasons that I felt up that I felt like I had to make games for a living you probably have your own list break them out once or twice a year when things get tough play them again remind yourself why you're excited why you're here and Gaurav has a great tip as well put the launch date of all your projects you've shipped on a calendar and celebrate those anniversaries when they come up every year reach out to old friends you work with play your old games where an old team shirt remember what you loved about those games so optimism fuel number two never forget that this is a business so game-development kind of weird I've gotten feedback several times over my career when I referred to players as

users or customers I remember people getting seriously bent out of shape a couple times when I called the game over here on a product like that the controller that's a product our game no way right and I don't think that's an accident our industry is heavily motivated by passion and the thing is the belief that it's all about passion it's a big part of our hiring process III Pat's GDC all based around passion and we kind of neglect this other bit but I can tell you that passion is a two-way street and in the hands of some employers and some leaders passion is used as a rope that can bind us so never forget it's a business don't let your colleagues or teammates or bosses convince you that this is not a business you need your business head on 24/7 when you're talking about your career that comes to things like what company you choose from Paul learn the warning sides of bad culture and how to identify them in an interview if a

studio seems interested in you only as a warm body or to throw to throw at a problem or if you see people in leadership roles being disrespectful to their own teams those are all big red flags don't take the bait and from an you work with people not with IPS you can chase after the passion project but at the end of the day what will make a project good is if you focus on working with good decent and talented people now I'm not discounting passion it's an important part of our work if you're like me you fall in love with every game that you work on every game that you make and that's important because love is what makes games great as Dillon says each game you make is the most important one you might only get a handful in your career so treat it well and make it the best it can be but we all know from life that love leaves us open to heartbreak a game you love is going to be canceled or publishers going to give you changes that decimate it or you're gonna release it and no one's gonna care no one's gonna listen no one's going to buy it

those things are gonna happen to you and you need to be able to come back from those things you need to be able to stand up after the most important you need to know when to hold and when to fold you need to know how to walk away and that goes for features and teams and companies as well I think Forest has great advice here raise yourself for change and instability the industry changes a lot every few years jobs come and go sometimes opportunities dry up where you are sometimes we want to move to chase a new opportunity prepare yourself for these possibilities from day one and you won't be surprised when they happen so up nose and feel number three focus on creativity and craft so over the years of game development I realized they made an interesting shift from I make games I'm interested in - I'm interested in making games and that's an important shift because I learned to focus on my craft it became less important to me that I was making a game that I would as a consumer actually play and more important that I was working on a game that challenged me and made me think about new things and made me learn in the process of developing it

and I think that that's an important switch as Jennifer says find something to fall in love with and whatever work you're doing it's impossible to do creative work on demand if you're resentful or bored no matter what your first impression is find a point of connection with the work or with the audience and build off that to fall in love with what you're creating so another good tip get a hobby seriously it doesn't have to be inside outside games I don't care just get a hobby you need something that you can own so when things are really difficult at work you can come home and there's something you own that no one can tell you what to do with it or how to do it it's absolutely yours as Megan says the phrase do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life is toxic vs it's still work and sometimes in order to keep being passionate about it you have to stop step back and be passionate about something different so you don't burn yourself out stay open to learning stay open to travel find ways to embrace everything that life has to offer beyond

games get out of the office do your research and things that are not about what you're working on as Brenda says I limit my research to stuff that fascinates me without regard to fire that will make it into a game it usually does in some way optimism fuel number four is built from her mistakes and share them you hear all the time you know build from your mistakes learn from your mistakes I like to say leverage your mistakes because that's your gold as you build experience those mistakes that you carry with you are the things that enhance your company's they make your work better you need to share them with other people as openly and often as you can as jane says actively find and face the things that make you feel like your total newb and when you get through it again and again you never feel old and certainly not stagnated I love this tip from Teresa create an email folder titled post mortem and then put anything you learned all those big issues in it at the end of the project revisit this and be better next time I'd never actually considered having a personal post-mortem folder just for what I've learned on a project

keep in mind that staying open to feedback is also a way of learning from your mistakes and so are metrics actually and it's important to be open to feedback no matter how harsh it seems that even to ask for it as Brenda says I surround myself with incredibly talented people who genuinely loved making games and I encourage them to give me direct hardcore feedback a lot of developers mentioned mentoring is another way to leverage their mistakes and also grow as individuals as Gaurav said being a mentor is a great way to get a new perspective on game development bring a fresh energy into your daily routine and use your experience to improve someone else's life or as Terry says what keeps me going is mentoring and paving the way for young ladies who are up-and-coming in the industry so I chose infill number five sinc balance and rest so use your PTO people like seriously every place I have worked there have been a significant number of people who every

month get that email that says you're at the cap if you don't spend your email you're gonna lose it and then they take that one day and stay just to hit the cap there's so many reasons why you need a break away from the office of course one of them is health as Anne says the single biggest lesson I've learned don't sacrifice your health to make a game years off our lives from stress or lack of sleep are not worth it or from Sandra you may feel that it's more important to pour your soul into the game to meet the deadlines even if you're crying tears of blood from exhaustion and that vacation can wait it can't it's good for your physical and mental health but also simply to renew your sources of inspiration and that I think is the key point for me so that creativity requires space there's a reason that you might be struggling with a problem you need to solve all week at work and then all of a sudden on Sunday you're driving you're here in the shower you're at a barbecue and there's the answer because your brain finally got the space away from the problem to noodle it over and figure it out and that space is important in your daily life too as Dan points out

set aside sacred time each day to doodle and dream even after all these years a hot cup of coffee a nice pen and a blank notebook are deeply inspiring this is the heart of the process that I try to never lose number 6 is find a community so yes you absolutely need friends and family that you can lean on when things get rough I don't know what I would have done without my husband over the years as Terry says I've voice suffered greatly when I didn't have a support system to prop me up on days that were unfair frustrating or just plain dreary whoever it is friends or family make sure you have a set of healthy supportive people there to share good and bad moments with but I'd like to point out that you also need a game development community it could be the people you work with now it could be the people you've worked with before but you need people who are going through the same things that you are they need to share their mistakes with you and for you to share your mistakes with them if you're introverted or been separated by distance there's slack there's Skype let's find a forum I love my game dead

