Interviewing, teaching, triple-A vs indie, and fixing game dev crunch

Summary
-Guest Heinz Schuller talks about how he made the transition from working in IT into the video game industry
-Thoughts on the game industry being like a secret club in the 90’s
-Two things he wished he’d known when starting in the game industry
-Advice for working in a corporate environment and understanding how not to sabotage your career
-How to work with people who aren’t creatives
-How to radically improve your odds in this highly competitive job market
-The importance of finding your “thing” and what you’re going to express
-Experience of working on small and medium size indie game projects
-How he’s releasing games on Xbox Arcade and Steam
-Thoughts and advantages of teaching and creating games simultaneously
-The importance of YouTube for your career
-Ideas for staying sharp if you’ve worked in the game industry for a long time already
-Couple funny stories about working in the industry
-Changes in Microsoft’s culture between the 1990’s to the 2000’s
-Differences between the FASA acquisition and the later Bungie
-The coolest thing about being part of Microsoft Games
-Behind-the-scenes work that Art Directors do
-Building infrastructure are career paths outside of Engineering
-Ideas around work output, getting smarter, and fixing the crunch culture of game development
-Main reason for leaving triple-A games
-Challenge of working in middle management
-Thoughts on the horrific Telltale Games layout  
-Hard questions to ask when interviewing at a game studio
-What it feels like going through crunch
-Where to find Heinz online

Quotes
-“He was telling us to stop complaining because we’re literally just a fly on a rhino’s ass”
-“Early on in my career I was pretty famous for writing beautifully sarcastic and highly volatile emails”
-“I was called the angry young man”
-“The only constant is change”
-“Those were holy wars back in the time”
-“It would slowly saturate my monitor to pure magenta”
-“We were alien to the Seattle culture”
-“Occasionally there’d be holes in walls”
-“We don’t have enough hits, we’re not making enough money, time to shut it down.”
-“They had no idea about making games, or why they were talking with me”
-“They gave the keys of the city to Valve”
-“Epic crunches just destroys lives”
-“I used to be in the belly of the beast, I used to be part of it”
-“I worked on one of the worst crunches in my life on a game called...”
-“You have to tell your people to come in and work on the weekend, again”
-“If you walk around and see futons and air mattresses all over the place it’s probably a bad sign”

About My Guest
Heinz Schuller started working in the games industry in 1993, and has served at companies including Viacom New Media, FASA Interactive, Microsoft Game Studios, and Day 1 Studios. He is credited with Art Direction on popular PC & Console games including MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, F.E.A.R. 3, and Avatar Laser Wars II. Heinz also served as Publishing Art Director at Microsoft on games like MechAssault, MechAssault 2, and Crimson Skies. He recently completed Death Toll on Steam and is the Instructor // Visual Effects, Graphics / Animation at DePaul University in Chicago

Resources
-Hotline: [phone]
-Email: [e-mail]
-Website: gamedevadvice.com 
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