Could You Handle Your Kid Working For You?
This hypothetical became reality for the creative director of a flashy new video game about fighting and food, Dosa Divas.
“I don’t know where the balance is as a parent,” Chandana Ekanayake, director of the new food-centric RPG Dosa Divas and Outerloop Games co-founder, told me recently.
Chandana could be talking about anything, but in this case, it’s the balance between nurturing a children’s individual interests and including them in your own. How much is too much, too little? How do you avoid trying to raise a tiny version of you?
Notably, Chandana’s son, Aidan, was also on the call with us.
Over the past year and change, Chandana and Aidan went from a father and son with a shared interest in video games to a father and son who became legitimate co-workers, as Aidan grew into a part-time contributor in QA at Outerloop Games.
QA means “quality assurance,” and is the department that finds and catalogs bugs that need to be fixed by the rest of the development team. It’s not uncommon for developer to get their start in a QA departments, before moving into, say, design.
Despite having a father who’s worked in games for decades, aka his entire life, Aidan had never really given the idea of moving into game development any serious thought.
“I don’t think it was something I was really thinking about that much when I was younger,” said the 20-year-old Aidan, who’s also in college studying data visualization.
One of Aidan’s big passions: speedrunning video games. In speedrunning, players do their best to push through a game as fast as possible, competing with other players.
Speedrunning is, on some level, a numbers game. (“I love big numbers,” he said.) It’s why Aidan is obsessed idle games, which are all about watching numbers go up up up.
Ahead of releasing anything to the public, Outerloop does a family and friends playtest to, in Chandana’s words, “get a sanity check.” Is the game any good? What are they missing? What might people complain about when the rest of the world tries it?
“We’ve had Aidan playtest a couple of times,” said Chandana. “When he playtests, he just pushes all the edges and finds all the things. There’s areas you can jump out of the level and he just finds all these places to break, because he likes to run around in the game and explore. The team saw that [and asked] ‘Can we get him to just playtest more?’”
So he did!
And over time, Aidan became more than just “friends and family.” He dropped his part-time job at a local department store (Marshalls) and signed up for between 10 to 20 hours per week of QA work. It was an opportunity for Aidan to apply that personal love for speedrunning. But in this case, Aidan would be breaking the game to help it.
For Chandana, it quickly became clear that “Dad” is different than “co-worker.”
“I wanted him to feel like he has that autonomy,” said Chandana. “We’re all remote, too, so I was like ‘Okay, go talk to Sunny [another developer on the Dosa Divas development team],’ and I was like ‘Tell Aidan what he needs to do. If you need me, fine.’ He and I are similar in personality, too, and sometimes we butt heads, so I wanted make sure he can have a good time at work without dad being involved so much.”
Aidan focused on QA, but experimented with implementing changes to bugs, such as areas where the player could accidentally jump and fall outside the game world.
“It’s definitely a change of pace,” said Aidan, who noted that trying to learn Blender, a popular tool to create and modify 3D models, proved a little overwhelming to grasp.
The whole experienced lasted about 18 months—nearly two years, all told.
Dosa Divas was released last week on six different platforms. The big lift is over. It’s also a moment for Chandana and Aidan to reflect on a decidedly unique experience.
In other words, was it worth it?
“We tried to introduce both boys to different things and I never wanted to push like too hard on [video games],” said Chandana. “With Aidan especially, he [once] wanted to make a game. So I was like, we’ll sit together, build a tower defense game or a clicker game. But don’t want to over steer. I want him to find his own thing. […] One thing I keep telling them is to find something you love doing, because you’re going to spend a lot of time at your job. Most people hate their jobs. If you can find something that you love to do that you’re gonna spend a lot of time doing and it’s some some way of living, then that’s all we can hope for as parents.”
Aidan is, at least, giving it some thought.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be like a teacher or like an accountant or something,” he said. “But now that I’m doing this and also my major in college is data visualization, it can lead into something in video games, as well.”
Aww. 🥰
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Also:
My daughters, of course, want to be “on YouTube” with me. I have said no, though I’ll admit to considering a stream where they could be v-tubers with me.
Funny enough, I haven’t pushed video games onto my kids and the result is that while they like video games, do they do not love video games. I wish they did?
My oldest is nine, aka a really formative age. It’s where I fell in love with video game writing. Only a few years later, I’d take steps into being a professional. It’s still unclear what her own passion is, but my theory is that it’ll be art-related.