Give Blood

I started writing this post on my 21^st birthday (this past Sunday), so it's going to be pretty frivolous and might not teach you anything-but hey, you've been warned. Because it's my birthday, I've been thinking about my successes and failures that I've had growing into the game developer that I am today. A bit of a postmortem of going from being a kid that loved video games and math to heading into my final year of college with more than a few games under my belt.

I decided I wanted to be a game developer when I was in 7^th grade, which is now 8 years in the past (I'm a junior in college now). This decision was met with resistance from most people that I knew, but I was really serious about it. Most people thought I'd grow out of it and choose to do something that “made a difference”, especially those who knew that up until that point I was a kid that wanted to make use of my love of math and science at NASA working as a researcher.

Clearly, I didn't grow out of it. I suppose that it didn't help that I was already very aware that it was “nearly impossible” to get into the games industry. With this in mind, I managed to get a bunch of scholarship money at a private school on the other side of town for one reason: computer science classes. I didn't make games in high school (and I'm glad I didn't – I needed to be a kid), but getting serious about programming years before college was one of the best things to happen to me. Exposure to code before college helps so much farther down the line (by the way check out Brett Douville's awesome post about teaching his son about programming). But still, I knew that I had a great deal of work was ahead of me because I knew how hard it was to get a job.

Not that long ago, this video surfaced about game development:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw

To put my thoughts at the time into perspective, I acted a bit like I had that video running on repeat in my head (even though that particular video didn't exist yet). I made the decision to attend Michigan State University largely for financial reasons, but also because of job opportunities with the game development lab I currently work for. Attending a large university was a bit worrisome to me, given that I didn't think a diverse program could compete with a specialized school like Digipen or Full Sail. I felt like I had to work my ass off to make up to what I would probably be missing from class. I got involved with Spartasoft, MSU's game development club, and vigilantly attended every game jam that year. By the time the year closed, I had worked on no fewer than six games of varying sizes, and was starting to get interested in writing shader code. To say the least, I was working hard and was perhaps overreacting a bit to my worries that I might be getting a “lesser” education.

Freshman year was also the year that I watched many of the seniors that mentored me fail to get jobs. The industry was starting to feel the pains of the recession and things were rough, and it scared the shit out of me. No matter how hard I was working that year, I pushed myself into overdrive the next year. I was involved with a team in a game development competition that ended up winning a trip to GDC paid for by Ford Credit. Being an underclassmen on the team as well as the primary programmer, it would be the first project I seriously crunched for, but I'm glad I did because going to GDC that Spring changed my perspective about everything.

Up until that year, I suffered from something that I suspect afflicts many young programmers. I thought I could be both programmer and designer. I mean design gets all of the glory right? Every kid wants to be the next Miyamoto or the next Ken Levine, and I still reveled in the thought. But that year I would finally get enough experience to realize that design is really hard and you might kill yourself if you try to be both a good programmer and a good designer. Still, I thought maybe gameplay code was the place for me, or a scripting heavy design position. And then GDC hit me like a train hitting a chicken, blowing apart all my thoughts about game development as a career. The fact of the matter is that engine code is really cool, tool development is incredibly important, and hand optimizing assembly code makes you a badass. I had started to become interested in graphics and rendering, and John Hable's presentation about HD rendering in Uncharted 2 convinced me that I wanted to do graphics code professionally. If you get the chance, check out some of his presentations and his website, there's some great stuff there.

Going along with these newfound desires to work on lower level systems, I once again decided I wasn't working hard enough and hurled myself further into my work for the next year. I had the portfolio development class for MSU's game specialization that fall, and I began pulling tons of late nighters and all nighters for my games. I look back on college and realize having a laptop and being able to take my work everywhere with me was both a blessing and a curse. I got to the point where I got a feature implemented into a game while in the back seat of a car on a coffee run. I was out of control, wanting to learn and accomplish so much, so fast. So was it worth it? Now that you've read through several paragraphs of me admitting to crunching increasingly more throughout college, I'm going to finally get to my point.

