Point being, know your project, know your requirements, and know when it's better to spend time prep, and when it's better to simply wait till you see it and react.

And that's not to say test plans are useless. Of course for a big enough system there will be huge swaths of interactions that are best planned out ahead of time and tracked.
There are also low tolerance environments where the spec is law, and deviation from that in development is itself a problem.

You can plan all you want ahead of time, but development is so often going to drift from the plan in critical ways that you'll need to adjust and figure out and test the system as it was implemented, not as it was specced.

Fingers crossed that if B happens that businesses not overly reliant on LLM services become seen as a sort of safe haven investment.

Like Blues Traveller said:
"There's no such thing as a failure who keeps trying"

FWIW, from a follower dating back to the bad place, your content maker work is exemplary. You work with your fascination to bring attention to the under-appreciated, while having fun. It's wins all around. No hate or drama, just fun and respect.
Here's hoping the rest of life treats you well in 2026

Or as Weird Al said:
"You gotta grab life by the lips and just YANK AS HARD AS YOU CAN!"

So much of my time has been doing end of the pipeline hero work tying things together that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, and...
*sigh*
Just venting a little...

Also it's from every direction for me. I'm a knowledge in my current position, and I keep having to push everyone around to ask me questions to save both them and me time down the road.
They're always like "But you're so busy" and I'm like "THEN STOP MAKING IT WORSE AND ASK THE QUESTION NOW!"

I might be more sensitive on that count for a couple reasons.
Had one tester lose days trying to figure something out that they had no way to be able to figure out on their own, but consistently refused to ask questions in favor of figuring it out themselves. Dead end after dead end to lost time.

Ask questions, ask questions, for the love of god, ask more questions
If you can figure it out yourself that's great, but there's so much abstract stuff that you have to be ready to say "I'm not getting it, please explain this to me"
I've had to impress this so hard on so many people over the years

"someone’s resume or CV and the candidate took singular credit for an award, I might be a little leery of such a candidate"

Agreed. Unless you solo'd it like Her Story, good news like that is "we". Either that or you're talking to Kojima or Miyamoto, or someone for whom a resume is irrelevant.

Personally, I'd feel more winning one of the awards given at GDC, either IGF or GDCA, than a VGA. At least those are industry awards.

"Since the majority of games are a team effort"

Little funny, I was there when "Her Story" won everything across both award sets, and that was all just Sam Barlow.

In an ideal case I can only think of a few uses for LLMs in games. Like dynamic villager dialogue in an RPG. But this also takes the user out of a curated experience, so this is still peripheral or novelty gimmick stuff. I've yet to see a core concept proposed that actually requires an LLM.

Ran into that plenty with early feature phones when the hardware capacity was developing very quickly, and previous development was... as simple as possible.

Also any time I think about tying behavior to frame rate, it makes me think of taking older things where framerate is the basis of the calculation instead of time, and putting them onto newer hardware and HOLY COW THIS IS UNPLAYABLY FAST!

"Developers often make a lot of assumptions"

Testing has to run on a lot of assumptions, too. Especially on a live service application. "You submitted a change to feature A. Feature B is unrelated and you marked no change there, so I didn't look there because I can't check everything every time"

I admittedly got lucky. I wanted to work in games, and my first job out of college was a game tester. Turns out software testing fits my skills and mindset very well, so I've been adding to my skills and confidence for it since.