Happy Holidays

I hope that everyone is having an excellent holiday season: exchanging gifts, visiting family and/or friends, and spending lots and lots of quality time with your pets! Even though we took a few days off to spend some time enjoying the food and eggnog, we’re still hard at work on To The Rescue! and are making some improvements that we think you’ll be really excited about. But the most immediate exciting thing for us is that we’ve hired a new animator to help us improve the look and feel of the game.

So much talent, such little time!

The process of finding an hiring an animator at really short notice was something that we didn’t really have much experience with. When we first started working on the game, we went to Byron for our artwork immediately, and we hired Belle sort of serendipitously. But since we are in the middle of a large-feature push with a strict deadline, we needed to find an animator, and fast.

Luckily, Byron has social media connections with a lot of talented animators. After posting on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we received an overwhelming number of applications. As someone who is not an experienced hiring manager, going through them all and carefully choosing who to interview was a lot of work! I have a very hard time saying no to people, and almost every single one of our applicants had incredible work in their show reels.

First we narrowed down the list based on portfolios (hard). Then came the interviews (fun, but it took a lot more time than I anticipated)! Then we had to choose who among the interviews to send an animation test to (extremely hard). We decided early on to only send animation tests to our very top choices, because we didn’t want to waste the time of anyone that we weren’t already fairly certain we wanted to move forward with. I think this was a smart decision, but even just having to say no to a single person who spent the time on the test was a challenge.

All of the animation tests we received (on a very short timeline, mind you) completely shattered our expectations, which made it even harder to choose. As a team, we ended up ranking them by considering the quality of the animations, time estimates, and a few other factors to decide, and it was still incredibly close.

In the end, though, I’m happy to say that we are ecstatic to be working with Kat Higgins as our new lead animator! I have no doubt that they will be an excellent asset to our team and that their work will make for a much more lively aesthetic experience in To the Rescue!.

As part of our large-scale refactor, we are also revisiting our art workflow (and designs) with Kat in mind. Currently, a lot of our animation is a poorly-implemented animation equivalent of “programmer art,” and we’re excited to make some more intelligent changes to not just the appearance of the animations, but in the way they are implemented behind the scenes.

Takeaways

I think we vastly underestimated the time and effort it takes to find and hire new members of the team at this stage of development. Considering our lack of experience and time, though, I think they we did a good job of surveying our options and making a good choice.

However, it’s important to remember that tasks like this are a non-trivial part of development and takes a huge amount of emotional labor. We initially approached it as if it would be something that we did in the background of all of our main development work, but it ended up being a much more involved process. Which is okay!

It’s easy to feel like you know how much non-development work goes into a game. But as a small team, we’re still constantly re-learning just how much work it can be.

Just like all of the dogs you might find at a shelter, all of the animators that we interviewed are deserving of a great home! If you happen to be looking for an animator for your own team, we have a LOT of recommendations, so please reach out and we can refer some options!

Soon, we’ll be providing more details about some of our new interaction mechanics and dog designs. Until then, thank you so much for your continued support.

– Olivia