For the first Spring in a long time, I don't feel like college is a time bomb with only so much time left. Three years of increasingly stepping up my dedication to learning the art of game development has finally lead me to become the programmer I want to be. Maybe I worked too hard at times, but it's no small task to become a programmer cut out for game development in just four years time. The way I viewed life, if you want to get a job in the games industry, you have to become a good game developer, and the only way that that will happen is if you love making games and learning how to make even better games. I went back to GDC this year, and I'll be back again next year, because I love learning about all the crazy techniques people are developing and trying. People talk about how you have to have connections to make it as a game dev (what are we, film?), but I honestly think that's bull shit. I don't want your card because I want a job, I want your card because I want to be friends with people riding the edge of what games can do (speaking of which, props to the Battlefield 3 team). If you want to make games throw yourself at it, because only you can make yourself a crack game developer.

When I'm walking to the lab and I feel like I'd rather go home and sleep through the afternoon, I listen to one song consistently. It's called “Ali vs. Frazier 1” by a Massachusetts hardcore band named Bane. I think it summarizes my view's on what it takes to become successful at anything worthwhile, including game development:

(rumble, young man, rumble)
how many more days will you sit
and talk about your ambitions
all that you can be
the person you are dying to be
the place you want to get to
but always out of reach
before that fury swells inside of you
grows so big that it forever quiets you
stand up to your demons
make a run at your goliath
find the best, find the worst
waiting in both of you
it's not the who or the what that is lasting
but how you fight
that is the fight
the only mark that will not leave you
and I will feel my heart drum its final beat
if it meant that I have given this my all
there's nothing left for me to believe in
if not your, if not this...
what else is there but death?
(it's your call...it's all on you)
give more
give everything
give blood

Students and Quality of Life

The basis for this post is partly me realizing that I rant about bits and pieces of being a game development student on a semi-frequent basis, and partly because GDC is keeping me from fully fleshing out a more technical post. So as a result, I decided to compile together some of my thoughts about what being a student is like these days and what sorts of possible implications it might have for the future. I met up with @MikeActon and a few other #AltDevBlogADay contributors at a cigar bar earlier this week in the gigantic blur that was another GDC. Myself and Shawn (@qtbon), the other half of the programming team in the GEL lab, were the only current students in attendance.

Shortly after we arrived the conversation turned to quality of life, something that Mike has been talking about quite a bit as of late, including an excellent presentation at Game Forum Germany. One of the points brought up was that the huge influx of students interested in game development allows companies to basically burn through their employees and easily refresh themselves from a deep pool of people desperately looking for work. I didn't end up contributing my thoughts on the subject from a student perspective, but I later realized that maybe I did have a relevant perspective to add to the discussion. Especially because I'm currently in the weird spot in my life where I've found myself fitting into many different sides of the fence dividing developers and those aspiring to become developers, which as a warning, might make me sound like I jump perspectives a few times throughout this. I might be wrong about some of this, so feel free to flame me in the comments in that case :)

When Start-ups are “Safe”

I attended GDC with a handful of other Michigan State students this week, many of which are actively in the hunt for jobs. However, Shawn and a couple others weren't looking for work because as their current projects wrap up and they begin to graduate, they've decided to form Adventure Club Games, a start-up, doing a combination of contract work and smaller independent projects. They've already landed a few serious games related contracts through the professors with grants at the university, so they may be well on their way to surviving the first year as a start-up.

What worries me is that some of the students looking for jobs have told me this week that they feel that the guys involved in Shawn's company have the “safe bet.” This is quite honestly one of the most terrifying things that I have ever heard students say. I'm intentionally not letting myself get roped into Shawn's company, even though they're all great guys and I know they'd be excited to have me on board. I've been involved in two start-ups in the past (not all game related), and I think that the stress that comes along with that could quite honestly kill me at this point in my life. Going into an industry where a start-up feels like a safer bet than finding a job is just... unbelievable.

