Onward and Awkward

Happy Holidays! Though belated, I hope everyone had an enjoyable Thanksgiving.

I've gone through a few goodbyes recently that I wasn't expecting nor prepared for. Comings and goings, however, are by their nature subjective. No story has truly ended to all of the players. Ultimately, I have confidence that everyone involved will go on and continue to do great things. Doors close, windows open, and those with wisdom find the way forward. As Einstein said, "in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

I used much of this past holiday to reset. I've never been one to sit idly for too long, however, so resetting has given way to new projects. I'm practicing C++ with a calendar program (good regex practice), painting some 40K minis on commission (slowly), and catching up on some C.G. Jung. Joseph Campbell was my introduction to Jung, so it's only fitting that he edited the collection I've chosen to review: The Portable Jung. Any fiction writer would benefit from this book. The insights into the human experience, the resonance of childhood, the shared symbols of mythology, feel strikingly true and powerful. Once I finish with Jung, I plan to move on to Marie-Louise Von Franz's The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Yeah. We're gonna get all archetypal up-ins.

At work, I've been thinking about the problem of balancing planning versus implementation. I'm a big fan of "failing fast:" don't worry if your solution is optimal. Implement, see where you erred, then correct. This mentality saves you from the trap of indecision and infinite postponement of implementation. The problem is that, honestly, I'm not the best implementer. I'm focusing on improving my CS chops because I tend to get muddled up on syntax and data structure. I may be working towards failing fast. Until then, I have faith that proper planning and support of my team members will carry us through. As we've said before, weighing principle versus pragmatism will lead you to the best solution.

I've gotten some very positive feedback regarding my Maya 2012 review in Game Developer Magazine, which is fantastic. I hope to find more writing opportunities soon. Speaking of opportunities: if you are a talented Maya Character Rigger and are looking for work, please let me know! Riot Games and I would very much like to hear from you. :)

Cheers, and here's looking forward to the new year.

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.