Life Of A Game Software Geek

Today I participated in a PAC.  That's "Program Advisory Committee".  Two or three times a year, Westwood College invites people working in an industry related to one of their degrees to come in for a couple of hours, look at how the programs are set up, and give advice and suggestions about how to make them better based on their experience.

Hey, I do too have experience.

It was fun.  First they fed us, which is a good draw for game industry people, because the mooch factor is pretty high.¹  Then they gave a short presentation about Westwood, why it's important that industry people show up and keep them honest.  They talked about HLC accreditation, about the 18 campuses (including the online campus) and 4700 students across the country.  Then they split us up according to degree programs.

What really surprised me was how many people actually showed up.  There must've been 30 people in that one room, not counting the actual Westwood employees — bringing it up to 60, I'm sure — and there were 6 people for Game Software Development and Game Art and Design programs.  Doesn't sound like a lot, but I expected half a dozen all together.  I guess people give a shit about what they're teaching their future co-workers.

It was an actual discussion group, and opinions were encouraged and validated.  There's probably some deliberate ego-boosting going on because Westwood definitely wants a good relationship with potential employers and people who're likely to go back with a good report.  For GSD/GAD, I can say it was worth it.  There was Charles Bendert, who's the current Program Director for the GSD/GAD programs.  There were 6 industry people, and four other people from Westwood just there to take notes.  Whatever stroking might have been going on, they were interested in what we were saying.

So what were we saying?  "Get the art and programming students talking to each other.  Get the students serious about their chosen career path — serious about resumes, about job performance, about good attitudes."

Yeah, didn't happen so much when I was there.  It's happening a lot more now, even before the PAC.  At least that's what we were told, and maybe the fact that we were there saying it right back to them puts more emphasis on that.  Anyway, I'm happy: I got free sandwiches and two cool folding pens with the Westwood College motto and no wrench heads on the end.² 
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6 Men 13 Sotz' 12.19.16.7.15
3 Tun, 10 Winal, 5 K'in until the end of time and counting
¹ Kel Mitchell, Mystery Men, 1999.  Play along, challenge your friends, win valuable prizes.
² Ha ha, old joke, don't worry about it.

Allied Aces: Stunt Pilot was released just yesterday for the iPhone.  It resides in the iTunes App Store even now.  It was developed by Squiddle Games, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leviathan Games — yep, the same company that made me an associate producer.  It's our very first iPhone game.

In Stunt Pilot, you take a WWI Sopwith Camel through a series of rings, gaining points by collecting stars and doing a lot of acrobatics¹ .  The graphics are great and you just use your thumbs to pilot the Camel.  We out-did ourselves with the graphics, if I do say so myself.

Yes, it costs 99 cents.  Yes, we are coming out with updates...starting next week and planned for weekly updates thereafter.  And who's doing the updates?  Guess....  So if you're iPhone- or iPod-Touch-equipped, by all means get this game, and tell us what you think.  Feedback means better levels. :)
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3 Kawak 17 Sip 12.19.16.6.19
3 Tun, 11 Winal, 1 K'in until the end of time and counting
¹ You don't have to do a lot of acrobatics to get points — it's just more fun that way

Made the mistake of going to Leviathan's office in Boulder yesterday. So now...

• I'm the programmer for the new game project
• I'm the maintenance programmer for another game project
• It's possible I'm going to be doing production work on a third game project

So what's a maintenance programmer?  Programs that you download from the iTunes store for your iPod or iPhone may be upgraded every once in a while — Version 1.0 to Version 1.1, for example.  For games, this usually means somebody added more levels to the game or fixed bugs, or often both.  That's the maintenance programmer.

When we submit a brand new game to iTunes, we'll have to wait a couple weeks until Apple stamps its approval on the game.  After that, I'll get to go in every week and spend maybe 6-8 hours building a few more levels, and re-submit the game.  The approval process for upgrades will take 3-4 days — when Apple approves the first version it won't take so long to do the next because they'll know what they're getting into.

The awesomeness about upgrades to the games is that people who bought the previous version get the new upgrades for free!  Wotcha!  That might not stop a development team from just releasing a brand new version — not an upgrade, a new program — and going through the approval process all over again, which means that people would have to buy the new version regardless of whether or not they have the old version.  But hey, you can't have everything.  No, really, you can't, even though it's Apple.