Let's circle back real quick to what I mentioned earlier, this conversation started because we were talking about crunch, and the thought that there is an endless pool of fresh talent ready to get killed in a vicious cycle of burnout is quite troubling. These kids would work well over 80 hours a week and throw themselves under a bus for the opportunity to work on “game X,” and they still feel like it would be easier to get involved in a start-up. In my experience, being in a start-up is a whole different devil, it's a world where the crunch is endless because the sole determinant of success is yourself. The amount of time you spend on your work is a bottomless pit of stress, business, and development, but the reward is that you get ownership and control. People at Mike's get together mentioned staying with a death march development because of loyalty to the studio or loyalty to the project, but think about it, in a start-up, you are the entire show. You either rise or die, and it's a very difficult thing to do. To see students thinking starting a business as a more secure temptation than sticking through the hurdles of landing a job with an established studio- it shows just how crazy this all is.

I feel like students might be getting the wrong messages from the industry as to what should be expected of them. After spending time in the career pavilion, several students told me that they basically felt like 4 years of college had absolutely no relevance to them getting a job. Something is not right if people feel like that, especially if they're part of a program that is apparently ranked among the top in North America. We don't want people to drop out of school and try to make games in their basements. We want people to rise above their degrees and push their programs to new heights, even if the piece of paper you get at the end isn't as important as what you learned along the way. Game development education is still in its infancy, we need to be encouraging programs to grow and mature.

To be a Student

This all really gets to me because I think that this perception finding work as a student game developer being impossible might be having a negative impact on the the student culture as a whole. This ties back into how uncomfortable it makes me when design students want to make games that are marketable instead of games that are art. Are we suffocating creativity out of students? I always thought design students would be stubbornly optimistic about games as art, wanting to experiment and create as they find themselves suddenly empowered to create virtual worlds. Shouldn't students be encouraged to make use of their time in college to experiment and take risks? They're getting an opportunity to make the games they want to make, as they exist in an environment free of the weight of money and the reponsibilities associated with a formal job. This is why I think the student showcase is such an important part of the Independent Games Festival- it encourages students to take a risk and do something creative.

This applies to disciplines beyond design as well. Programmers and artists should be encouraged to try new or unconventional techniques. In school, it's alright to fail at an implementation and learn from our mistakes. We need to encourage people to experiment with ways to make their games interesting, optimized, beautiful, and every other thing that we want to achieve as developers when we work on professional projects.

From A to B

When I started college, it was also the beginning of me truly becoming serious about game development. I took a long look at myself and realized where I thought I might need to be as a developer by the time I graduate. I imagined the quality of game I thought that I might need to be capable of producing to “break in,” those devilish words that give an aspiring student the chills.

At the time, it seemed impossible. There was so much to learn, and improving the quality of my work was such a tedious process, I wondered if I would be heading to grad school at the end of my four years to continue my education. Now that I'm three years in, I feel a little foolish for thinking that during my earlier years. However, there's something important there- that envisioning of where I wanted to be at the end has been vitally important for my growth as a developer. It was something that I did on my own that I really wish more people had been saying because I think it

In all honesty, I feel like we need to be telling students a bit more than just “you have to make games,” which is something that I've heard over and over again. That's not enough. There's so much more to becoming a good developer.

What I think we should be saying:

Based off of my own experiences over the past years, here's a short list of what I think we should actually be telling students:

1. Set your goals. How long do you have until you will be looking for a job? The clock is ticking. But the harder you work early on, the easier it will get. Make sure you include getting team based experience in that road plan if you don't intend to be a one man show your whole life.

2. You have to be good at what you want to do. Can you produce work of the quality of studios that you want to work at? Realize that basic skills across your broader discipline is important (art, programming, etc), but specialize in one or two areas is important as well (animation, rendering, etc).

3. Speed counts too. Artists hear this sometimes, but its important for everyone. If you are given a programming test, it will almost certainly be timed. If you are asked a design question in an interview, you have to be quick on your feet. This comes naturally with practice. If things aren't slowly becoming second nature to you, you need to be committing more time to your work.

4. Live beyond your tools. Getting stuck inside a bubble will result in sloppy work and messy solutions to problems. Consider an animator that spends all their time playing in Maya or Max but doesn't study natural motion, or a character artist that hasn't studied anatomy, or a rendering programmer that isn't familiar with linear algebra. You can cripple yourself if you're not careful.

