When you’re in AAA, you usually go from one game to the next. It’s a cycle that lasts every four or five years, if not longer.

At BioWare Edmonton, Fernando Melo was coming off the back of working on Mass Effect: Andromeda and hopping on to the next Dragon Age game currently being made. But as production wore on, he started questioning whether another four or five-year cycle was worth it anymore.

“When we got to EA’s greenlight towards the end of pre-production [of the next Dragon Age], things are looking pretty good. That went through, that wasn’t a problem or anything,” says Melo.

“But it’s when it really kind of hit me if I was prepared to sign on for another four or five-year dev cycle. And I realised that my heart just wasn’t quite into that as much as I think it needs to be to take on something like that.”

He decided to up sticks in 2019 to break out from the AAA mould, start a new studio and pour his – and other people’s – experiences from the AAA scene into Game Director Story.

Here, Melo talks of the pressures of the AAA scene, how he’s putting those into Game Director Story and how he hopes players will come away from Game Director Story with a better understanding of what game development is actually like.

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