I wish we talked more about the importance of buoyancy as a soft skill for game dev.

Making video games seems to me a lot like swimming up against the ocean, periodically a wave will come along and beat the absolute shit out of you.

You get feedback about something you made that’s really hard to hear, something you are deeply passionate about gets cut, someone you are depending let’s you down, you hit dead ends.

And it sucks.

You are almost never prepared when you get hit. You get salt water up your nose and in your eyes. You can barely see which way is up from under the water.

You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to protect yourself from getting submerged, but the rising tides come for all of us.

The people I’ve seen thrive in making these crazy messy creative endeavors are all buoyant.

They don’t try to prevent themselves from ever getting submerged, instead they focused on getting better and better at being the first ones back on top of the water after a big wave.

There’s some expectance of realizing you can’t stop the sting of the water up your nose, it’s part of swimming in the ocean, but you can certainly get better at finding your way back to the surface after getting dunked.

I don’t think there’s some shortcut at getting better at it. Game dev certainly throws everyone a lot of curveballs.

I think a lot of us have been lucky enough to be surrounded by other buoyant people, we’ve watched them pop up from some pretty gnarly shit.

And after we talk and learn from the buoyant people around us, one day we realize we are the first person up on the other side of the wave and we can help show others how it’s going to be alright.