I’m happy to announce that besides currently developing my first “game baby”, my body is developing my first real baby as well. When the game is ready, my baby will get her own mention in the credits. 

The tradition of including babies in the credits of films and games has been around for a while. According to Wikipedia, the first official listing of production babies was in the 1995 film “Toy Story”. By 2005, the game industry had gotten in on the act too and even coined its own term “Development Babies” with the release of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” in 2011.

In reality however, the game industry has been unofficially announcing births in various ways for quite some time. Cabel Sasser looked into this trend in his article “Message in a Binary Bottle” where the earliest examples of the practice date all the way back to the 80s. The developer Steve Ettinger announced all of his children’s births by embedding the messages in the source code of some of the games he developed like “Spiker – Super Pro Volleyball” from 1988. 

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) publishes “Game Crediting Guide” which states that any person who has contributed at least 5% or 30 days to a game’s development should be credited. By this measure, the baby in my belly has already made a huge contribution to the creation of my game and will continue to do so after she’s born. She’s helping me to develop my project management skills, as well as giving me a great deal of motivation.

I’m now going to be on maternity leave for a little while as the due date is at the start of September. I will not be publishing any posts about the game development until October at the earliest as I want to give myself and my family time to adjust to the changes.