Learning from the best

To wrap up the first season of Game Dev Diary, I had two guests on the episode for the first time. Ayhan Şahin and Tuğrul Atak, co-founders of Playabit, joined the podcast to talk about their journey in gaming and how they founded. Both of them worked for some of the largest gaming companies like Jam City, Scopely, and Big Fish. They also worked together at Peak as two of the first members of Toy Blast.

As two experienced people working on games for a very long time, the most important advice for people trying to get into the industry is two-folded: selecting a genre that you want to work on and playing the most successful games from that genre. Since the gaming industry is quite large and there are several types of games for several types of players, it is impossible to cater to every genre out there. Selecting your niche by focusing on a specific genre will help you channel your time and energy in the best way so that you can properly improve yourself. The next thing that you need to do after picking a genre is playing games. And although this seems quite obvious and rather simple, playing games in this context doesn’t mean just playing them and having a good time. You need to be more deliberate while playing those games and analyzing them so that you can get an understanding of what the most successful games are doing. Getting that understanding is going to help you establish a good starting point to build your skills on.

Another important truth about the gaming industry discussed in the season finale was that working on games is very demanding. Work-life balance is a very important topic that needs to be taken seriously. But, especially when you work in a hit-driven business like games, you will be expected to work way more than average to make that hit game. Competition in the industry is very tough and is increasing every day since there are more games out there being developed by both newcomers and incumbents. In an industry like this, if you rest on your laurels, you will quickly be left behind and will need to work even harder. So, anyone that wants to get into the games industry should also be aware of this. I think you can still find many teams that won’t expect you to work 60-hour weeks, but I doubt the level of success you will have with them. And since this is a very personal choice, you need to decide which part of this puzzle attracts you more.

For people that want to improve themselves throughout their careers, working with the best and trying to learn from them is what Ayhan and Tuğrul have to say. As they worked at some of the best teams, the first part was already there for them. But, learning from them is the actual work that requires constant effort. No matter how multidisciplinary you are, there will be other people working on the specific parts of the game where you have very little idea about. You might be an artist who has no idea how certain animations are developed or a developer how certain visual assets are created. In those scenarios, going up to those people’s desks (or DMs if you’re remote) and asking them questions about how they did a certain thing will be a huge help in improving yourself. You can’t possibly do everything, but you can easily learn a lot from others simply by asking them about what they do. And believe me, most people are quite eager to share their knowledge and experience when they are asked about their job.

The importance of learning is very obvious, but the way you approach it is what determines your speed of learning in the long term. Being laser focused from the first moment by choosing your niche and spending most of your time is of utmost importance especially early in your career. Then once you see people with great skills and experience around you, learning from them as much as possible will be even more important. Many people tend to slow down their learning if they already achieved something and feel successful. But even when you’ve achieved things that other people are impressed with, if you can ignore it and keep trying to learn from others, you will be able to achieve even greater things as a result.