Life Update + Miscellaneous Business Matters

Oh man, how time has flown.

I've been super busy settling into the new job and all. It's good as far as work can be good. I have a boss that treats me humanely and as far as I know the politics of this company don't seem super hyper nasty and counter-productive (although there's always a bit of that, but it's at least low enough that I can't spot it within the first couple months of working). And they're using SAP SuccessFactors, which is the system my father wanted me to learn in my career, so I've sated at least one parent's hamfisted expectations of me.

I hardly mean that everything is all bubbles, confetti, and rainbows. Problem with this company is senior management's process philosophy is bottom-up.

What on earth is bottom-up? For the non-business-acquainted, one example is how a company would plan employee bonuses for the year. Most major corporations do a top-down process, maybe something like this:

1. CEO / Chairman comes up with a total budget pool (based on profit for the year), or to put it even more simply, they set aside a pile of money to pay out the bonuses 
2. Split that money into sections (e.g. for various departments, etc.)
3. Further split into subsections until you get down to individual teams, where you begin measuring on performance
4. Split down to individuals based on their performance

Of course this is one example across perhaps thousands of variations. But the point is that you started with what the "top" (i.e. the CEO) came up with, and then split it downwards however you want.

Now look at a bottom-up process, which is what this company wants:

1. Take the maximum possible bonus you could pay every employee (e.g. if my bonus is X to Y based on work performance, then take Y)
2. Compile by team and send to managers. Managers apply a ratio to each employee's bonus amount based on individual work performance for the year
3. Total for each team, then move upwards into departments, divisions, etc. Repeat for each level of management until there is a single, company-wide total that reaches the chairman.
4. Chairman comes up with a total pool amount (based on profit for the year).
5. HR then compares the two amounts and applies a global ratio to the total amount in (3) so that it matches the amount in (4).

So you can see where "bottom-up" comes from, since it quite literally starts at the individual level and compiles upwards.

Bottom-up does have some marginal gains in terms of fairness since the chairman is receiving an approximate guideline for how much his employees deserve, so psychologically he'll be inclined to pay people a little more. But it's boatloads more work on the HR end, and I'm not sure exactly how much gain it is worth as far as fair pay goes.

So I am absolutely not saying bottom-up is strictly bad - even in this bonus process example, you can kind of see what the benefits are. Thing is it's not just the bonus process, but basically everything HR does in this company is bottom-up, and bottom-up is always more work (often not a small increase either). It also makes things extremely complicated, such that it might take a new employee like myself months to understand how things work at a given company, and other staff may not even understand it at all, despite having been at the company for years.

So yeah, work has been my life for the past 3 months I haven't been writing. Been a Chinese New Year and a birthday too, but those were mostly uneventful.  And I should disclaimer that I really am happy with my whole situation. My family's philosophy is that work is an approximate measure of value; so knowing the company's issues, if I can find a solution, that'll be what gets me paid.

I should start looking to get a gym now that Singapore is opening up, although I'm really afraid - I've heard nightmare stories of long COVID permanently taking out people's energy levels and respiratory capacities, and I don't want that. I might want to wait a bit longer, maybe when when cases drop to below 2000/day or 1000/day I'll go look for a new hobby. While games are still fun, I'd be lying to myself if I said I can do this forever - now that the game project is on hold, I'm starting to get bored.

Kingdoms of Amalur - a small business lesson

Think this game got back into the news recently as THQ bought over the rights to the game and released a graphical remaster, with an expansion soon to come. But this game was largely forgotten by the public for years. With THQ's announcement of a new DLC, I wanted to speak about its past.

The open-world fantasy action role-playing action video game Kingdoms of Amalur was funded by Curt Schilling, Major League Baseball pitcher. The project cost him a full year of his salary, and the studio that made it quickly went bust after his sponsorship ended, laying off all their employees. Personally don't have much sympathy for Schilling's losses, considering he later revealed himself to be connected to the American alt-right. But it's still a cautionary tale into just how expensive video game development is and how it can become a massive financial hole.

Thing is, based on both my personal opinion and aggregate review scores, Kingdoms of Amalur is a pretty good game. If I hadn't known how the studio ended up, I would have thought it would have sold a lot more than it did and been at least somewhat successful, much less been a money pit.

What went wrong?

