Chad Verrall

Acknowledgment where it is due, my plan did not pass muster. About 10 minutes into the playtest, the game director turned around and calmly and carefully informed me that it was not working. I wasn't mad. I wasn't defensive. I was ready to receive feedback and try again.

Before I could say anything, one of the three men in that iterative process I spoke about piped up with a phrase that still haunts me: "Yeah, we tried to tell her." There wasn't a bus. But he manifested one and threw me under it anyway. I spoke very little that playtest.

Things did not improve from there. I drafted a new plan, more closely mirroring the original that was handed to me. Repeated the process. Got all green lights. But I was cautious. I asked a LOT of questions. I tracked down every unknown I could think of. I covered my ass.

The second plan got approved and the result is the Blizzcon demo that shipped. Blizzcon was a stressful blur as I paced the show floor to look for bugs and reactions, knowing this content would also be part of Bastion's final form.

When we got back to the office, I was informed that Bastion would be the first zone to hit alpha. I was the only quest designer working on level up, and thus the only designer who could make those dates work, at the time. I expressed unease. I was reassured that I "had this."

Still unnerved by what happened for the Blizzcon demo, I continued to ask questions. Without going into specifics, I was either unable to get straight answers or simply told to figure it out; that they had complete faith in me. Only, I had evidence that they did not.

Long story short, it was only with the intervention of other designers on Bastion that the portion of work that started as mine shipped. More of my work was "iterated out" than saw launch. It was, in short, brutal and I was vocal about it. I felt the process had failed me.

Alpha came and went. I knew we weren't done. There is always more work to do before ship. I was exhausted and no longer eager but I was at least committed to seeing it through. Then I found out that they decided how to act on alpha feedback without talking to me at all.