My Blacklist
A fact of life is that you’re not always going to get along with everyone. You’re ultimately only responsible for yourself—except when you give someone your word or consent to be responsible for them. That takes a lot of trust. Trust is earned and should be flexible to disagreement so it doesn’t break. But once it’s broken, it’s much harder to build it back.
For me, once that line is crossed, I pull the plug. They go onto my blacklist.
What is a blacklist?
“A list of people or things that are regarded as unacceptable or untrustworthy and should be excluded or avoided.”
Sounds harsh, but the people on my list create victims. They are artists, developers, studios, etc. Some of the attributes of these people are narcissism, immaturity, spitefulness, uncontrollable anger, controlling behavior, and disrespectfulness. Thankfully, the list is short, though.
For this next blog, I thought I would share my blacklist. But I’m only going to name one company from my blacklist; the rest will be about the sins that got people onto it. I will reveal that company at the bottom.
1. Treating Me as an Employee
This is something you need to research for yourself. In the eyes of the IRS, if you’re not an employee, you are a business. There are a few classifications, but most contractors work as sole proprietors.
Salt & Pixel is a registered LLC in Virginia. It’s a business. I pay taxes as a business to the commonwealth and the federal government. So when you contract my services, you are entering a business-to-business relationship with Salt & Pixel—not with me personally.
Here’s a good article on the rights and privileges I have as a business: What are your rights as an independent contractor.
2. Stealing my work
Some time ago, I was looking to hire an animator for a personal project. I found someone and hired them to do a test. The work was acceptable, but I was still considering other people.
This artist decided to mock up a game in the exact style of the game I was making and share it on social media. They even tagged me and then untagged me once I told them I wasn’t going to hire them.
Recently, I had a colleague recommend a pixel artist, and it turned out to be this same artist. I got to tell them about the liability this person had shown themselves to be.
3. Take Me for Granted
For context, this was a work exchange contract. Very rarely do I offer this, but at the time, I wanted to help this developer out. I was going to convert one of their games to mobile and PC in exchange for some enemy code in GBStudio. That was $20,000 worth of work on my part.
In GBStudio, you can copy/paste sprites and blocks of code from project to project. I think I sent over a list of eight enemies with very simple AI: back and forth, up and down, circling around the platform, etc. This was something I could have done in 20 minutes.
This dev insisted on having the source file for my game. He didn’t need it, and I didn’t want anyone to have it. He got mad and stated he wasn’t going to uphold his end of the deal.
Fine. Thankfully, I hadn’t started working and could cut them clean off.
4. Being difficult or entitled
If I can’t afford you, that’s perfectly fine. But if we come to an agreement and you complain about it afterward, that’s on you. For me, I’m not excited about contacting you again
5. Krool Toys
Ironic name, but this is a company I can confidently say I’m never doing business with again.
All because of a ring.
The knew the non-Krool team members. They were awesome, as always. Their work was fantastic. But the “producers”? Holy shit show, Batman!
I worked on a project as a general artist. I had nothing to do with the programming or exports. I’m sure what happened could have been avoided if the management weren’t so poor. Anyways, I kept the receipts. I’m sharing this as a lesson on incompetence
Here’s what I think happened: the programmer didn’t update the images in the project before exporting the latest build. When Krool Toys reviewed it, they thought I hadn’t uploaded the new images.
On that day, I was planning to color the new images, but the project manager kept preventing me from doing it. Their messages really confused me. All the people who were supposed to be communicating didn’t.
Here’s the conversation about the actual folder itself:
Also, the part where the person accusing me of using the wrong folder was supposed to organize the folder and get back to me.
Here’s me taking the initiative to communicate, and the PM acknowledging they messed up:
Here’s where I was told to stop working. I had been streaming my work on the server so I could get live feedback to speed things up. The person at the bottom of this exchange is the captain of this ship—completely unaware of how to steer it.
The response I received when confronted with the counterevidence:
They never got back to me. I never received an apology. This project just became a sour spot in my portfolio.
It’s never fun finding yourself in this situation—especially when they’re paying you. By the time I received the first message, I was already looking for a lawyer in New York. Thankfully, I didn’t have to go that far in the end.
These examples are the extreme end of “no going back.” They were unavoidable because they happened mid-job or at the end of a job.
But some people like to show their cards early, and I’ll do a follow-up article on red flags.