Average Suburban Housewolf and Game Developer
It occurs to me that my family really is the most important thing in my life, but I don’t feel like I know enough to speak intelligently about it for other people to hear.
Parenting should be like doctor’s: call it a “practice”. Because we are only practicing here, and know we will never be perfect.
In any event, for now, I have nothing public to say about parenting. Except perhaps one thing:
Be involved in your children’s lives the best way you know how!
10:43 AM mr.ed Hey guys! How you doing?
4:39 PM mr.ed Hey! Are you guys using this thing? :) #general
4:40 PM dan Just saw this, sorry. This afternoon has been crazy.
This happens every time I start with a new team. A communication tool is only useful if it gets a response from the other end. It takes some effort on the part of the main office, not only by the remote worker. And every team I’ve had the pleasure of working with have used this simple set of rules.
Act as though the person you are talking to is right in front of you. Do you like it when the person you are talking to constantly turns away to answer the phone, or get interrupted by other people? No, you don’t. So when you are talking to someone online, don’t just step away and leave the remote person hanging. Either ignore the interruption, or at least excuse yourself from the remote person. That way they know that your attention is elsewhere. If you try to do both, it becomes very obvious that you are not paying attention.
Likewise, don’t say anything you would not say to their face. Anonymity does not apply here – these are people that you work with, respect, and will remember how you act. That said, this is a rule that should really apply to any online interaction.
There are three main channels of communication available to remote workers. If everyone on the team has the same expectations of the methods, then all requests will be handled in timely manners.
The first channel you might think of is instant messaging. This is an extremely useful tool. However, it’s often overused. It is perfect for having ongoing conversations. It is also an interruption. If the servers are on fire, or someone is stuck and can’t get their job done, the an interruption is completely appropriate.
The rest of the time, email is the proper channel to start new conversations in. Email can be ignored until there is a break in your current task. There is no expectation of an immediate response. But also don’t let the email thread get twenty replies. If a conversation needs more than a single response, it makes sense to set a time for an instant message conversation to follow up with and hash everything out.
Which brings us to the third channel: phone. Nothing will replace the ability to talk out issues. It is often much faster and easier to understand nuance than instant messaging. A particularly powerful addition is using instant messenger at the same time, to post links and references to the other participants during the conversation.
Some additional notes about phones: high quality is a must. Do not use computer built in speakers and microphones, always use a headset or headphones with built in microphones. Computer speakers often create terrible distortion. Also, do not underestimate the importance of being able to interrupt another person, to provide a supportive comment. Many phone systems only allow the loudest participant to be heard, meaning no one can interrupt.
These guidelines have served me well for many years. May they also serve you well.
This is not the first time I have faced the end of my career as I knew it.
Picture it: the year is 2003. The Matrix Reloaded and Revolution are going to be coming to theaters soon. And on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building, in a tiny room with no windows, sits a tall man in a relaxed pose and a short man looking very uncomfortable.
The short man is telling the taller that he needs to read his required three career improvement books per quarter to continue being employed there. The tall man listens and smiles, laughter bounding in his mind, but only letting a smirk show on his face.
For the last six months the tall man was told to build reusable software for importing email address databases. At no point was it defined how it might be re-used. They even brought a second programmer on the project, fresh out of college with a shiny degree in a frame set against the window at an odd angle, to architect this design. This architect declared the five-tier architecture was the path to reusability. And then proceeded to create separate, duplicate copies of every structure in every tier. Every change needed to be made in five places.
When the completion deadline loomed, the tall man knew the project was doomed. Yet until that last week, he figured it could be saved. But as the day of the deadline arrived, the tall man could not even get out of bed, too sick from worrying himself over the first true failure in his career as a developer.
For four months after being let go, the tall man could not even bear to touch a computer. He was thoroughly sick of them, wanting nothing to do with them. His entire career, almost his entire life was spent around them. Tinkering with them in high school, making games on them in college. And now, he couldn’t touch one, or he would feel the stink and the fear of that last project.
