I am a casualty of publisher-led development, having spent over four years doing games design and writing before being cast adrift in a round of redundancies in mid 2010. I tried going back, but my casual projects designed to keep me in practice and improve my portfolio slowly took over until I was starting to think of myself as an indie and feeling curiously relieved that I had broken free of the cycles of crunch.

One of the curious parts of my last job was writing for a training course on design, trying to teach people how to write design documents, etc. My parts tended to focus on storytelling and I even presented a few lectures on the topic, but it was a little odd to be moving from making games to talking about making games.

My time as an indie and a freelancer has taught me a great many things, not least of all being that working as a designer has left me ill-equipped to make games. I spent just a little too long writing documents and sending them to someone else to implement, so it took a while to a) scale back my ideas now I don't have half a dozen artists and almost as many programmers and b) remember how to do what I once considered simple things like 3D geometry and messing with matrices.

These days, I work as a writer, creating stories for games and writing training materials for game-design and game-writing students.