{"id":720,"date":"2026-06-28T17:29:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T22:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=720"},"modified":"2026-06-28T17:29:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T22:29:41","slug":"ive-done-all-the-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=720","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve Done All The Things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I was posting on Bluesky today and said &#8220;I&#8217;ve done all the things I ever wanted to do in games,&#8221; which is something I&#8217;ve said in a handful of conversations recently, but maybe not so publicly or visibly, and I decided to dive into what that meant to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-bluesky-social wp-block-embed-bluesky-social\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"bluesky-embed\" data-bluesky-uri=\"at:\/\/did:plc:spxpslnaahdrez5zg2knsz7y\/app.bsky.feed.post\/3mpeqygfjnc22\" data-bluesky-cid=\"bafyreieba4zfmksfzoakkjqaog6jucwic5vzlei6vse6vls4uta3jumpaa\"><p lang=\"en\">(To be clear: I don&#39;t have heroes in this industry anymore. I did when I was younger. I even got to work with some of them. But now I&#39;ve done all the things I ever wanted to do in games, and it turns out your heroes are just people. And that&#39;s pretty cool actually.)<\/p>&mdash; <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/did:plc:spxpslnaahdrez5zg2knsz7y?ref_src=embed\">David Lindsey Pittman (@dphrygian.com)<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/did:plc:spxpslnaahdrez5zg2knsz7y\/post\/3mpeqygfjnc22?ref_src=embed\">2026-06-28T19:56:27.922Z<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/embed.bsky.app\/static\/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>That &#8220;I&#8217;ve done all the things I ever wanted to do in games&#8221; thing has been weird in my current job search. I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m looking for. I don&#8217;t know where I see myself in 5 or 10 years. I&#8217;ve done all the things, I&#8217;ve gotten all the cheevos, and I&#8217;m still playing the game because I enjoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Also because I need to pay the bills.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was starting out, I&#8217;d have said I wanted to level up to being a senior engineer owning some systems, maybe someday become a manager, and maybe if the stars aligned make my own games someday. I did all that before I was 30 years old!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I came back from the solo indie thing, worrying I was stagnating, to challenge myself to do multiplayer code and console porting on The Blackout Club, and I nailed that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;d been hesitant to return to management after my first experience, but I stepped up, led the engineering team on The Killing Stone, and guided us to a smooth landing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this point, I&#8217;m not worried about stagnating, because&#8230; I&#8217;ve done everything. It&#8217;s just a matter of what I focus on next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And really, in the current industry, that&#8217;s a matter of who can\/will pay me. If I can get funding to make Eldritch 2, then obviously I&#8217;ll do that. If I can get a job as a director at a AAA studio, then obviously I&#8217;ll do that. But I can take a senior engineer job and it pays the bills, I&#8217;ll do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A decade ago, in my last job search, I kept asking for more time to make a decision, and the recruiter at 2K (who had previously hired me for 2K Marin) told me frankly that engineers had all the power in negotiations. That ain&#8217;t the case in 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone of my caliber could&#8217;ve walked into any job a decade ago. I mean, I literally had my pick of four offers when I joined Question, and I dragged out negotiations with the other three places so that I could wait for Question&#8217;s offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That ain&#8217;t the case in 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(The other three were Double Fine, Hangar 13\/2K, and Gearbox. I was also in the middle of interviewing with Arkane, but they were in the middle of shipping Prey, so it was going slow. But at least I got an intro call and a programming test there! Can&#8217;t even get that far at most places now.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There have been a handful of jobs I&#8217;ve applied to this time around that I REALLY wanted, and they&#8217;ve all either rejected me outright, declined to continue past the intro call, or withdrawn the position for other reasons (womp womp Otherside).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I just want to make video games, and also pay the bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was posting on Bluesky today and said &#8220;I&#8217;ve done all the things I ever wanted to do in games,&#8221; which is something I&#8217;ve said in a handful of conversations recently, but maybe not so publicly or visibly, and I decided to dive into what that meant to me. That &#8220;I&#8217;ve done all the things [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}