Nightingale developer at an Inflexion point
Five years ago, we spoke with former Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn as his new Edmonton-based development studio was announced as part of the cloud computing startup Improbable.
The studio has since severed ties with Improbable and adopted the name Inflexion, and with it launching its debut game Nightingale into Early Access this week, we speak with Flynn about what he's learned from the experience of shepherding a new studio to this point.
It's a broad and open-ended question (perhaps obnoxiously so), and Flynn thinks for a moment before choosing which learning to share.
"I've learned about the incredible responsibility that studio heads have around preserving culture and ensuring you have a strong, vibrant, diverse culture within your studio," Flynn begins.
"A lot of the lessons I've tapped into here to lead Inflexion are lessons we started to learn at Bioware 20+ years ago, and then I would offer that we stopped honoring and stopped valuing [with] the acquisition by Electronic Arts. A lot of what EA does is excellent, and they do very good work, but they were different sets of values and different approaches.
"What I find myself doing is recalling the times when I was a software developer or taking on a big challenge at Bioware when we were independent and asking myself, 'Did we learn something there that would be valuable in this situation?' And more often than not, there was something there. I find I'm going back sometimes 20 years, when managing certain things or having certain thoughts, as opposed to any more immediate experiences."
He gives two examples of such learning experiences.
"The obvious one would be delaying a game," Flynn says. "We've delayed our game a few times now. Bioware was very famous for delaying games when it was independent, not so much when it was part of Electronic Arts. And that's just two different views on when to ship and what it means to be a successful studio, right? At Bioware when it was independent, the only thing that mattered
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