I knew what I did was about as critically acclaimed as it can be. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do something that’s substantially better, so I wanted to something substantially different.

forrest dowling is someone you probably haven’t heard of, but you may know of his work. he was the lead level designer on the video game bioshock: infinite which won game of the year awards from 42 publications. he’s absolutely right—it’s hard to get substantially better than that. after the studio he was a part of started to shed all but a few people ramping down from their development levels to be a smaller, more nimble development team, forrest connected with a few other people from his industry to create their own studio and their own game.

we all want a challenge. to grow. to master one thing and then move on to something else. if you’ve been spending day after day, month after month, year after year, working on the same thing and you don’t feel you’re growing anymore—that there’s no possible way for you to do better at that thing you’re doing—then it might be time to do as forrest did and try something substantially different.