I have been in the game industry for almost three years, and it has been quite the ride thus far. I graduated a Computer Scientist from Syracuse and only had decided that I would make my mark on the game industry months before I received my degree. Not phased by my lack of personal development experience, I was determined to find a way into the industry, knowing that I could find my way once I got in there. Through a ridiculous amount of networking, I started at Harmonix in their QA department as a tester in March of 2009.
Almost two years later, and four products shipped with my name on them (The Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Network, Rock Band 3, and Dance Central), I came up for air. I had learned a ton about game development at (relatively) larger scale for the industry — at it’s peak, Harmonix was around 350 people, and has multiple projects and teams working on new stuff all the time. With such a large company, however, it is important to have some people be dedicated and focused on a particular task. By developing and harnessing experts for very specific parts of your pipeline, you can create a really strong foundation for the rest of your development team to flourish. I found my work becoming more and more pigeonholed to a direction that I wasn’t comfortable with (it was far more directed at tools than it was at game development), and I decided a change would be appropriate for me. I wanted to have my fingers in a bunch of proverbial pies, so to speak. I am fairly certain that games are my passion, but I wanted to take some time actually trying a bunch of different facets of it before I settled down into something.
Through some networking, I managed to land one of the most rewarding three months of work I have had yet, doing some development on a demo for Moonshot Games. The game is called Fallen Frontier. I did some light work in their engine, worked with the designer, implemented auto-aim, created a crowd system, and even got to design and develop a fun cannon-fodder enemy, the drone. If that experience wasn’t mind blowing enough, I got to present the game with the team at PAX East 2011. Check out some of the gameplay footage, I think everyone who worked on that is very proud of what we managed to put together for that show.
After PAX, I went full time as the lead developer on a game I had been working on in my spare time. A company in DC who does training for the DoD wanted to add a game to their training to help instill the issues that they are trying to teach their students. The game puts a player in the role of the people that they will be working with to help the player gain a broader cultural awareness of the communities, views, and goings-on of the location they are being deployed into. At a basic level, the game is a resource management and decision making game, supported by primary source information that is showing to be very successful in generating meaningful conversations in the classroom setting during the training. Being the lead developer on the project has taught me some invaluable lessons about creating systems that can systematically grow very large over the course of the project. Forcing the team, at times against their will, to deal with these larger systems during the build out caused changes much later in the project to be much smoother and understood by everyone. I can happily say that most of the requests that we get for feature additions play into the original design of the game’s system.
After about six months of full time work on that game, my tasks are starting to wrap up, and I’ve reduced my time to a four day workweek so that I can (finally?) open up some time to do some game development on my own and discover what to focus my energies on.
I bit the bullet and purchased a Unity 3 license, and am determined to release something. I hope to share some of that experience of the games I make here, not only to review the decisions I made down the road, but to hopefully help others learn from my successes and missteps, IN REAL TIME.
