Over-due update: a couple professional articles, GDC, and a promotion!

Hey folks,

Since I've last updated, there have been a few exciting updates. First, I've written a couple of professional blogs over on Digital Tutors and Pluralsight. The first post is about the importance of maintaining trust on your team, and can be found here.

The second is about the importance of standards, both technical standards and standards-of-practice. That post can be found here. Regrettably, it seems that the image links are broken, but they're not too necessary to the substance of the post. Both of these posts pull a lot from my experiences as a tech artist at Riot, including some challenges we've faced as Riot has grown over the years.

More recently, I'm excited to say I've been able to take on additional responsibilities in a more senior role. I am now an Art Lead on the Personalization team, currently managing seven artists. I'm learning a ton, and am incredibly thankful for the resources and mentors I've had available to me on this journey. Not that I've been super diligent about updating this blog, but as I continue to update in the future, you can expect some content related to the challenges of mentoring, setting expectations for your team, etc.

Last note: after taking a three-year hiatus, I will be returning to GDC this year! In addition to the general sessions, I will be attending the tech art boot-camp. Hope to see you there!

Publishing and Programming

If you haven't seen the November issue of Game Developer Magazine, you might want to check it out! There's a really awesome article called "The Game Entity" that talks about... game entities, how they're constructed, and many pitfalls developers tend to fall into. Not being overly familiar with main loops and game engines and hardcore multi-thread memory problems, there were a few points that needed some google-fu. Still, I found it very informative (and co-workers who are familiar with these things enjoyed it immensely!) This one is appropriate for all audiences.

Oh, also: I wrote a Tool Box review of Autodesk Maya 2012!

It's my first published work as a game professional, which is incredibly exciting! The folks over at GD were very helpful through-out the whole process and I'm really happy with how it came out. I'm not allowed to re-post it here yet, but please do check it out in magazine form. (Edit: considering it's been 4 years and it's online in PDF form... link above) Not to spoil anything, but I get a couple good jabs in there about Autodesk's appetite for early releases and hot-fixes.

My team is talking about adopting Google's 20 percent time concept, which is also exciting. The concept is, since most sprint planning and retrospective days turn our schedules into meeting Swiss cheese anyway, we should take those days to work on personal projects. This allows us to expand our skills, kill a few bugs, increase team bonding, implement a few small nifty-but-not-essential features, and generally become 20% cooler.

My time will probably be spent continuing to learn C++ and C#. I am rediscovering C++ syntax (it's been a while) and am remembering all the crazy shenanigans it gets up to. Yesterday I wrote a list class as a refresher; I will not tell you how many times I tried to run and said, "oh, right, I need a blank .cpp for this header," or, "I guess it's not really going to error... it thinks that variable is out of scope, but visual studio is just lying." A couple engineers on our team have volunteered to help lead this effort (much thanks!), the whole tech art team is pilling in, and it's going to be a party.

I believe the ability to learn can be improved with practice. It's a key component of mental fitness to constantly try new things, especially subjects alien to your core studies. I want to see more developers learning new languages, singing opera, watching documentaries, taking sailing lessons, playing rugby, or learning instruments. It may even feed back into your core discipline! You may see something new about water physics while fishing or learn more about AI through paintball. That mental flexibility will give you tons of value and insight you would have never found at work.

Honestly, though, that's not even the big win. I don't care if my capoeira classes ever further my career or give new insights into animation. The big win is in living a richer life and feeling like every day has something unique in it. I love drawing connections between things when it's not even useful. Today Troy was showing me a new auto-attack particle for a champion; The only thing I could think of was, "that flash and smoke trail looks just like the mini-sonic-boom a pistol shrimp makes."

And that's not useful. That's just cool.

Level Up + Force Multiplying

Hello internet,

First, personal news: it's been a good week! I'm excited to say that, after finally receiving my yearly review, I've been officially stripped of my junior status. My title has evolved from "Associate Technical Animator" to simply "Technical Artist," indicating an increased range of responsibilities and influence within Riot Games. Huzzah! I'm very honored and excited to move forward with my team as we continue to improve our tools and pipeline. It's going to be rad.

During my review, one of the points Riot underlined for me was the importance of being a force multiplier. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, essentially it speaks to the value of teaching and enabling those around you to be more effective. Providing better tools, teaching new methods, improving communication, or simply increasing morale are all forms of force multiplication. To me, it is the core principle of tech art.

Last year, I was in a much different place at Riot. At the time, most of my work was related to hooking up new character rigs and skins. I was also responsible for creating dynamic poses for the characters, as we used these for reference when crating splash art. We had about seven character skins coming out per patch, so this represented a large chunk of my work velocity. It was difficult for me to do this work and simultaneously undertake tools initiatives or otherwise improve the pipeline. I was also a bottleneck: splash artists and QA depended on me finishing these characters before their work could begin.

