The Game Dev Journals: "Building Sword Tech"
The Game Dev Journals: "Building Sword Tech"
By: @SWDTechGames - #Project Manager - Tim Robinson
It stemmed from conversations with friends and peaked after sitting down to watch Indie Game: The Movie. How does video game development work? I mean, where do you start? What are the boring, unfilmable pieces of the story that fill in the blanks?
At that time, I barely had a toe in the door of the gaming industry. I was (still am!) a host on the SML Podcast for the now long gone TheGamingVault.com which also led to the chance to do some light review work here and there. I thought that if I kept at it, who knows, maybe I could break into video game journalism and one day sit in on a panel at PAX Prime as a choice guest to talk about the industry.
In a strange twist of fate - in early 2012, Joe Cammisa, one of the other hosts of the SML Podcast - invited on some guy named Kunal. Apparently, he was in some bands that did video game music. I was thinking, cool, a guest on the podcast who’s actually done something, carry on.
Kunal didn't just talk about music though, he went into talking about the gaming studio he was starting with his friend Len. I did one of those half joking "you hiring?" kind of quips and to my honest surprise, he said yes, he was.
At this point in my life, I was the Regional Manager for a string of small video game stores. It was a good gig, but I was getting burned out from working retail for so many years. I knew it was time to move on, and I needed to set an end date for myself.
Now, I hadn't met Kunal when I made the decision to leave my job, and in fact, I hadn't really looked too far into a new career path. All I knew is that part of me, the creative part, ached to chase after something that made me feel talented and fulfilled rather than, well, retail.
I loosely kept up with Kunal and we talked about the company and the project they were working on, Pixel Noir. We planned a lunch, had an interview, and decided that with my talents and work history I would be a great fit for the team as a Project Manager.
The timing fit. I was leaving one job and moving into another. However, the first thing I learned about game development started not long after.
Dates, no matter how firmly in place they are, usually aren't met.
This is not generally any one persons fault. I've experienced this a lot while trying to film things through the years; where in your head, you think, this is a perfect timeline to get something done. Then, when you/your team goes to work on it, you find out why these things cost so much money and man power.
To quote Valve, "Making games is hard."
This did not then - and now something like three or four months into the project - still does not, discourage me. We are a small indie team, building a prototype so we can get funded traditionally.
Originally, we had outsourced our coding side to third party company. We built a pretty complete GDD, got it to the group, who returned with a Milestone plan. We had some concerns off the bat about it, but we thought hey, this is a respectable company, they know what they are doing.
I think we fired them a month later.
So, we moved on to work with our in house coder who we were using as a sort of interpreter before. This guy is nuts. It took him something like a week to build what took the other company nearly a month; and with a level of tightness that the company we had fired had absolutely no grasp of. After this, we ended up moving on completely with just him.
When I say just him, I mean, JUST HIM. One coder.
Even with his level of talent, we still miss deadlines. No amount of management or talks from the team can change that. We simply need more resources, more coders, more time.
It makes me think about poor ol' Phil Phish. This guy, who is now notorious in the industry, had received a lot of hate for taking something around five years to create the excellent game Fez. People wondered what was taking so long and were literally sending the guy death threats over it.
These people have obviously not tried to make a game, and if they have, they never finished it.
I understand the whole process a lot more now, and I have not even really started talking about any of it from the management side of things. It's an incredibly difficult process. It's organic, it's like a living breathing system, if one person falters, the whole system slows. On the same token, if it does falter, we're all there to help out too.
We are like a gang, but a gang that goes out and makes games instead of smashing windows and stabbing people.
If I get the chance to talk to someone who wants to get into making games though, the first thing I will tell them is to stick with it. It's going to take time, not just longer than they expected, even longer than that. Then, when they get to that point, longer still.
Tied to that, is the other thing I learned.
Life keeps going on around you.
If you are just starting out, without a full time job in the industry, no office, perhaps not even getting paid; then you will watch as the world keeps marching onward. It will try to crush you.