I think the first problem was timing. KoA fell into the same genre, and was thus competing directly, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most highly acclaimed video games of all time, and which was barely a year old at the time KoA came out. Had KoA released today, it would have had a much larger following - not only is the games market much larger today, but it also is somewhat more tired of fantasy open world titles such as Skyrim (which has now been repackaged so many times there's a running joke in the games community about the future of gaming involving Skyrim-playable toasters and smart fridges).

The second thing was the cost. Open-world RPGs are extremely expensive to make, easily climbing into the tens of millions, because the entire model of video game revolves around artistic and graphical fidelity and scale (which is very labor-intensive). The number of copies needed to break even is so exorbitant that even if your game is good - heck, even if your game is amazing - it may simply be unfeasible solely because the target audience is too small or you don't have a large enough marketing budget after paying millions in development costs.

So what are the lessons here?

• Start small. Don't begin with your dream. Make smaller prototypes and build up.
• Timing is key. Even if your idea is great, if it releases at the same time as someone else with more money releases a similar project, you will lose by sheer scale.
• Don't build an open world video game, lol (unless you've got the funding of a whole corporation)

(Final?) Project Update

Well, it's the start of November. I thought I would quickly get this update in. I think it's pretty big, at least for myself.

I am abandoning the project, at least in the way I've been planning it.

What happened is simple: I've taken a look at the costs to develop the game I want to make, and they would stretch into the hundreds of thousands of US dollars, and years' worth of time. (Case in point: Grim Dawn was crowdfunded at 0.5 million USD, while Path of Exile was crowdfunded at 2.2 million USD. This does not include any cash the developers or sponsors may have invested themselves, which would not be publicly known.)

My father might be a multimillionaire, but that doesn't mean I'm free to casually drop six digits into a hobby. Not to mention, given the years it takes, nobody knows what's going to happen by then. What if Diablo IV comes out in 2023 / 2024 and it's the amazing game I've always been wanting? Controlled by a notoriously scummy corporation, perhaps, but I can't deny that my dream would be answered for less. Not to mention, if I tried to release an ARPG in an environment where everyone is already playing Diablo IV or some other game, that would be financial suicide.

 

After I realized how absurd the costs were going to be, I sat down and asked myself what my aims with this project were:

• To make some contribution to society, however small: I don't need to make a video game to do this. Hell, a lot of people would argue video games aren't good for society (although I firmly believe they can be).
• To make something that my friends and I can play together (preferably for hundreds or even thousands of hours): This goal is actually impossible and I was naïve to believe otherwise. The simple reason is that, aside from Warframe (which can't bring us together anymore), our tastes in video games are all extremely different. I'll talk about this in more detail some other time but that's the short of it.
• To innovate upon the ARPG genre: Just because something is innovative doesn't necessarily mean people will enjoy it. In my research/polling I've found there's many factors, graphics and etc., that can make or break someone's enjoyment, not just my design ideas. And looking at those millions in development costs, I am certain a majority of it is on models and animations. And, okay, even if people do enjoy my game despite some ugly graphics, so what? I've entertained some toxic gamers for a few hours. Applause.

Given these conditions, I've decided that abandonment is not really abandonment - it is not only the reasonable thing to do, but also the reasonable thing to do in terms of actually achieving my goals, or at least, the first one (which is the only one that didn't stink).

I've created an action plan.

• Take the two months until the end of the year to organize the absolute jumble of project documents that I have
• Start looking into picking up reading and writing short fantasy stories and making some fantasy-based visual art (I will start this parallel to my cleanup).
• If I get time, maybe I'll take a look at Unity and make some tiny games, Pong or Tic Tac Toe or something
• Starting January, I'll also start my next job and start putting a lot more effort into my career. I'll continue to make time for the other stuff, but my goal is to prioritize work for the first 12-18 months until I can get my first raise.

The idea now is to keep my options open, work on more traditional skills and perhaps get the works of a novel or some art pieces going. In the tiny chance that game development does work out, then those characters can go into the game, so nothing is wasted. And if it doesn't, it may very well be a blessing, as more traditional media may have been a better option all along.

Status Update

Oct 13
Been a bit busy. Company called [redacted] called on Sunday saying they found my resume and they think I'd be suitable for a position there. I had interviews on Monday and Tuesday, and both went well, but it was tiring nonetheless. In the meantime, I had some minor issues with my current job (at Brenntag) - HR partner sent me information that is weird / seemingly wrong, and controlling complained. Over the weekend I sent out emails explaining HR's process and pushed (rightful) responsibility to the partner. When my supervisor came back from leave I was told I handled it well. And yeah, I did the monthly closing by myself and all.