Two important things happened: first, we sought to train others on the animation team to do these tasks. Sharing knowledge and responsibility made us more flexible. Second, we challenged the process. We experimented with outsourcing and creating other ways to generate poses that didn't rely on the animation team. Ultimately, we found that while some concepts might benefit from 3D poses for reference, many worked well (or even better) free-hand. By reducing the number of cross-team dependencies and increasing the number of routes to achieve our goal, the pain point almost entirely disappeared.

This is just one example, but it speaks to a philosophy. Whatever your work may be, continue to ask the question: "What is more difficult than it needs to be?" Where can we reduce dependencies? How can we share knowledge? What happens to your production if you get hit by a bus? As counter-intuitive as it may seem, you actually want to make yourself obsolete. Remember: if you want to be promoted, the best strategy is to train your replacement. Until you do, you are stuck.

Cheers.

def HelloWorld(newContext):

Hello internet! Since I last posted here, many things have happened... most of them incredible.

I not only had a fantastic internship at Riot Games, but since became a full-time technical animator. I have seen our product, League of Legends, evolve from a pretty popular online game to a multi-award-winning, international, multi-million-player sensation. I have a GDC award sitting on my desk. I love my job. Everything went... way better than expected.

I also had a bit of a career re-focusing. When I last posted here, I listed my skills as "animator and concept artist." While I still love to draw and animate, my career path has strayed almost entirely into technical art. This is actually awesome. For the past year, I've become involved with a very smart and passionate group of people focused on helping others on their teams be effective. Though I've animated a few characters for LoL (Swain, Urgot, and Jarvan IV!), I've touched every character in the game by re-making their rigs, fixing problems, making tools, and generally filling that all-important support role. I'm learning more about rigging and programing (so far, mostly Python with a smidgen of C++) and a lot about game production. I'm really excited to see what sorts of problems I try to solve next!

The switch from student to industry professional happens incredibly fast. It was bizarre for me to go back and read my first couple of post on this blog; I was totally focused on the goal of getting hired and, as soon as it happened, I needed to totally re-contextualize my idea of success. I'm sure most Rioters who have been part of this ride from the beginning are stunned constantly by how far the company has come.

I'm excited to say I've had a few opportunities to help other students make the switch to industry professional as well. I've looked at dozens (hundreds?) of portfolios at GDC and SIGGRAPH. I've made a presentation with my co-workers to student volunteers just a year after I was sitting right where they were. Next week, I'm going to have the incredibly surreal experience of making a "how to get into the industry" talk at Ringling, speaking to many of the people I've known as a student! I'm incredibly excited for this trip. I've got my slides ready and a follow up Q&A lined up with the Game Design Club. It's going to be sweet.

I don't know how often I'll update this blog. Ideally, I start posting some work related to tech art; none of my internet presence currently suggests what I actually do. This is terribly hypocritical, seeing as I encourage every student I speak with to demonstrate their work and thought processes through blogs or websites. Historically my interests have been incredibly fickle; I start and stop side projects all the time. Within the last couple months I've started D&D campaigns, Warhammer 40K leagues, music jam sessions, indie games... tonight alone I painted miniatures for a co-worker, edited an article that'll be coming out soon in Game Developer magazine (super excited!), watched SoloMid livestreams, and wrote this blog post. I'm not sure I'll be able to stuff everything I want to do into the nights and weekends, so expect updates to be sporadic as usual.

For most of my life, I've felt guilty about the projects I keep starting and stopping. I'm starting to think, however, that it doesn't really matter; all of this is valuable. Even if I can't maintain focus on one problem for months on end, it's exactly this desire to stick my hands into everything that's allowed me to grow into a support role across many different projects. I'm excited for seeing where it all goes next.

Graduation and Riot Games!

Oh hey I graduated! :D

It feels super awesome to be done. And, to top it off, I have an internship at an incredible company and I'm really really excited. I will be rigging and animating this summer (and maybe, hopefully, permanently) at Riot Games!

I was lucky enough to meet a few of the Riot people at GDC this spring. They seem really cool, I really love their game (League of Legends), and I really look forward to getting over there next week. Until then, I'll be getting ready, hanging out with the folks and the guitar, and maybe playing some games. :P I'm also getting a new ASUS laptop tomorrow, which should be sweet business. I'll be putting Maya on there and making it my main machine.

So, sorry for the long lull between updates, but that's where we stand. I'll be sure to update on the Riot situation when I'm over there. :D

Toodles.