Prepare Yourself, ATX Game Makers

Let’s talk about our futures; let’s talk about how we achieve our goals!   What are your goals? Perhaps you have a clear intention for your future and are prepared for success? If so, awesome! If not, now is a great time to start. Coordinating decades of my own hopes into reality while, at the same time, shipping many video games has helped me nail down a few tips. Here are my basic processes that can be scalable toward large and small personal or game industry goals.

Prepare

First, create a baseline understanding before jumping into processes. Start understanding yourself and the world around you. Here are some recommended variables to be well-prepared:

• Understand personal values
• Have clear intentions for your future
• Brainstorm goal(s)
• Identify self-sabotage
• Identify external challenges or blockers

We’re getting right to it. Now, one process that increases probability of reaching goals is to focus on the goal’s end point and work backwards until understanding the first step. Let’s do it!

Game Industry Example

In the planning phase for gaming QA, test plans, telemetry plans, staffing plans, and budget plans are created. Test Leads that like to play on Easy Mode start at the end by creating a mock-up of the release candidate (RC) milestone report. They make this report specific to the title and imagine it sent to the key stakeholders for the project’s submission. Working backwards into what the RC testing looks like, what the risks are, what areas are important, how many people will need to work on it, a likely delivery plan through assumptions and experience.

By working backward from the goal, everything falls into place to identify and take direct steps toward reaching the goal successfully. Doing so can help clear a large part of the path for success.

Work on Goals

This can be a lot of work, so give yourself a significant amount time to solidify appropriate brainstormed goals. Here a few steps to help make an idea a lived reality:

• Raise self-discipline to do challenging things.
• Incorporate personal values into your goals.
• Visualize achieving the goal to define it with specificity.
• Roleplay achieving the goal. Take in reality and limitations of your situation and use them to help mold the details of your goals.
• Mitigate risks.
• Set deadlines.
• Create regular check-ins for progress.

One of the points above is roleplaying the achievement of your goal. Depending on the goal, this can be intimidating. If you find yourself unable to clearly see the path between now and that future, break the large goal into smaller ones and work on understanding those smaller checkpoints.

Game Industry Example

Breaking down complex tasks into smaller ones is something that your peers leading in game production, game testing, and game QA will be able to do through years of experience. Do you have a friend with gaming QA or production experience? Connect with them to talk about your goals. They would be able to help you consider the realm of future possibilities, branching paths, what may need to occur for you, variations of results from your actions, and how you could work around potential problems.

The next section about organization aims to help you clear the pathway for ease in goal achievement. Organization will improve your timeline to meet your deadlines. When deadlines are met and goals are achieved, motivation and confidence in ability is improved.

Organize

Brains often spend time and energy on clutter and decision making. Being organized can positively affect different parts of your life and the lives of those around you. These four things can help boost the effectiveness of achieving your goals through organization.

1. Remove Clutter

Clear the path for yourself to remove some of the mental load and distraction. Decluttering can happen anywhere. In the home, at work, on your computer, even in the mind or amongst teams of people. You never know where that whole bag of jellybeans will spill.

2. Categorize

It is time to put all the things of a certain type together! This step is often a part of the process when going after minimalization. It also does a few other helpful things like bring an understanding of what will help achieve the goal and will identify what is missing that is needed.

3. Simplify

Do you ever find yourself overwhelmed or spread thin? Sometimes too many options or too many decisions are to blame. The Konmari Method instructs to categorize all items into piles and then simplify through whether the item brings happiness; I have found this to be very effective when instead customized toward goals and values.

4. Be Intentional with Focus

Focus on the positive – what should be done – rather than what should not be done. Do it! Achieve your goals!

Tools and Resources

• Ink + Volt Goal Planner https://inkandvolt.com/
• Hobonichi Planner https://www.1101.com/store/techo/en/
• Bullet Journaling
• Konmari Method https://konmari.com/