So. How’s your last three years been?
When I accepted a full-time role at BonusXP in April 2020, I’d just returned from a family trip to Florida, including a somewhat ill-advised trip to Disney World the week before all the theme parks shut down for COVID. I had no idea what was about to unfold – a couple of years of pandemic chaos, a full year of remote schooling for my son, and multiple deaths and severe illnesses in both my wife’s family and my own.
In parallel with the chaos in my personal life, I settled into my new role with a great team. BonusXP had just moved into a new office, but in the early days of the pandemic, we quickly transitioned to fully remote work. While we’d eventually reopen the office and offer a hybrid option for local folks, most of the team ended up staying remote. In the end, I probably spent no more than 30 work days at the BonusXP office between April 2020 and the end of May 2023, doing most of my work from the same home office from which I’d run Scree Games.
Despite my best intentions to continue writing and blogging as a side venture for the last three years, figuring out how to balance the personal challenges in my family’s life with the demands of the lead producer role on a large, mostly-remote team took all my time and energy. The Scree Games blog has languished since that April three years ago, with the only traffic the horde of spammers slowly filling up my pending list of unapproved comments. (The mass selection and deletion functions are my new best friends.)
But now the situation’s changed. Unfortunately, BonusXP’s long run (eleven years as a studio, shipping eleven games) has come to an end. As of June 2023, the studio is shutting down.
I’ve written before about studio closures and layoffs. When the dust settles, I’ll write more about BonusXP’s shutdown. For now, I’ll just say that BonusXP’s team is one of the finest I’ve worked with from top to bottom, and we were all supportive and kind to each other right up until the last day. The owners of the studio were unfailingly honest and did everything they could to salvage the situation, and there is nothing I’d change about my professional choices over the last three years. Sometimes games just don’t ship, despite the talent of the team and the quality of the game – external factors come into play and there’s no one to blame but the shifting tides of the industry.
What’s Next?
So now I pick up right where I left off. For the moment, I’m splitting my time between contract consulting and resuming work on a small independent game. While I’m not looking to jump back into a full-time position with another studio immediately, I’m looking forward to leveraging the new things I’ve learned with partners both new and old who are looking to ship great games.
More immediately, the Scree Games blog reboots with what I hope will be a higher frequency of posts and better content than its pre-BonusXP / pre-pandemic days. I’ve got a lot of pent-up topics to write about. The long-term effects of AI on both written content and art for interactive games are making a lot of headlines lately. Pervasive, poisonous cultural issues in the industry are still near the forefront of my mind, with revelations last year about Activision Blizzard and others proving that many studios have a long way to go before they’re truly inclusive, supportive places to work.
Thankfully, the NFT and Web3 buzzes of the last few years seem to be petering out as rapidly as they rose like a virulent COVID strain, so maybe I’ll be able to skip wasting valuable brain cells writing about that stuff.
And there are games, games, games – so many great games to talk about from the last three years! I have to write soon about Deep Rock Galactic, an absolutely genius design with a crazy long market tail (and our family game of choice). I need to write about the things to learn from the stellar UX design and friction-reducing mechanics in Age of Wonders 4. There are even lessons learned from my eternal struggle to maintain a 1000+ rating in rapid matches on chess.com.
So for Scree Games, a reboot. Come back and visit every once in a while – I’ll make it worth your time.
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