He knew it was time to get serious about his next move. What was he to do? Computer programming was the only thing he ever felt he had a talent for. Grudgingly he contacted a local non-profit organization to see if they might want some help improving their online presence. He wasn’t after money. He was after a measure of making someone happy.
It wasn’t much that he did, but it did make a small difference for them. And they were grateful. The kind of gratitude that didn’t exist at that last job. The kind that he knew was required to keep his sanity if he were to ever work for any purpose ever again.
He set about re-learning the business of game making. When he was hired at that email company they were making games, but their vision had shifted. He was simply riding things out as long as he could, looking around for better opportunities. As it turned out, none came.
So with the strength of his wife’s support and tip of the hat from someone willing to take a chance on him, he began writing the game engine that would restart his career in games.
In truth, I’m hardly starting over at all. I will still be able to bring to bear the talent that God gifted me. My heart goes out to you who are forced to truly start over.
So now that I’m between gigs, I’m going to try this “relaxing” thing while I listen for what God wants me doing next. But I still gotta do something. So I’m making myself available to all you indie developers! That’s right – come talk to me so all of this great Unity3D and game development knowledge doesn’t go to waste.
You will actually be doing me a favor. Why you ask? Because if I don’t use a piece of knowledge for more than two weeks, it’s almost as though I forget it. Which incidentally is why my code is so well commented, because I know I’ll forget what I was thinking when I wrote it!
You can connect with me through this website, or if you prefer, either of the following teamup sites:
Happy coding!
A month or two before I came on this project, I was given the freedom to start working on taking existing code from our Hellfire project and organizing it so that we could share that basic code across new projects. While I was successful in starting a shared technology stack, it was clear that much more needed to be done to make it solid for other projects to use in earnest. Part of that stack was the Asset Bundle system rewrite.
In Unity3D, the simplest way to publicly download additional content like models and textures is to add them to a Unity-specific container called an Asset Bundle. This feature worked, but was under documented and difficult to use at the time in Unity3D version 3. We had some strong code for working with these asset bundles that was developed by the Hellfire team before I started working in Unity. However, the code was complicated and did not support the sharing of resources between different asset bundles. My goal was to fix that.
While I was working on that shared technology, it was determined that one of our new projects was going to need more client coder help than was available. Therefore when I was brought in, I was still developing that shared technology at the same time as implementing user interface designs in this project that already had almost a year’s worth of prototype work done on it.
I would end up spending most of the project this way, doing double duty as the only user interface developer as well as adding tools to make production easier as well as creating the new asset bundle system to make this large dataset manageable for devices. It was only three months before release that I was able to complete the asset bundle system.
As it turned out, Unity themselves had the same ideas I had about asset bundles. Not a month after completing my system, I learned that Unity 5 was including a new asset bundle system which did exactly everything I had put into mine.
All that aside, this was the most complicated user interface design I had ever attempted. Early in development I made this statement to our designer: “Go crazy, dream up anything you can think of, and I’ll try it. If I can’t do it, I’ll let you know.” Sure enough, I was able to make happen a lot of complicated scrolling contexts and interactions that had not even been dreamed of for the Hellfire project.
We support both phone and tablet devices, iOS’s few resolutions and Droid’s many resolutions, all using the same scene definitions. Each scene was put together based on virtual screen dimensions that scale the interface up but not let it get too “fat” and then use the “springs & struts” style of automated item layout to fill in the differences in device aspect ratios.
Other major improvements over the previous codebase was a new scene loading system, one that no longer assumed only one scene was displayed at a time. To make that happen I also had to rework how scene transitions worked, as well as seemingly simple things that became very complicated like handling the Droid “Back” button. All of this code written from the start with the idea of adding it to the shared technology set that I started with.
This was my largest project with this company, and sadly, my last. After twelve months of my work and just a few days after releasing to the public, I was laid off along with many other people.
Despite the difficulty of this project, I am still extremely proud of the work that everyone did on it. This is one of the projects where every single member of the team knew what they were doing and worked with each other to make it happen.