Traiteur Dev Blog #10: Why We Do This

Happy Wednesday as always, and welcome back to the Traiteur development blog!

This week, to celebrate blog #10, we don’t have a formal update on the game or when you can buy it or anything like that.

Instead, this week we’ll take a moment to talk about why we do this.

Gather ’round the campfire!

Why?

It all started when I was four years old. I was playing Super Mario World on my brother’s SNES — he left for school 30 minutes before I did, meaning I got to play “his” console without him knowing. Now, I was four years old and not very good at video games — but that didn’t stop me.

From that early age, games captured me. I knew this was a way that we could tell new and innovative kinds of stories, and I made the decision to be a game developer at that very moment.

There was a long journey in-between then and now, but two highlights stick out, and I’d like to share them with you.

The first one is a sort of series of events. I’ve talked before about a mentor I had at Gearbox Software named Aaron. You can read the whole story at that link, but to make a long story short, Aaron let me job shadow him and also taught me a lot about production, the industry, and being a professional in general.

We meet every summer when I’m in Dallas for QuakeCon, and last year we only had a small time slot in which to meet. He asked me how things were going, I told him what I learned, and I told him my plan for if things didn’t work out — if we’re successful, then we have great jobs, and if not, we have the experience to get great jobs.

Without skipping a beat, he smiles and says, “Or you could try again.”

The other happened early into knowing my other mentor, Zach. I was talking to him about what failure might mean. In his infinite salesman-like stature, he proudly said, “I’ve never failed.” Of course, this gets your attention and you ask how that’s possible. What he said helped mold my perspective on the world today.

“To me, failure means that either A) you gave up because it got too difficult and you could have pushed a little further, or B) you didn’t get the outcome you wanted and learned nothing from it. By that account, I’ve never failed!”

I will never forget either of those moments as long as I live, because the two wonderful mentors I’ve been blessed to have known taught me something so pivotal: life is about perspective.

We could spend our time focusing on what could have been, or how things should have been done differently… or we can move on to the next thing, taking our learning with us and making something even more badass in the process.

At Raconteur, we choose to do the latter, and with Traiteur, I’ve never been so confident about something in my life. It recaptures that very first moment when I decided I wanted to make games and tell different kinds of stories.

I think this is going to be something like you’ve never seen before, and next week, I’ll show you our first official glimpse into the game through a video walkthrough!

Thank you all so much for following us for ten weeks — it’s only going to get even more exciting from here!

Have a wonderful week.

-Nick

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