I’m as guilty as anyone for hammering the skip button when a videogame’s credits begin to roll, but I acknowledge that a scrolling list of names is an important part of the game. At a time when layoffs abound, projects are cancelled at a moment’s notice, and work in the games industry is more difficult to find than ever, designers being able to show potential employers the work they’ve done is vital. Hence, diligent, accurate crediting is important for any creative’s career, as well as just being the decent thing to do.
In most cases, a credit is formulated as the developer’s name and the nature of their role on the project, whether that’s a fixed job title or a specific type of work they contributed on a part-time or freelance basis. But with the credits for Demonschool, developer Necrosoft Games went one step further, adding paragraph-long descriptions for every role on the project.
We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don’t know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.
— @brandon.insertcredit.com (@brandon.insertcredit.com.bsky.social) 2025-11-25T11:23:58.087Z
“Credits are basically a free space,” Sheffield elaborates in a follow-up post. “Players will watch them or not. Those who do will come to understand how each person participated.” I’d add to this that such descriptions make me more likely to stop and read the credits. For the average person, reading an enormous list of names is not an engaging exercise—unless you’re smitten with a specific aspect of design and want to find out who worked on it. But credits that tell me in detail what a person did? That’s interesting, providing a bit of inside track on the development process.
Sheffield points out a couple of other interesting things too about Demonschool’s credits too. He notes that Necrosoft credits “everyone who ever touched the game in any way,” which is also good practice. Sometimes developers miss out people who had smaller roles on a project, like localisation teams or design consultants, even though their work still helps shape the experience.
Finally, Sheffield concedes that “this means for a relatively small team our credits are long. But who cares? Why be stingy with it?” This goes back to his earlier point about credits being a “free space”. There’s no limit on how long a game’s credits can be, and players are more likely to sit through them based on how interesting they are rather than their length.
Of course, a game has to be worth your time before you’re likely to read its credits, and by all accounts Demonschool will have you eating through it like a tube of Pringles. “I devoured it in a matter of days,” Mollie Taylor wrote in her Demonschool review, awarding it a score of 86%. “It pulled off something no other RPG has managed before: make me fall in love with the ways of the isometric grid.”
Read the full article here
