Adriel Wallick began working on satellites at university, helping build the systems that handled the routing among instruments. But making games was her dream job, and she piled on computer graphics and AI programming electives. “It never occurred to me to just make a game,” she reflects. “Growing up, it never occurred to me that games were made by real people.” At first, she was discouraged when she found how job listings in game development frequently required experience on a shipped game, even for positions described as “entry level.” Wallick hadn’t made any games, but she had made a satellite, leading her to work at Lockheed Martin on the GOES satellite’s geostational lighting mapper. “I made a simulation model and then a flight command database,” she explains to me while I nod dazedly.
“I started making things.”
When she left that job to move home to Boston, even getting a job at a different company led her to work on a different aspect of the same satellite she’d just left. So Wallick went to PAX East and tried to meet developers from local independent studio Fire Hose Games. “It was an awkward interaction,” Wallick admits. But not to be deterred, she emailed the studio’s founder Eitan Glinert, and learned about the area’s IGDA meetup. “I started making things,” she says. She collaborated with a team on a global game jam game and ended at Fire Hose doing contract work for Harmonix, working on games including Rock Band Blitz. “I basically just shoved my way in the community til I knew enough people, and then I worked hard,” she says cheerfully. “All my game development is self-taught, I built up my skills, and then I finally went indie-indie.” Wallick has since kept on contributing: She planned and organized the cross-country “train jam” for indie developers — which will return next year with even more tickets — joined others in walking off the set of a disastrous reality show with a message about accountability, and started making a game every week in public.
A game a week
Wallick says quickly prototyping and making a small game every week has been crucial to her relationship to game development. “When I first went indie, I thought, hey! I’ve always had the best ideas, and I don’t have time to do them, so now I can do them, and they’ll be wonderful and something-something success,” she says. “I spent a lot of time opening up Unity, organizing things, and then months could go by.”
For her, waiting to execute those big projects, those long-term great ideas, became demoralizing the longer she went without a finished project on her plate. So she decided to borrow an idea from Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, who recommends giving oneself a Sunday deadline and committing to complete — and then let go of — whatever can be accomplished in that one week. “I spent those first few weeks going through all the ‘perfect’ ideas I had obsessed over — and realizing they were shit when you only have a week to prototype them,” Wallick reflects. “At first I felt horrible because all my ideas were dumb, instead of feeling good that I was accomplishing things. But once those ideas were ‘gone’ out of my head, I began to get better ideas.” Making small games rapidly every week gradually began to liberate Wallick from the paralysis of laboring under gigantic, vague ambitions. “There is room now to look at the sunset and be inspired by that,” she says. “These games are not for sale and nobody has to play them; this is practice that is helping me improve the quality of my game design.” “Sure, you don’t get the experience in production and release, but you get experience in seeing a concept through from start to finish — and it’s still an exercise in gaining experience with the emotional impact of putting something out there, putting just a little bit of your heart and soul onto the internet,” she adds. For her 38th week, Wallick decided to make a game that would act as her GDC Europe presentation about her game-a-week project. She hopes other developers will try a similar experiment, and benefit from the results. “Continuously making myself vulnerable and putting myself out there for feedback makes me feel a little less scared,” she adds. “And you learn other people have felt these things as well. Just talking about things in public, about feelings in general is helpful, as you learn we’re all feeling a lot of the same things. And when I analyze why I can’t do something, I learn about where I can push myself.” A common misconception about being indie has to do with ‘not answering to anybody anymore,’ but Wallick has found that public accountability helpful. “You’re not just making games for yourself; you’re making games for other people to play, and the first few weeks you’ll have unplayable messes of nothing. You’re going to feel bad, but you’re also going to feel good because you did it and got to move on, and you know where to go next.”
And you learn about your own strengths and weaknesses fairly quickly, as well as the things you like and don’t like to make. Wallick struggles with time management and planning ahead — “I tend to just sort of do things, and then I sort of mitigate the risk of what happens when a thing goes wrong,” she laughs. “When we try a lot of things, some of them will work out. I have a lot of self-doubt, but I don’t let it stop me.” “We put a lot of constraints on ourselves, and some of them are self-constraints that are easily worked on. Embracing a ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ attitude has really helped me in a lot of things,” she continues. Wallick has emailed business magnate Elon Musk about her idea to send indie games up into space, and while her insistence (and likely follow-ups) might amuse her some, she feels she has nothing to lose. “The worst consequence is that someone says no,” she says. “Or you have to leave a room you’re not supposed to be in.”
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