Safe to say I am, ah, getting exhausted.

Oct 18
On Friday I got the offer from [redacted]. The pay is not low, let's just say. So, I'm taking that job - it starts on Jan 10th next year, so I've got ample time to clear up my current work and submit my resignation.

Dad tells me to thank the Lord for my good fortune. I'm taking a moment to do that now.

I should note that this week I also received a (verbal) offer to extend contract for my current company. Obviously, I'm not accepting that as [redacted] is offering higher, plus it's a permanent (whereas my current position can only extend until the end of 2022 / early 2023 when the project finishes, then it'd be quite illogical for them to extend it as they don’t have any other work for me).

Anyway, after this exhausting week, I had a quiet weekend sleeping and playing a new title, The Riftbreaker. It's decent - a few problems with the game are quite detracting from my fun, actually. But I'm willing to overlook a few problems if it's a small indie developer and an innovative enough game, both criteria of which The Riftbreaker satisfies.

The Monthly Post - Oct 2021

I'm a little frustrated with myself. Honestly, it's the same deal again and again that's been plaguing me for years.

All my life, I've been instructed to find meaning out of this life through career and family. I've been questioning this on several lines:

 

[1] My career in many ways feels like I'm just padding the back pockets of corporate leaders, rather than an actual contribution to society. It's mildly less bad with my swap to HR from accounting, but still…

 

[2] Needless to say family is important. But if all we spend our lives looking for a spouse, amassing resources to give to our children, then our children spend their lives amassing resources to give to their kids, we produce a selfish society where generosity ends at the family line. In this sense, we are no better than animals.

 

At least when I was a teenager and a younger tween in college, I thought about taking on a "side gig" - singing, art, some sort of hobby that would make a more direct contribution to others' quality of life. But:

 

[3] When I look at artists who have day jobs, they often spend their whole lives between their jobs, so it is difficult for them to find spouses and begin settling down. I've now mostly accepted that if I am to take on a side gig, family is not happening, so this is not really a concern anymore. But it's still worth noting - not least because many of the amateur artists and entertainers I know are often exhausted or struggling under their double workloads, while the professionals also struggle with money in a saturated industry.

 

[4] There are perhaps millions of artists and entertainers in the world, and with the rise of online entertainment platforms like Spotify, the spread of the arts has become so overly saturated that its value is diminished. Why listen to me ever when you can listen to hundreds of thousands of the best artists anytime on the go?

 

[5] I picked video games because I feel the video game industry is the one place where amateurs and indies have an advantage over professionals. This is because professionals must craft their games in a certain way in order to retain profits. As someone not limited by this, I have greater freedom to tackle niche markets. However, because I am an amateur, my budget is extremely low, and thus I might not have the budget to even advertise. It is very likely I might just be looking at a few players in my game solely due to a lack of publicity. Neither is there a guarantee I'll be successful, and the game I make might just suck.

 

As of this weekend, I was thinking maybe I should look outside art/entertainment instead. It won't do much about [3] but it will help with [4] and [5]. But what exactly should I tackle? Given my expertise, I'm not sure what I can do that will make this world a better place.

New Job!

Got a new job. It's a 6-month contract but so what, it's better than nothing.

My job search was short, but admittedly very frustrating, with many interviews but no offers prior to this company (who are clearly desperate for someone). The main problem was simply how Singaporeans think. "Never come between a Singaporean and a rule," the saying goes. Well, a lot of job postings in Singapore have experience requirements; and while in other countries they might take these as a guideline ("approximately 1 year" for example), in Singapore I found many companies took this as a rule. So I could have 11 months of work experience (I have 10) and they would categorize me as having no experience rather than 1 year. Kind of stupid but that's how it works.

 

Anyhow, the lesson is that knowing the work is temporary, I've got to keep looking and improving myself. Maybe it's the economy, but it's clear that my qualifications aren't holding well in the current job market.

Wish I knew where to go with this, though…my personal feeling is that hiring managers struggle to see me as an effective HR professional if I lack experience in local HR regulation, since my degree is foreign. So I've been looking into taking a postgraduate diploma from a local institution. Problem is there's two HR certification institutions in Singapore, and I have no bloody idea which one I should choose. I've looked into both websites and both ways to certify look like heavy time, effort, and money commitments. So I've got second thoughts, especially with this new job coming up.

