stop being smaller, an anti-specialist manifesto
written for manifesto jam 2026, also on my itch.
for a few years now, i’ve been banging the drum to whoever will listen to me yap about making the most of the tools and resources freely available to the wide internet to be bigger than you are. automated testing and ci/cd build pipelines free with unreal engine, the value of the technical designer or technical artist, a work environment (both software and your peers) that encourages curiosity and tinkering instead of reinforcing “your lane”, using the steamworks API to get as much out of steam as possible since they are stealing 30% from you anyway – just a few topics that fall under the banner. an ethos to combat the infinitely funded megateams, something to make small teams feel more empowered.
my goal stays the same but i’ve decided to change the framing.
note 1: this is largely about the effects of commercial/AAA gamedev on people outside of those environments, whether they are people who’ve worked there before, indies completely on their own, students in uni, or people who just are extremely online and absorbing the wrong shit. it’s intended for those looking to release commercial games. grats if you don’t have these brainworms.
note 2: this may seem extremely fucking obvious to some folks, and i used to think it was extremely fucking obvious until i worked with enough people outside of AAA who extremely did not fucking know this.
