At one point in my life, my job was to shadow our creative director, write down what he said to the developers and put it in a prioritised schedule. This was provided he didnät change his mind the day after, which frequently happened.

At another point in my life I spent several weeks with a stopwatch and an excel sheet, measuring challenges and unlocks in our game because we didn’t have working telemetry.

I’ve also spent time cleaning up a string list, whittling it down from approximately 100.000 strings to somewhere around 60.000 because, really, there’s absolutely no way to search for a string to see if it exists (there was) before adding a new one.

I’ve argued with legal departments over a choice of words that happened to be trademarked by a tiny garage in the middle of… I want to say Texas, but I’m not sure.

I once did a UI prototype in power point. The power point took 3 weeks to make and contained roughly 1000 slides.

I broke Figma’s memory.

Despite not having any complaints, I was replaced by a dude because the project management wanted a dude instead of me. I left the company.

I also broke a build because the devs changed colors on a 256×256 pixel map that was used to set regions in the game. They forgot to tell me (honest mistake) and because this was nightly builds that were really nightly builds, it took two days to fix.

I have placed so many rice pickers and given so many civilian settlements and military bases names.

I worked between 10 – 18 hours a day for a year and a half.

But my crowning achievement, the one thing that really made me want to jump off a cliff or crawl under a rock and die was when the CEO of a major games company stood on stage in front of the entire studio and said the area I was responsible for was the one area in the game that was lacking. It wasn’t true, but it made me feel awful.

In other words, when you break the build, keep in mind that worse things can happen.