I moved out of my apartment and now live with a friend, an hour away from what was home, in a room smaller than a typical jail cell. Chances are that I will not have a solid income for probably another month. But the strangest thing about it is that I could not be any happier.
Now, I'm not saying that all game dev jobs are going to be, or should put forth a sort of "pay your dues" situation, where you have to deal with some sort of crushing amount of work or life decision. What I want to say is that if you find yourself in that situation and you are not excited every minute you sit down to do the work, then you may not be in the right field. That's the key to it all, finding a line of work that makes you happy. It may not be the easiest route at first but waking up every day knowing that you are doing something you love will change your entire world.
So I left my job a little early and my living situation is a little awkward for the interim. During that time, our whole team came to find out that it's very difficult to gauge the timeline of a project; that external factors will not only push in on you if you are working with a fledgling studio, they will push you to realize whether or not you are in the right business to begin with.
Please, anyone reading this who wants to get into Game Dev, do not let anything ever discourage you. Set a deadline, and watch it pass. What you will learn about your project trying to meet that deadline is incredibly important. It will spur conversation between team members about every aspect of the game. It will lead you to the understanding of which aspects of the systems you are working with are more time consuming which will in turn allow you to plan for them better in the future. If you find yourself couch surfing, trying to make ends meet until you get your project done - if you love it - keep going. You will make it.
On the Project Management side of things, I've never thought I would be so immersed and engaged in something so creative outside of film. On the first day I had received access to the files for the SWDTech projects I poured over everything, absorbing what I could. I now am the human repository for most things SWDTech, which is a daunting thing, but the longer things go on, the easier it's become.
I work on my iPad most of the time. I ditched my laptop for something with a built in 4G signal so I can work anywhere with a cell signal really. Most of my job has me writing emails, making phone calls, and planning steps forward. Other times I'm pitching design ideas or story ideas, filling in little gaps that no one has gotten to yet in the hopes of at least starting a conversation on them.
There's a lot of trying to be everywhere at once, which is difficult with those external factors pressing on me right now. I'm only able to sit and finally write out this blog because my life just recently slowed down enough for me to do so.
During a typical day, I am not really on the clock at any specific moment, and at the same time I am on the clock at every moment. I had the hope of blocking out times where I would focus solely on SWDTech work and have a set daily schedule for myself, but it just couldn't work like that. I may field a call from Kunal in the morning, relay things to Len later in the day, and then call Luke, the coder, at midnight due to time zones. It's a pretty persistent gig right now.
Dedication and passion are what's driving me forward. A paycheck too, once we get funded, sure, but mostly the dedication and passion.
Typically, I will set off to a local coffee shop with my iPad, grab some yummy yummy hot caffeinated grounded bean juice, then set up camp to work.
Other than the above talks of making calls and emails, the other thing I do is research on Project Management tools and ideologies.
Right now, with no office or central work place, we have been using the website Basecamp for our organization and communication needs. It's seriously clunky, but it works the best of anything we can find so far. This virtual office space has connected us for the life cycle of the Prototype we have been building for investors. When we finish with this and move into full production of Pixel Noir however, I will be transitioning to a much more hardcore Scrum method to crank out more specific chunks of work from the team.
For those who don't know what Scrum is, its a method that essentially breaks the project down into small pieces that get built, implemented, and tested rapidly rather than trying to build whole swaths of a game, test it, and then do a massive bug squash near the end of the life cycle.
Scrum allows us to iterate quickly and test small pieces of the game instantly so we can make sure that they don't suck early on.
Its not the end all be all for any project and of course I'm sure we won't stick to its methodology one hundred percent, but its given me a way to look forward and take what we've learned from building our prototype, then apply that to the full time build cycle that we'll be entering soon.
Well, this was all very tl;dr.
Honestly, I've not tried to write off the top of my brian in a sort of open form blog format in a while, but I'll be doing more of it, and making other people do it too... In fact, I want to try and film it some of the time, and encourage my fellow SWDTech crew to do the same.
I want to show the day to day life and saga of a group of people trying to come together and open a studio. It's not something I've seen before and I think it's something that is needed - I think it's something essential for the direction that the gaming industry is heading.
