The seventh episode of Season 1 of Enduring Play: hosted by Game Development Strategy Guide author Cheryl Platz, is now live with guest Caerie Houchins, current Chief Technology Officer for indie gaming studio Wicked Fox Games. Caerie brings her perspective working on world-class live-service games as an engineering leader to this episode of the podcast, and our conversation explores what it was like working as a critical member of the launch team of VALORANT and how that work differs from her work at the helm of an indie gaming studio today. This episode also explores the role of artificial intelligence in gaming from a very practical engineering perspective, and host Cheryl Platz takes some time to walk through the video game industry conditions that led to the layoffs that sent both Cheryl and Caerie down their current paths. As with all episodes of Enduring Play, there is something here for everyone regardless of discipline or career stage.
Stream now or visit the show notes page for full details:
Key Quotes
”Coming in from a pure tech point of view, I was very focused on the engineering itself and on the technology. I wasn’t giving enough credit to what video game creation is, which is a creative process. And a creative process is messy. It’s not: “Okay, how do I take an engineering problem and break it into smaller pieces and then most efficient path from A to B execute on?” This creative process involves many, many types of people, different types of personalities, a lot of coordination and working together. And I don’t think I truly appreciated that fact going into the gaming industry from tech.”
It’s vital to learn how to properly estimate and break down tasks into subtasks. Trust me, no one likes using something like JIRA to track their issues. But it’s in everybody’s best interest if we all learn how to properly break things down, estimate them and track them. Because if you can’t tell me how long it’s going to take, even a ballpark, I can’t properly plan and road map. Especially in the AAA gaming space, everybody has their own part to play and their own piece of the puzzle. Your delay or inability to plan can cause another team to get behind. It just cascades from there and then that urgency and delay starts building and it snowballs. At the end of the day, more than likely a team is going to have to crunch because another team couldn’t plan properly.
Trying to found a game studio has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Until this point professionally I think the hardest thing I had done was to help launch VALORANT China, a massive project across multiple countries and time zones and languages. Founding a studio is even harder. You’re trying to create something from nothing and I don’t know that there is a good roadmap on like the right way or the wrong way to do that, especially if you’re coming into it and you’re not particularly wealthy yourself. And you actually have to find funding for your studio. If you’re a co founder, whether you’re in engineering like me or anything else, you really need to learn the business side of things. You need to learn the venture capital system, how that works – because it’s complex and not every player out there is looking out for your best interest.
The artists are generally the ones making these AI images using their own prompts to make comps. We asked them to make something, but we’re like, “It doesn’t really matter, we’re going to throw this away.” So we’re not taking the jobs away from anybody here. And that’s super important to me. I really don’t want a lot of these new techniques to have a negative impact on the creatives that actually are the geniuses behind these games in the gaming industry.
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