Always assuming good intentions
My guest for this week’s episode on Game Dev Diary was someone that truly radiates passion about everything related to games. Harshal Karvande joined me to discuss his gaming journey and the things that helped him along the way. He is currently working as a Game Design Lead at Rovio and he previously worked at Zynga.
Early in his life, at the age of 13, Harshal was able to realize that games were all he wanted to work on. This definitely helps anyone shape their life and career accordingly, but he didn’t just stop with this realization. What helped him take his first steps into gaming was the fact that he made sure he had people sharing the same passion around him. The famous saying about a person being the average of the 5 people they are closest with is quite accurate in my opinion. And if you can try to find people that share your passion in any way, it will certainly make the challenges along the road much easier to manage.
Just like any other industry, gaming is also maturing and it can be seen clearly from the quality of the games increasing through time. A lot of people talk about the good old days when it was only a matter of making a good game and uploading it to the App Store. Then the top chart gods would help you with a lot of discoverability and virality where you would have a lot of space and time for improvement. Now, with players having endless alternatives that they can default to, you have to be almost perfect right from the start to capture the attention of your audience. Since these are the rules that apply to games, people working on them also have to find their way around these rules. For someone trying to break into the gaming industry today, it is incredibly important to be aware of the level of detail needed. And applying it to yourself where you do your absolute best to understand the company that you want to enter and the game and genre that you want to work on are almost table stakes at this point.
When it comes to growing your career, one thing that helped Harshal was changing countries. Everyone is a product of their own environment and most of us inherit lots of personal treats from where we were born and raised. However, it is still up to each and every one of us to change that throughout the course of our lives. Sometimes it comes with changing where you live, but sometimes it comes with changing the team that you work at in the same company. The important thing is to shake things up once every while to see different points of view to widen your perspective.
The most interesting thing that we talked about, however, was the importance of assuming good intentions. Although we depend heavily on words while talking to others, we let our body do most of the actual communication. After COVID and the lockdown period, virtual communication became quite common and it obviously removed most of the things we expressed through our bodies. In this sort of a situation where it is very hard to know what other people are going through and feeling while talking to us, Harshal thinks that it is really important to always assume good intentions. If you start with assuming ill will and you are wrong, it requires a lot of energy and time to change your mindset in addition to the harm you might have done in the process. If you do the opposite, on the other hand, it will be much simpler to manage the situation. I can’t say I have been applying this to the heart, but I think it was quite refreshing to hear how Harshal put things into perspective with respect to assuming good intentions.
The passion for games and the positivity for life that Harshal brought to the conversation were incredibly amazing. I really enjoyed our conversation and honestly think that the philosophy of assuming good intentions can be a life changer for many people out there. There might be instances where you will be harmed because of that, but I think the long term results will yield a positive outcome.