All the programming will wait.  For the first bullet-point game, I'm waiting a couple days for our CCO to get the art assets together.  The second bullet-point, the one which we'll submit and I'll maintain...well, duh, we gotta submit it.  So I'm doing the third thing, which starts with reading documents pertaining to a submission process for an entirely different game system.  Officially, we're not doing it yet, not until we get all the details ironed out.

So the most important question is: what does this mean for me?  Well, I'm contract for the first two games, and possibly salary for the third one.  Gotta wait for all those details to be ironed out.  Only the first game is definite.  Meanwhile, I gotta go read a whole lot of documentation.

I'm fully-employed again.  Now I have to work again.  Kind of sucks, right?
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11 Ix 12 Sip 12.19.16.6.14
3 Tun, 11 Winal, 6 K'in until the end of time and counting

( One of the better ones, but still using Capital Letters )
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9 Eb 10 Sip 12.19.16.6.12
3 Tun, 11 Winal, 8 K'in until the end of time and counting
¹ Running gags...gotta love 'em.  This one's going away...probably about damn time too
² I've said before my name isn't really Boy Mozart.  I don't use my real name in my posts even though most of the LJ bloggers I've friended know it.  After all this time I'm still reluctant to use it.  Just another quirk, I dunno.... I actually used my first, middle, and last name here in this conversation
³ It's a little easier when you're not married to the guy in the first place :)

I've written another rough draft design doc for Leviathan — 3rd or 4th or πth, I've officially lost count now.  The Art Director and I spent some time this morning going over it.¹ We were talking about a specific item and I had a suggestion, "What about this..." and she said "that's a great idea."

This officially marks my first design decision!

When I'm writing proposals and design documents I'm basically just typing in decisions that other people have made — very well, I might add, I'm so awesome — and occasionally I feel like an admin assistant.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, only I don't wanna be.  It's not that simple, however.  You're telling someone else what the decisions were and how they should be implemented, going from "make a flappy thingy go through the open bits"² to "Concave and convex collision objects must be present to allow bird objects to maneuver between branches and leaves without going through them, providing more realism."  It's easier just to say "flappy thingy" but you don't laugh so much when you read my interpretation.

Point is, I get it down and prepare it for submission to potential clients and our programmers & artists so we're all on the same page, but I haven't done any actual design work.  Until now.  It was just an idea I had, but it felt good to hear it be accepted and possibly become part of this game.  I made design decisions in classes at Westwood, I listened to others' thoughts and ideas and came up with some of my own.  But none of those games are being produced or sold.  This one is.  It's different now, more of an impact, an accomplishment I wasn't even interested in achieving.  Leviathan has damn good designers, but I'm a producer.  I'm there to make sure everything jives.  But I had an idea, presented it, and got some positive feedback.  I'm surprised sometimes at the directions this "career thingy" is taking.

By the way, wanna know what the game is?  What platform it's on, what genre, when it'll be available?  Well, too bloody bad.  All hail the NDA.  Don't worry, it's cool and you'll love it.  Trust me.
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9 Eb 10 Sip 12.19.16.6.12
3 Tun, 11 Winal, 8 K'in until the end of time and counting
¹ Yes, I know it's Memorial Day, I forgot when I suggested the meeting time, she was cool with it.  Blame the sig
² Nobody's ever actually said "flappy thingy" to me before, but it's only a matter of time

I found this out, like, 15 seconds ago.  Caligari trueSpace Support Fading Fast

Again, I'd never heard of this product until, like, 15 seconds ago.  Microsoft is obviously into the whole game development thing now, has been for a while, but I've never heard of any products produced by them to make 3D art assets.  About the closest thing I've ever seen Microsoft develop for art is, well, Paint.¹

They went out and acquired Caligari's trueSpace program last year and made it available for free.  The interest from my perspective is that you can use it to develop game assets.  And low and behold, that previous link shows you can develop textures within trueSpace, which puts Paint out of business from that respect. :)  But MS has been losing money like everyone else so they have to cut back on certain projects including trueSpace, which may just mean support but which may go up all the way to closing the project all together.

