First of all, happy new year! I thought I should update this blog with some new pictures, my last post from Venice was long time ago. A very different place this time. Last summer I went to Canada. I was invited by the games studio I was working for the last 2 years to spend a week there. The reason was a celebration, we had just released Nightingale some moths before, a survival crafting game set in an alternative Victorian era. I loved this project, the art direction was pretty unique, and I did some of my best VFX work to date there. I don’t work for them anymore, the studio had to make redundant a lot of people (me included) because the game hasn’t sold as much as expected. A month or so before Christmas…
The games industry these days is a dangerous place, perhaps more dangerous than usual. If you read “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” by Jason Schreier, you can get an idea of the kind of issues I have been facing for the past 20 or so years I have been working in games. What now feels different is how often news about layoffs and studios closures are heard. Perhaps is a market adjustment after what happened during COVID, when many studios grew a lot, maybe too much.
Anyways, back to that Canada trip, I enjoyed spending time in a very different place, meeting colleagues that I only knew remotely, and taking pictures of it all. The city I went to was Edmonton, Alberta province. We had time also to spend a weekend in Jasper, and do some hiking around the surrounding forests. That area is famous for its beauty, and sadly, also for the summer fires that happen very often lately. Not long after I went there, news of big fires broke, and apparently, the fires got to the town, not too far from where I was hosted!
I’m glad I went at the start of the summer. One thing I yet have to understand is how people survive such cold winters over there! If you are from there, let me know… :)