5. Try new and unconventional things in some of the free time you might have (if you're like me this time is usually in between midnight and 4 am). Read white papers about the latest research, try new art tools, prototype an unconventional design, the list goes on and on. Like I said earlier, trying new things is especially important in college.

6. Your professors don't tell the whole story. You'd better learn what they have to teach you, but quite often realize that they don't always have the same goals in mind. This hearkens back to my feelings about how little my current roommate (@krismicinski) needs the capstone class that my school touts for it's Engineering programs, being that he studies compilers and just got accepted into half dozen PhD programs. The class is designed to help people get jobs as the more generic breed of software engineers, not as game developers, and most certainly not as academics. You'll have to learn a lot on your own no matter where you are, and this trend will continue into professional work.

7. Your free time is a commodity. One of my closest friends is part of my school's brutal Biochemistry curriculum, which has been compared to doing graduate level work straight out of high school. He has a saying that “in college you can work, socialize, and sleep. We only get to pick two.” Playing games is, in my opinion, a dangerous culprit here. Playing through an entire AAA game is a time consuming process, so pick your games wisely.

8. Save up to attend GDC. Get at least a main conference level pass. I personally equate a week of cutting edge development talks to be worth an entire semester of college. Sound like a lot of money? How many 60 dollar games do you buy in a year that you don't actually have enough time to play?

9. Keep a development blog. It'll help you be coherent when people ask about what type of work you do.

10. Make a Twitter and follow developers. It's an easy way to keep up to date on the latest research, techniques, and thoughts of some of the brightest people in the games industry.

Concluding Thoughts

So here's where the hypocrisy comes in a bit. Even though I act like I've done a good job growing as a game developer, I still don't know if I could resist accepting a position at a studio that has abusive dev cycles. I feel like I could at this point in my life, but at the same time I wonder what a dozen rejected applications would do to me after I graduate next year. I used to keep myself up wondering if I could actually cut it as a game developer. After three years of doing the ten things I just mentioned, I feel confident that I'll be at the level I want to be in a year's time for graduation. What keeps me up now is whether or not I'll be able to live a healthy life style after college. There's too many stories of developers who have let parts of their lives be wrecked by abusive work environments, too many developers who get up to accept an award and thank their wives for putting up with endless hours of overtime. So what are your opinions? I'd love to hear what advice you have for students, whether or not an endless pool of applicants enables a burnout dev cycle, and why I'm just straight up wrong. Flame on?

“Serious” Developments

Today is my first #AltDevBlogADay post, so I suppose a short introduction is in order to preface my post. Currently, I am a computer science student at Michigan State University and a game programmer for the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab. In the GEL Lab we generally develop serious games for contract or research purposes, and this post is going to be about an aspect of serious game development that I think is often not realized.

If I were to ask any random developer as to why developing serious games is challenging, I think I would typically get a response about the game design challenges associated with serious games. While it's no cakewalk to try to make a game that is both fun AND teaches the player some other skill (such as financing a car or managing a power plant), there are some very likely pitfalls that will inevitably impact the entire team beyond the designers.

You can't go it Alone

The issue that I think often goes overlooked is that because an average game developer is just an expert at making games, a serious game developer will have to consult an external source that is an expert in the subject matter of the game. More often than not, that source of expertise is also the source of funding for a serious games project. An example is a company contracts a developer to make a game about workplace safety, and the developer will have to work with them to understand what that actually entails.

“The Client”

This places people outside of the development team, who typically know very little about game or even software development, in a very powerful position. The delicate relationship that arises out of this is, in my opinion, potentially more intricate than that of the developer-publisher relationship. Personally I suspect it is more like working with an IP holder on licensed work because they care much more about how their content appears in the game. Often if the client wants to be too hands on, the game ends up not being fun, but if the developer just runs wild, the game could end up not teaching the players what it's supposed to, which is just as much of a failure in serious game development. It has to be a symbiotic relationship to result in a successful game, and I've compiled a couple of pointers from my personal experiences from the past couple of years.