July 17th (highly belated)

Okay, it's been a good while since I last wrote for my public blog.

In short, I had an alright departure from my previous company. My senior highlighted that it was a change of management direction that created budget changes for the department, causing me to not get my expected contract extension, so none of the blame is on me. They must know it felt like shit.

 

In the month since, I've mostly been chilling out and working on my project while applying to jobs. I've had interviews with about 6-8 companies (lost track a while back), so that's good. But nothing has really been converted into an offer yet. I'll keep working on it, I guess.

 

Ironically the games are doing the poorest - everything just feels boring and eh. Even though the summer sale just ended and I went on a shopping spree, I found most of the games I bought lackluster, and I have limited motivation to play my old/existing games. Am I outgrowing video games? I don't really think so. I just have this vision of a game I want to play and I'm trying to look for games that are similar to my vision, but I've played through just about every possibility I can find, and nothing gets close enough to what I want. There are good games out there but they aren't relevant to my goals, and I suspect I feel bad for playing them out of enjoyment, knowing I have a project to work on.

 

I've also been kind of feeling…directionless? Let me put it this way. I started my game project with the full acceptance that my "failure rate" is above 95%. My goal, you see, is to make something fun that people will want to play - and why would anyone play my game? It's not like music or visual art; games comprise an oversaturated market of half-decade-long projects built by teams of highly experienced professionals with a variety of different specialized skillsets. A single talented person can hope to make quality music or art, but they cannot hope to best the might of a full organization. At least that's what I think.

 

I also thought, perhaps overly idealistically, that video games might be used as a medium for change. Literature and art have been used as catalysts for positive societal change for millennia; why not, then, a digital medium consumed by millions of youth that serves as a platform for literature, art, and music? But at least in the current day, I question if there is really a place for video games with social statements. The nature of video game development lends itself to corporate production, and the core audience of many video games, I think, lacks interest in such things.

May 19
Got a call. They pay low and the location is inconvenient. But in this job market an opportunity is an opportunity, and it's a multinational at least. I will be interviewed on Monday.

May 24
Well, I had my interview. It's another one down the drain, maybe? Because I was actually overqualified for the job. They were kind of just needing a data entry clerk and weren't looking for a true degree-holding analyst. I offered to maybe do a better job and help with data validation and analytics, and the manager said he would be appreciative but he didn't sound super convincing, like he wasn't really interested in paying more for that. Kind of sucks, but I did know the pay was low and was mostly aiming to get the interview practice.

May 25
As stressing as it is for my mental health, one of the things that has contributed to my life successes in the past is the ability to self-reflect critically: that is, even if the circumstances are largely catalyzed by external factors, you can still try to take the opportunity to reflect and try to do better. For example, if you're on a sports team and your team members are repeatedly missing the ball and causing losses, you can still ignore your team members and try to find a smaller mistake you might have made in those games, instead of putting all the blame on them.

So, work. Maybe my manager isn't lying, maybe the company lacks adequate headcount for me. Or maybe they hate my guts and think I can't perform. Who knows? But I can always improve.

I talked to my father today for a few minutes (my folks are the perfect people to go to regarding this because they are highly critical of me, too) and he gave me several pointers to think about:

• I don't invest enough time into my work in the early stages of the project
• My planning is poor because it does not adequately take into account contingency for emergency factors
• I accept too much upscaling/scope increase in my work, leading to failure. If I accept too much workload and then fail to deliver, management will only remember the failure and ignore all of: my other successes.

When I think about it, I do think there was a timeliness issue in my work as a trainee. Granted, trainees do not have performance objectives and I do not think that should have affected my chances of a full-time contract with this company (and have no idea if it did or didn't). But that is something I should really improve upon as an actual worker - and contract or not, that is what I am now.

(Part 1)

Well, I've got some bad news.

Originally the head of my department said he was interested in extending my contract by "one year." (Or maybe it was "up to one year" - he said it about 1-2 months ago and I don't remember.) I'm not quite so stupid enough to actually think they'll give me a full year, but I did think they would give me about 3 months, as their Gantt chart reveals a ~3-month timeline remaining for my project.

