The final episode of Enduring Play Season 1 launches today featuring Riot Games Senior Producer Yesenia Cisneros, whose iconic self-made journey through the gaming industry has seen her build a video game production career on a strong personal brand of people-focused problem solving, empathy, and well-executed game development fundamentals. In this practical episode, you’ll get concrete examples of some of the most common failures to thrive amongst aspiring games and game developers, along with advice on what to do to avoid those pitfalls yourself. Yesenia is a repeat presenter at the Game Developers Conference and her perspective has helped her ship work for some of the world’s biggest intellectual properties, including Minecraft, Batman, and Pokémon. As always, Enduring Play provides context so listeners at all experience levels can enjoy and understand the conversation without frantic LLM searches, whether you’re a seasoned game developer or a curious fan of games.
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Key Quotes:
Please, please, please, please build tools ahead of time before you go into production. A lot of places I’ve worked, it’s very easy to deprioritize tools because people just want to get features in the game so we can get it out the door as quickly as possible. But if you have the right schedule and you build the tools properly, it’s going to be so much better in the long run because you’ll be able to iterate a lot faster. That’s my PSA: Please build tools in your games for your developers because they need it.
If you just ask, “Oh, I wonder what happened?” That’s leading with empathy instead of, “Oh, man, this person, this studio- They suck because they didn’t deliver this.” When you see someone having a bad day and they lash out at you, leading with kindness is sometimes just wondering, “Oh, I wonder what’s going on in their day.” It doesn’t excuse the behavior that’s happening to you, but it’s like, “Are they having a bad day or did something happen to them?” So it’s kind of the same thing with our games: “Oh, I wonder why they didn’t ship on time. Do people feel safe? Is there something going on at the studio?”
Your user research team actually knows a lot more than you think. I’ve worked at places where user research kind of gets frowned upon. They’re like, “We’ll listen to their feedback, but we’re not going to do it.” Every place I’ve worked, user research has usually been right about the feedback that they give to us early on about our game because they know what’s trending, what’s not landing well, what the issues are, what people in the community are talking about. User research and community management are very valuable in terms of helping develop your game and you should consider them as part of the development team because they have a different perspective than you do working in the trenches.
So many people forget about those telemetry hooks for those critical moments in the game that you wouldn’t have thought about. That’s something I’ve definitely learned launching games because I’ve worked on a lot of live-service games and it’s having those telemetry hooks; they’re so crucial for those big moments. As an example, “What weapon are people using the most and what’s not performing?” Oh, okay, maybe we should stop making those and start making more of these because that’s what people like. And that’s how you have a successful live-service game: it’s when you actually know what your players are doing so you can help better serve their player experience.
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