I spent about fifteen years working at Melbourne House in Australia (which went from being independent to being bought by Infogrammes/Atari, and was then bought by Krome, before finally being wound down, but it was mostly the same awesome group of talented folks for most of that time. At the end, I’d been there for fifteen years and still wasn’t in the top ten list of longest-serving employees; I felt like only a medium-sized fish in a very large pond).
After that, I went to an EA studio for a couple years (which was very difficult for me, as I was put on a smallish team where I literally had more years of experience than everyone else on the team added together; I was suddenly in the very strange situation where any silly thing I said would just be taken as gospel and acted upon, and it took me a very long time to figure out how to behave to mitigate the risks of that). Then I did a couple years in (non-games) statistics software to pad out my resume a bit and show that I could do non-games work as well.
After that, I started freelancing, doing both games and non-games work, to support myself while I worked on my own game, which is now up on Steam in Early Access. Freelancing was a lot of fun, and I love the freedom to switch between projects and solve the most difficult problems of one project and then moving on to a new, different project with a new ‘most difficult’ problem to solve. Though obviously the lack of job security was a bit of a strange new experience, after spending my whole career on a salary!
I also spent a couple years acting as an advisor on the local Film Victoria’s games funding grant program, helping select projects to allocate grant funds toward and just generally advising applicants (whether or not they eventually received funding). I’m super proud of the work those folks do and that I got to be a small part of it for a while. I feel like the blossoming we’ve seen here in the local indie games scene has a lot to do with their support for the industry.
After that, I went to an EA studio for a couple years (which was very difficult for me, as I was put on a smallish team where I literally had more years of experience than everyone else on the team added together; I was suddenly in the very strange situation where any silly thing I said would just be taken as gospel and acted upon, and it took me a very long time to figure out how to behave to mitigate the risks of that). Then I did a couple years in (non-games) statistics software to pad out my resume a bit and show that I could do non-games work as well.
After that, I started freelancing, doing both games and non-games work, to support myself while I worked on my own game, which is now up on Steam in Early Access. Freelancing was a lot of fun, and I love the freedom to switch between projects and solve the most difficult problems of one project and then moving on to a new, different project with a new ‘most difficult’ problem to solve. Though obviously the lack of job security was a bit of a strange new experience, after spending my whole career on a salary!
I also spent a couple years acting as an advisor on the local Film Victoria’s games funding grant program, helping select projects to allocate grant funds toward and just generally advising applicants (whether or not they eventually received funding). I’m super proud of the work those folks do and that I got to be a small part of it for a while. I feel like the blossoming we’ve seen here in the local indie games scene has a lot to do with their support for the industry.