With literally two working days left until the end of my contract, my manager spoke to me today and said they would give me up to 1 month - and I would have to write a justifying statement explaining what I would do for that month, due on my very last day itself. This technically means they can do a 180 on my last day and just tell me to gtfo!

Kind of scummy. As my dad said after he heard that: "Welcome to the real world." (Although he also says it's very telling that the company "has no concern for the individual", and so me leaving is not a bad thing.)

Granted, it's technically not too bad when I look at it from this perspective:

• My original attachment outline was to enter and learn about their HRMS while helping them out with work.
• When they noticed that I am the most skilled Excel user in HR, the head of department put me on this dashboard project, which otherwise would be done by someone else. This is a major point that I put on my resume!
• The only reason they're even considering the extension in the first place is because of the dashboard project. Had they not been proactive in noticing my skills, there is a 100% chance I would be out of work by Monday.

So I mean, I'm still walking out with more gain than I expected going in. The only thing that I consider scummy (although it's pretty major!) lies in their informal treatment of me. They seem to have intentionally conjured a false hope of giving me a bigger extension, then pulled it back quickly at the last minute.

There's three things I would like to consider.

Firstly, the past: is this sudden news a consequence of my performance in this job? It's very difficult to quantify because I am classed as an intern and am not subject to performance appraisal. From the very limited feedback I have received, I would guess the quality of my work is at least okay but I could do better at meeting deadlines (I missed one, which is one too many).

(I'm not a sensitive person so there's no way of telling if they secretly hate my guts. But the workforce development specialist is universally hated and he still has a job despite butchering his relationship with just about everyone at work, including and especially those he reports to. So somehow, I think that's not the problem.)

Secondly, the present: what do I do now? I'm not sad to go - if I didn't see that there was something funky with this company, I would be blind. I will rant about that later. The question, then, is when and how I should go: I think I will take the 1 month extension so I can get a bit of cash, but who knows, maybe Monday comes and they don't even give that to me.

Third, the future: I haven't managed to secure a new position for myself. Dad says my job search is way too lax, while I would argue it is a combination of my job search being too lax, the job market being quiet, and my father only wanting me to apply to big companies and HRIS/"HR Analyst"/Digital Transformation roles. I've spoken to him today and he's agreed to expand this to include all HR roles and mid-sized companies.

(To be continued in Part 2...)

Big news for my personal project: Magic: Legends released their first gameplay overview, and it's…very similar to what I had in mind.

Basically, the idea is to play an ARPG like Diablo where you run around smacking things and casting spells. But instead of a traditional skill list, you would collect cards and pile them into a deck then "draw" them for use in battle. The advantage of this system is that your gameplay is always "fresh" because of the sheer number of permutations you can have with a deck. The disadvantage (as some comments on that Youtube video have highlighted) is that gameplay is far more luck-based and if you get a poor draw it just feels bad and unfun.

Of course, I had several additional ideas that make my game different: I had a dark steampunk theme in mind actually, with aesthetics based on Bloodborne and Underworld. I also had a number of other mechanics, e.g. weapon swaps and DOOM-style glory kills. But I am fully aware a majority of people will home in on that one thing that is "a ripoff" rather than consider the game might be different in every other aspect.

This might sound bad on paper, but it's actually a very good thing. If Magic: Legends can just be the game I've been looking to make, it would allow me to have fun while saving me a ton of money and effort to actually make a game. Alternatively, I can just change the project to not resemble that game, which isn't a problem either.

So there's several options for me to consider:

1. Abandon the project entirely.
   As described above, I could save myself a lot of time and effort in to a project that might be headed in a very futile direction.
2. Continue the project in its current trajectory OR delay the project and continue it later.
   Perfect World Entertainment kind of has a bad reputation in the English-speaking market (which makes no fucking sense* but that's how the world is). So the game could end up unpopular, and if it gets shut down in 4 years due to financial constraints then, well, it's time to start building again.
3. Change up the project to no longer resemble Magic: Legends. This is the one I'm leaning towards. My vision doesn't really rely on this deckbuilding system, you see. I just wanted a game that involves fancy footwork while also having a strategic/building aspect. If I could change things up to not involve a deckbuilding system, then there's no problem.

*most of Perfect World's poor Western reputation is solely due to the fact it is Chinese. Having published Neverwinter and Remnant From the Ashes, is limited consistent evidence that tells me they will apply predatory marketing policies in their games outside of China, despite everyone on social media claiming the contrary.