How does one stay motivated doing this? It sounds very tedious.asked by Koala999

To be honest, since the new team update, it's been pretty nice because essentially, we were just making the art before, and now we have a real awesome chance to take our own work further and develop our own stuff. So for example, I haven't been tasked with this specific thing. This is just stuff I've been working on between tasks. So there'll sometimes be a day or two where you're waiting for your next task or you're waiting for it all to kick off. So you're just doing prep work to see how you can prepare yourself for it. And this was one of those tasks for us. We had a spare day.

Those things come up quite a bit because something you're supposed to be working on gets blocked by a dependency from somebody on another team, and you need them to finish their thing before you can continue on the thing that you're supposed to be working on. So you find other tasks to make sure that you're always being as productive as possible. I think we have an episode of ISC dedicated to that phenomenon coming up later this next quarter, about the sort of middle tasks, the things that aren't necessarily laid out but tend to crop up during development when you have to wait on something from somebody else. Another way that folks are always battling tedium: if you've been following the project for any prolonged period of time, you've heard a lot about "this team was supposed to work on this, but they're moved over to this", "this artist was on this team and they're now on this team or that team" and stuff like that. Part of that "the only constant in game development is change" mentality is keeping things fresh and interesting and motivating for the people who are working on the project. Of the many reasons decisions are made throughout game development, one of the considerations is always about trying to place the right person to the right task. And this person might have been the right person for that task three months ago, but they may not be the right person for that task today. It might be somebody else because of the last thing they worked on or just where they are in their career development at that time. So it's an amazing calculus that is worked out by our producers and our directors. And you can go back to, gosh, there was an SCL we did, I want to say 2017, 2018, where we worked with producers and built a schedule out. It was super popular. Literally, we spent an hour building out a schedule and I got a lot of crap for it. But it's another essential part of game development, to show the various considerations that go into why these people are on this thing and not this thing. It's an amazing calculus that I wish more game developers talked about.