Microsoft wants developers to make games for Xbox and, I'm sure, for PCs.  There are a lot of good modeling packages like Blender, Maya, 3DS, but trueSpace was the first one I've heard of that was for free, and actively being used by the game community.²  I'm useless when it comes to developing art assets, but I'm just a little boggled about this.  I wish I'd spent more time looking into things like this, seemed like a good way for MS to stick itself even further into the game community and continue to use its proven draconian tactics to compete.

If you're interested in checking out trueSpace, it's available for a short while longer at Caligari's original website.  Check out that first link way up at the top of this post for instructions on downloading.  But you'd better hurry, because, well, it's fading fast....
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6 Muluk 7 Sip 12.19.16.6.9
3 Tun, 11 Winal, 11 K'in until the end of time and counting
¹Maybe I'm wrong, I don't remember if MS had any other kind of art program, Paint's all I can remember seeing.  Photoshop FTW
²MilkShape is shareware—you get a 30-day eval, then you gotta pay US$35 or €25 to keep saving files.  Damn good price for a low poly modeler that can import/export 70 different formats, but still not free :(

Checking out the stats from my one remaining website, the one where I post my CV....  And it turns out 23% of the page views are for my Blog page, specifically the page that has the RSS feed to my LJ.

Makes me wanna post more.  Gotta come up with something to post, but hey, posting has never been my problem.  Shutting up, on the other hand....

( Not with a bang, etc.... )
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6 Ak'bal 1 Wo 12.19.16.5.3
3 Tun, 12 Winal, 17 K'in until the end of time and counting

I used to have a website on which I kept all of my posts to talk.bizarre.  That's right, used to.  I contacted Frii a few minutes ago and asked them to shut it down, along with the old e-mail address.

It's a cost saving feature, like $23 a month.  It's a hard choice, because that was the last grip on this persona, the last attachment to the old days that I had control over.  Now it's going away.  Not that I've done much with it in the past decade or so, but still....

So bmozart-at-frii-dot-com is up for grabs.  I understand /[a|c-z]/mozart is still available too.
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13 Kaban 15 Pop 12.19.16.4.17
3 Tun, 13 Winal, 3 K'in until the end of time and counting

Monday morning we got a nice little snowfall, covered Denver and Boulder and everything in between.  Traffic slowed down to a crawl, including the buses I was riding.  I got a late start, left an hour late.  As I was sitting in a small shelter at the Broomfield Park-n-Ride I wondered if maybe I could've stayed home and telecommuted.

When I finally got into Boulder, I got a call on my cell from my boss, telling me I could stay home and telecommute.  Heh.

Every year, Colorado gets snowed on.  It's usually just a few feet, spread out along several snowfalls.  By the time the next snowfall hits, the snow and ice from the previous snowfall have melted, gone for weeks.  And yet, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the various snow removal services based on the plains portion of the state continue to fail to run their snow plows.  I suppose that statement could be disputed, but I stood there at the bus stop outside my apartment watching six lanes of traffic forced into four lanes, watched cars heading up the hill on Wadsworth come to a stop because they can't travel over the ice.  What snow that might have been plowed off the streets gets dumped on the sidewalks, and people are stupid enough to walk in the street instead—hey, at least there ain't no snow there, and drivers have to watch out for pedestrians, right?

These thoughts kept me warm on the long trip into Boulder.  By the time Anna called everyone else in the office had sent e-mails saying they were staying home.  I sent the first e-mail that morning, saying I'd be late.  Everyone else was trying to hint that it might be more convenient to stay home and work, but I'm too dogged determined to put in an appearance.  This is how you pronounce "dogged": STOO-pid.

The only other person in the office was Wyeth.  He lives three blocks away; he could've walked, even on Monday, if he didn't have to drop his daughter off at day care.  It was quiet and peaceful in the office, except for all the IMs I was getting from everybody asking me to do research, dig through files for specific artwork, and open up a computer to see if there was a second drive bay for another HD.  It's probably the busiest day I've had so far: three or four things on my plate that had to be done, including another proposal.  Well, Wyeth wrote that one and I just cleaned it up a little.

It ought to snow more often.  But global warming, you know.
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7 Ahaw 3 Muwan 12.19.16.0.0
3 Tun, 17 Winal, 20 K'in until the end of time and counting