It is difficult to distill a multi-dimensional problem like job satisfaction into one single factor or answer. There wasn't one single thing about game dev that I missed, but rather a convergence of several factors in my life at the time that made going back to game dev the right choice for me. Had some of those factors been different at the time, I may not have returned to game dev.

I've said before that I find most of my job satisfaction in building something engaging for the player. I really like creating experiences for them, thinking about all of the little details and coming up with all of the ways to improve on each iteration. It's what I find most engaging about my work. I want to feel reassured that I'm building something that someone will enjoy. During my employment outside of video games, I worked in a games-adjacent field (casino games) and it was very much not player-driven. Casino games are highly regulated by the local and federal governments here in the US - casino gaming legal requirements are a lot like the console certification process on steroids. The majority of the development process is not to make a good or fun product for the players, but to meet all of the government certification requirements.

Beyond this, the company I was working for was also located in a small town (pop: ~20,000). I grew up in a fairly large city (pop: ~1 million); I grew up thinking a town with 100,000 residents was small. As you may expect, there were some elements of culture clash there. I was not used to dirt roads and lack of options when it came to food and entertainment. The city had two total movie theaters - one with four screens and one with six screens, so if neither showed a new movie I wanted to see, I would have to drive to another city. There wasn't a lot of option for other things to do there either; a lot of the locals did the wilderness thing - hiking, hunting, fishing, camping, etc. I was not (and still am not) really into those pastimes.

In addition to these two major factors (and perhaps most importantly), I was also still single and did not have any major responsibilities that might have kept me there. I did not have a mortgage, I did not have a family to provide for, I did not have a romantic partner who may have had a hard choice to make whether to stay with me and move or stay with their job. I did not have children who would have to leave friends, I did not have a house to sell, I did not have local obligations to fulfill.

It was the convergence of these factors that made it possible for me to decide to look for work elsewhere and go back to proper game dev. There was active pressure to leave from an environment I didn't like (the small town and lack of options), lack of pressure to keep me there (no attachments or responsibilities), and the work was not engaging to me (all cert, all the time). I bided my time, looked carefully for a good exit strategy, then took my leave when the right opportunity presented itself.

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You could be right. I could just be some schmuck that [a lot of prominent people in the game industry have shared and referenced]. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. It won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t.

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One of the reasons I’m able to post with candor is due to the anonymity. Without it, I’d have to toe the company line at all times or shut the blog down, and I would rather not do either of those. I can tell you the genres of games I’ve worked on, though:

And here are the platforms I’ve worked on:

I’m currently working on a title for current gen consoles. That’s all I can really say about it.

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