1. Figure out if the client understands what a fun game is, even if they don't know how to make one. If they do, make playable versions of the game a high priority. If you're on the right track with your game , make sure your client can play it and be on the same page as you, or else they might demand you scrap your work and change directions without giving your hard work a chance.

2. Be ready for change. If the game isn't meeting its goals, the design team is going to want a change, and that change is necessary. Huge design changes are in, my opinion, much more likely when you have to teach the player about something typically less than fun. Convincing the client that the change is needed can be hard though if they are worried about meeting deadlines, especially if your code base won't easily adapt to the new direction. Or the change could come at the demand of the client, which could be even more drastic, as one meeting can leave you commenting out half of your code base.

3. Be afraid if your designers and client don't get along. You might notice that the client is portrayed in polar opposites in the past two points (wanting change and not wanting change), yet both can happen on the same project. Anything less than a good relationship between your designers and your client is an early sign of approaching trouble. As I said before, a successful serious game needs a balance between the entertainment and the game's subject matter.

4. Keep in mind that sales is not the goal of the project. From a client's perspective, a failure to meet the goals doesn't always result in financial trouble. It can result in the client looking to fund a “do-over” of the project. If you didn't obey point #2 is reworking the entire game going to be a nightmare? This is especially possible if the project was funded by grants. A failure of one project just means that it is the basis of the next grant proposal to fund the fixing of the first game's shortcomings.

So there, a little peak into the world of serious game development. I've begun to wonder if the challenge of separated expertise is one of the reasons why it seems that there is a high concentration of serious games that are quite good at what they do because their purpose is to teach the player about game design.

Optimization Wars: Problems with CS Education

You may or may not know that I am currently a Computer Science student at Michigan State University. While it may come as no surprise that much of my knowledge of Graphics and Game Dev are largely a consequence of my own initiatives because no large public University is going to tailor its CS program to game dev. Which is totally fine, I expect that.

However, I've become increasingly disturbed with a trend that I believe to be a common denominator across most CS programs that work in any sort of prep for an engineering-type coding position. The trend is a general disregard for optimization. This post (rant maybe?) is essentially inspired from a #AltDevBlogADay by Chris Kosanovich but is fueled from my personal experiences in the University environment.

Chris's post is about the mentality that many software engineers get into where they only want to think in high level terms and don't want to consider optimization. Here's the quote from a conversation that he posts that really does it for me:

"’optimizing’ is what compilers are for.”
Frankly I wasn’t sure if this was a joke so I replied

“compilers will never do as good a job at optimizing as people”

after which all I got for reply was “yeah right”.

This pretty much summarizes the problem that I've found with the University system: we're not really taught optimization in the main curriculum. At least, only by the best professors do serious discussions arise. But perhaps the most enlightening experience that I've had about the overall attitude was in a software engineering class where the "Gang of Four" book is a required text. Several lectures into the class I asked what performance implications a certain design pattern had, to which the professor replied:

"In a professional setting, readability and design are much more important, optimization is not relevant to this course."

What, seriously? For the "Software Engineering" course? I started bringing my laptop to class to work on my games project during that lecture time after we had that particular conversation. I still got a 4.0 for the class, but the class became one of the least relevant classes in a program I've become so proud of here at MSU. I now realize I should have expected the professors response but still... this class is touted and one of the highlights of our program and it's just really misleading in terms of what a code writer should be striving for- even if they aren't going into games.

Chris ends his post with a dream of a mythical college class about hand optimizing code. We can dream... But the honest answer that it's up to students to realize that their programs have been twisted by a field full of people who too often backslide into thinking that their goal is to make their own job "easier" with design patterns and the like, even if it makes their product worse. I've heard people claim over and over again that a portfolio and game programming experience are critical to landing a job in games. I wish they would also mention the importance of optimization... I'm pretty sure it's important to all disciplines ranging from rendering to tools, so why aren't we making a bigger deal about it?

Sometimes I get worried that some of the other coders in the Video Game Specialization with me wouldn't understand why I would bit shift instead of doing integer division by 2. It gives me shivers.