I’m departing from my weekly blog post to reflect on a workshop day we held to better determine the direction of Convict Interactive in the future. Tim was keen to work out where we all stood on certain game development and company development issues. He’s actually provided them for you in his blog – if you’d like to run these for yourself or your own company then make sure you check it out. What follows is my personal reflection on the day’s proceedings.

After going through the activities, I learned quite a few things about myself. What surprised me (though it really shouldn’t have) was that I no longer desired to be an amazing graphics or AI programmer. I’d still love to do these things since they appeal to me academically. However I know I’d miss the excitement of being an indie/startup/entrepreneur. I think that I’d actually be more suited to a producer role in the future – I like to have some control over most aspects of the game and business.

I also identified that what I really love, more than anything else, is to learn. If I’m stuck in a role where I’m not learning anything, then I’m not happy (teaching does, sadly, come under this category a fair bit). Making games means I constantly have the opportunity to learn – it doesn’t matter if I’m programming, networking, designing, or looking after business matters, I always seem to be learning something new. I don’t think I could have this experience in any other industry.

Another realisation, and one that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, was the fact that people and relationships are really important to me. This is somewhat fitting for my role – networking and making connections comes more easily to me than to the others. But this also means that my main life goal is not to be a hotshot game developer (though that’s pretty high up there) - cliché as it may be for a female, I’d really just like to have my own family. So yeah, analyse that how you will.

Thankfully, when we went through some later activities about the company direction, all members agreed on the fact that we don’t want to make games with needless sex, violence or drug references. We did have a number of differing opinions about what kind of games we wanted to make – hopefully this is something we will keep in mind when designing games so that one person is not really unhappy by the direction of a game.

I think the workshop was a real success – I enjoyed learning more about myself and the others. Hopefully we understand one another better now, and it will be easier to avoid alienating someone, and easier to keep more people happy. If you have your own indie studio, or are just thinking about making games, then I suggest that you read Tim’s post and go through these exercises yourself. Totally worth stopping development for a day in order to do them!