Daniel Klautsch

My experiences make me who I am.
The lessons learned through each game published, each concept iterated, each story written and each team lead.
This is my journey so far.

Before I was a Game Developer, I was a programmer. When I worked at a finance company a senior programmer told me about his previous projects and told me a story about a feature he had to program. A feature that with the technology at hand was simply impossible to make happen. So naturally, he proceeded to then show me how he made it happen.

His words always stuck with me and informed the way I would analyse and approach problems even after no longer considering myself a programmer.

Joining the BTS was one of the biggest influence on myself as a game developer. The BTS is a 4 year course crammed into 2 years. It's like a 2/3 Bachelor's Degree in theory, but the actual professors decided to teach us a full bachelors worth anyway. It was an incredibly demanding course both times I graduated I was one of only 3 people getting their diploma, everyone else failed. I suspect I succeeded due to my hard-working and persistent nature.
It was one of the most educative experiences of my life.

But beyond all of the valuable knowledge I gathered, be it on game design or otherwise, the thing I value most that I learned here was about communication and teamwork.

The high stress envirenment of the BTS brought out the worst in people. Pride, Ego, thinking that being right excuses being rude. Worse yet, this was not unique behaviour and it seriously impeded team coordination and the abiliity of teams working together. Most of the time people would work on only their own aspects of the game and if it didnt fit together with other peoples work it was somebody elses fault. Programmers would blame artists, artists would blame programmers. Rarely any communication took place.

When I returned to the BTS --this time with a focus on programming --, I worked on myself not only to become a better game developer, but a better team player and better at communicating and fostering the sort of team dynamics I wanted to see. I would encourage this new class of students to work together in a healthy and productive way.

With my previous experience, and new found lessons about communication and teamwork I quickly found myself pushed into leadership roles. I received a third of the class’s votes to be class president, despite the fact that I never expressed interest in the position. Before too long I was the leader of a project with 3 other members who wanted me to be their leader.

I, uhh... never asked to be a leader. Having been an introvert for most my life, this was not my first choice, but I couldnt deny that my experience made me a good fit. Besides having been a introvert for most my life maybe I could leverage this to communicate better and encourgae introverts to speak their mind. Soon hesitation gave way to responsibility.

One of the first things I did, was gather everyone up and encourage them to come up with a team name. Silly, but effective in getting everyone to start thinking of themselves as a team. I went on to encourage frequent communication, cooperation and transparency about the games progress and direction. Especially because I knew fully well form experience what the lack of such things resulted in.

This way of leading my team resulted in an excellent unified team, many of which I still work with to this day on game jams and an excellent game. This is the reason why I believe in communication and teamwork. Because of hard earned experience.s

I went of to work at 1867, PearUp and later 1867 again.These were incredibly lucky experiences, as each of my superiors encouraged my free-thinking nature, eye for detail and pro-activeness to try and seek out and solve problems. In 1867 I managed to improve a multitude of things ranging from code to lighting to particle effects, while also full filling my main duties of creating and implementing a new playable area for the game.

During PearUp I was swiftly put into the position of Lead Developer and put in charge of my own Team, with the only oversight being progress reports. An incredibly independent role, which as a consequence meant that my management abilities of both myself and my team were tested.

Back at 1867, the fact that I had gained a leadership position at PearUp did not go unnoticed and so I was put in charge of a team of 15+ interns. Due to my previous experience I was given even more independence than previously and I used it in such way to orchestrate new features and events to keep the community happy and engaged. Throughout my stay I created the community newspaper and organised events and competitions, all while mentoring the interns.

While all of this was happening I remained in contact with my old team as we continued to develop game jams and other projects.
One day we made a visual novel in 8 hours and it became quite popular.

What if we made it into a full game and sold it? So, we did that.

It’s called Sacrifice For Sale. It's in the top 50% of all-time earning games on Steam.
The full development of that game was incredibly educational. Being in charge of such a fantastic team and such a professional project allowed me to finally learn about the aspect of the game industry I knew the least about. The commercial aspect. Seeing the project through from concept to release and having been responsible for it’s marketing I learned quite a lot.

And that leaves me here in the present. I am currently looking for a job in which I will be able to keep growing as a developer and be able to capitalise on the abilities I have fostered so far. If my general "je-ne-sais-pas" appeals, feel free to reach out.