A few years ago, we hired a friend to do a project for us (a physical, real world one rather than a digital one). We’d heard the adage “never mix friends and business”, but we’d thought it would be fine – after all, isn’t it better to hire someone you know and trust, rather than a stranger? And we believed him when he said he could handle it.
It turned into a disaster. The timelines and budget completely blew out, we had to buy double materials because of disorganization and wastage, and in the end the work was so shoddy we had to have it redone. It became clear we’d had very different expectations of the scope and quality of work. We felt he’d let us down badly, but he disagreed, and the friendship was broken. Perhaps the worst part is, looking bad on it all, it feels like he knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to deliver on his promises and never spoke up. Then he walked away, leaving us with a big financial hit and a giant mess to clean up, as well as the loss of the friendship.
So now we’re working together as a game dev team on top of our romantic relationship, and the question bears asking: are we making the same mistake? Established wisdom warns against working with friends, but what about your partner? Of course, game dev couples are pretty common in the indie scene these days, and these collaborations have given us some wonderful games like Eastshade, Slay the Princess, Backpack Battles, and Unpacking, to name just a few. But you can’t deny that this presents its own set of risks, as well as putting pressure on the relationship.
Challenges and Solutions
Working as a team with anyone is hard – you have to learn to communicate, set boundaries, and accommodate different work styles. When you’re working with your partner, it can be both easier and harder, in different ways. You already know each other inside out and you don’t need to build a rapport. in our case at least, we’re already comfortable with direct communication, so there’s no beating around the bush if one of us doesn’t like the direction the project is taking, or is unhappy with how things are going.
On the downside, there’s so much potential for the lines to get blurred between your work and personal worlds. These days, pretty much everyone struggles with work-life balance, especially if you work from home. But it can be 10 times more difficult to switch off when your partner is also your business partner. And this isn’t just about work time versus personal time – all kinds of things from workload and responsibilities to disagreements could potentially spill over the from work to the personal relationship, and vice versa.
Some of these things are probably compounded for us because we have completely different work rhythms. My partner tackles projects in intense bursts – when he gets inspired to work on a prototype he’ll go full on with tunnel vision, pulling all nighters until it’s done. I’ve been known to burn the midnight oil, but I much prefer to work steadily with plenty of structure and routine, putting in five full days a week and I need two full, consecutive days off to recharge. This can get tricky: I can feel pressure to match his intensity even though I know it will burn me out. He can feel guilty not working when I am, even if he’s not in that part of his on/off work cycle, and ends up sitting at his desk doom scrolling and falling down Youtube rabbit holes, when what he should really do is chill, touch grass, and wait for his next wave of inspiration.
Of course, this isn’t a unique challenge because we’re a couple: every office has people with different work styles. The trick in any team is to make these differences work through communication, boundaries, and respect, and if anything we have an advantage because we know and understand each other so well.
We’re still working on finding solutions to the unique challenges of mixing business and a relationship, and we know that this means actively looking for solutions. We’re trying to implement dedicated “us” time and try to enforce no game dev talk during these times (which is a challenge, at least for one of us). We’re trying to separate work communication from relationship stuff, with scheduled work checkins and working out how we can use some platforms for work-related messages only, and other for personal things. But yeah, obviously it’s a work in progress.
Our different work rhythms can also make it hard to spend quality, non-work time together when one of us is working when the other is taking breaks, and it’s too easy to just default to playing games together. As game devs, maybe playing games by default isn’t so bad? We’re still working out how to find that balance and prioritize each other but not force identical schedules.
The important thing is though that we’re recognizing that we need to treat this like what it is: a business partnership with rules and boundaries, rather than just saying we’ll be fine because we’re in a relationship, so it’ll all work out.
Why Working with Your Partner can be a Strength, Not a Risk
I don’t think working with your partner is foolish or even a problem that needs to be overcome. I actually think there’s something that intrinsically makes sense about it, as long as you approach both your working and personal relationships in the right way. The friend who screwed us over taught us what happens when someone knows there’s a problem but stays silent. That’s the opposite of what we’re doing in recognizing our different work styles and the potential strain on our relationship, and finding solutions to these challenges.
It can’t be denied that working together, particularly in a high-intensity industry like game dev, puts extra strain on your relationship. However, working through those challenges can definitely make you stronger as a couple. Actually, a lot of the aspects that are important in a strong working relationship or business partnership – communication, boundaries, compromise, conflict resolution – are equally critical in a romantic partnership. So in working through those challenges at work it (has got to) make you stronger as a couple. Our best advice to any relationship: stop pretending differences don’t exist and things will work themselves out. Communicate and tackle them head on, and you’ll be much stronger!
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