The third episode of Season 1 of Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast, hosted by Game Development Strategy Guide author Cheryl Platz, is now live with guest Amy Kalson, Executive Design Producer at Meta. This week’s episode starts out a bit like an episode of Apple TV’s hit series Mythic Quest with a real-life story of video game development shenanigans that seem almost too scripted to be real, but were a shared core memory for both Amy and host Cheryl during their time on Disney Friends DS. After the walk down that memory lane, the talk turns towards life as a senior creative leader in games, and explores Amy’s cross-cultural path through design and production leadership on several continents.
Key Quotes
“Early on in my career I thought that making a great game was enough: we were going to make great products that were going to make lots of people happy and that was how you won. Now that I’m older, I really think about it differently. Making great games is not enough. It’s great to make great products and to put them out there and to make players happy. But I also want to work on great teams. I also want to help people make their dreams come true. And making great products at all costs is not worth it. If you’re doing it at the expense of others, then you’re doing it wrong.”
“What’s interesting about being a producer is that I think it’s a little different at every studio. I’ve worked at companies where producers are kind of designers. I think we had a lot of that early on at Maxis where you had to come up through production in order to eventually become a game designer. Which drove me crazy at the time, by the way. I hated that. But in hindsight, I’m so grateful for that because it gave me a grounding in production that I could then use later on. At the time I just wanted to design and was mad that I had to learn spreadsheets and Excel. Now I love it.”
Try to not come in with solutions without context. Instead of saying, ‘I’ve played your latest build and it sucks and here’s what you need to do to fix it,’ it’s much more effective if you come in and say, ‘Okay, so I’m playing the build and I’m seeing the following things. What are your thoughts around this? What is your plan for fixing this issue? I’m happy to give you some of the solutions that I thought of, but I’d love to hear more about what it is that you are planning to do.’
Share on Social Media
