Dev Take Tuesday - Compliments

When’s the last time you allowed yourself a compliment? Today’s brief Dev Take Tuesday post is inspired by a Twitter hashtag. I saw the little list of what’s trending on Twitter and saw #NationalComplimentDay. Now, I know that all these silly holidays can be somewhat…well…silly. And based off my last desk job I’m pretty sure there are at least three separate “National Donut Days.” All that being said, I still liked the idea of dedicating a day to compliments.

Image of Fallout's Vault Boy, made by Bethesda Softworks

I’m going to make sure to give out a few extra compliments today, both in real life and over Twitter. But that’s not the focus of today’s post. I repeat the question I started with—when’s the last time you allowed yourself a compliment? I feel like the inescapable stream of iteration in game development forces most developers to become increasingly self-critical. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Criticizing is like chiseling—you keep chipping and shaping and smoothing to find something beautiful in what was once rough. But chip away at a stone forever and you’ll wind up with no sculpture and very tired hands.

Remember to take a break from self-criticism every once in a while, and give your project a compliment. Today, I’m going to compliment the work that Robby and I have done to start marketing and playtesting our game early. Working on builds that were only meant for demos felt a bit strange, but we got valuable feedback from the experience. Similarly, tweeting and posting while our followers were few and marketable content was hard to find sometimes felt like the first few brushstrokes of a painting, when the artist wonders if those brushstrokes will amount to anything. We’re starting to see the results from that work as our “painting” takes form, and I’m proud of our efforts to not only make a playable game, but a game that people will (hopefully) want to share with their friends.

So I encourage all the other devs out there to not only participate in #NationalComplimentDay, but to periodically give compliments to your own work, the work of others on your team, and the work of other dev teams. Let’s keep improving our art form and setting the bar higher and higher for what video games can do.  And let’s make sure we don’t wear ourselves out along the way.