My notes on the How Xalavier Nelson Does It Aftermath article.

Really interesting takes on scope, Project planning for games.

On work

Nelson: I sleep six to eight hours. I wake up roughly 10 minutes before my first meeting. [...]I'm doing a lot of admin around the studio of going through emails, answering emails, chasing opportunities. I'm in meetings, collaborating with my fellow developers on solutions for things, reviewing material and figuring out what to do next. I am, yeah, doing a lot of feedback on things as they're brought in and talking about the vision of the game and whether or not something fits.
[...]
One to several times a week I'm making time for developers, either inside or outside of the studio, to talk to them about what they want to do with their lives or their studios outside of our own and ways we can either support, or that any of my experience can be relevant for, what they want to do next and how they want to do it. And then after all of that stuff is done, which brings us into 5pm, 6pm territory, I have dinner with my wife, we might relax for a little bit, and then I begin what we colloquially call Night Work, which is when I get to do writing and design and documentation that typically I don't have space for during the day, that helps unblock people for the next day.
[...]
I'm constantly trying to calibrate my work-life balance as well, and I am treating that as a priority more than ever. But yeah, to run a studio like this in the way that I want, I know that, at least for the foreseeable future, there's no way I can have a standard 9-to-5. So finding a version of this that makes me happy and lets me be the type of person [I want to be] and show up for my family in the ways that I want, and treating that on a very individual, bespoke basis, has been the most useful thing, and that's what I try to provide for my collaborators as well.
[...]
When I notice that someone has a working pattern [...] We have conversations inside the studio of how to support them in that way, rather than try to force them in a way that doesn't fit their creative style or their natural patterns

I find myself so much happier getting to, on sometimes a daily basis, figure out what matters for me and my collaborators and fix that – rather than create a perfect spreadsheet that serves no one.

scope

the approach of each project we plan is in the aggressive, discipline-led way. It's aggressive positivity of, like, “I love making games – and making games that fit into our lives – so much that I won't let you put this cool thing into the game that challenges that.”

vision attracted by movement

people saw how busy I was across the studio; they didn't want to talk to me about what was happening in the game. And there's always other things happening in the studio; I think a term used for this is “vision attracted by movement.” I was like, “Oh, I guess everything is moving smoothly, and we're just making the game that we scoped and discussed. Cool.” I didn't realize that, outside of my field of vision, there were ways that the game was increasing in scope that weren't visible on the top level but, in the final game, I think can absolutely be seen.

The systems you set up give you the life that you live in. You can only hope it's the life that you want to live.