Twitter community personally but you need to find that community somewhere you also need to invest in the people that you work with as Dylan says invest in the people around you your peers your leads and even your bosses include them in your life the industry is small and tight-knit and they might help your career many years later even if you've moved on every relationship is important and this especially moving bit from Tracy what keeps me going is the support of my friends in the industry who helped me stay connected they've recommended me for jobs moving my stuff watch my cat and through birthday parties I didn't know I needed they hugged me when my world shrank and depression took hold number 7 is be the change and I know it sounds hackneyed but I really believe that we're all in this together and the only hope we have for meaningful change in our lives and our games and our companies in our industry is for each of us to stand up for the things that we believe in even when it's hard and to also help our friends who are standing up and I don't just mean this about social issues I mean this about everything how we speak to each other in meetings how long those

meetings are how we develop the games that we're working on all of these things require us to put our effort into making them better and actually the effort of doing that the act of making a difference you'll find opens you up my life is opened up tremendously since I started speaking at things like this as hard as it is for me because I feel like I have a better sense of purpose now as Jen says what keeps me going is knowing that I can make a difference to other people whether it's connecting an idd a member with a perfect mentor or you have opportunity hearing someone talk about how a life experience changed their life or a game experience change their life or having someone tell me how much they're looking forward to their next major anniversary in gamedev and now the last point you need to scupper and be willing to change your own path a great quote from Christina know your purpose knowing what drives you to develop and create games and revisiting and reflecting on that drive will give you the inner strength you need to make good decisions and overcome obstacles having a driving force means you always have a compass to guide you so a lot of us are

continuing climbing that stair right the never ending accomplishment stair stairs of game development and it's bigger salary and better title and more prestigious company bigger game more sales right we're all on that staircase so take just a minute and tell you about my experience on that staircase to illustrate the point so I loved all of the games that I worked on every single one of them but I wouldn't really call any of them mine and it's not just because they were colossal group efforts because they totally were but it's because I was a commercial game developer I made the game that the company wanted me to make for the audience we wanted to address with the IP that we had I was never about expressing myself it could not be about expressing myself because that would be the wrong thing for the game the game needed to have what was right for the audience so I spent twenty five years and I'd never shipped anything that I thought expressed me as an individual or as a designer and I tried to get at that with side projects but realistically after

giving 200% of yourself to game development during the day you were too tired I was too tired and my brain capacity for game design was just exhausted so it never got any traction regardless of how important it was to me which was very important so in 2012 I got stage 4 cancer and it changed my life and even after that I still didn't get any traction on this and I can't really can't tell you why but I just didn't and then in 2015 I got lung cancer still didn't get any traction and then in 2016 the lung cancer came back incurable metastatic terminal so I really was going to literally die and have never shipped a single game that I felt reflected me as a person that was really hard and I knew when I responded well to a clinical trial and maybe had a little bit more time that I had to make a change or I was never gonna fill this hole that was on my soul and that's really how it felt so if you remember this from the start I am a design director at Microsoft but I don't work on games

I am the design director for Microsoft stream which is enterprise video software it's like the YouTube for business it's a fantastic product I love the team really interesting design problems Microsoft has a great work/life balance and they very much encourage creativity so now when I leave work I have the energy I have the mental space I have the freedom I'm not under IP agreements I can ship games that matter to me I can tell my story for the first time ever and it made me hesitate to even do this talk for a while I felt like does this make me a an impostor some kind of minor betraying game development by not doing it from my full-time job but as I started to work toward this game that I'm actually gonna ship I realize now for the first time ever I'm free I can make foot every game I want to make for whatever audience I want to make I'm an indie developer now I'm still a game developer I'm just a different kind of game developer and I'm working on a paranormal romance adventure game but choose a choice of games just certainly not something I

ever would have shipped this cork on so developer but I'm really excited about it and the reason I'm telling you all of this it's because I want you to understand very personally when I say that life is short you need to figure out what path is going to make you happy and you need to do it now don't wait until you have a hole in your soul and you're looking at an expiration date and realize you haven't done the things that you need to do so that's my optimism juice and when I reached out to developers to ask them hey JEE have some advice which you know was very clearly going into a list of advice I actually loved what Dave said which is funny to me don't farm advice from pithy sounding lists a good advice administered in a vacuum your situation is complex and unique and good advice from one can be terrible for another and I think that's true but I can't say that we all share two things regardless of who we are first is that we're game developers and second is whatever your path is it's gonna get wrecked and it's

gonna get wrecked multiple times game developments will do it life will do it and honestly to be truthful time does it anyway time changes all of us it evolves our needs that have us our goals so if I can leave you with one thing today it's a challenge it's for you to think now about what makes you happy what will fill the holes in your soul what do you need to do to be happy what is your path how are you going to express your unique story what games are you gonna make that tell other people about your story because I personally can't wait to play them so thank you [Applause]