A Day In The Life Of ...
.. Me. Me! Time to go introspective here. 3rd person view, sort of.. Watching myself run around the city and gun people down after I've flipped out from the madness of game industry. Or so would the stereotypes and legends dictate, and they define the industry for those who aren't in it, right?
Well, I'm sorry to report that I haven't flipped out yet and haven't gunned anyone down, although I do have a fascination towards bows, arrows and to some extent, sharp-edged weaponry. Nothing to worry about, though. Put down that phone now, no need to call anyone.
My day usually starts around 10am at work, after the mandatory waking-up-rituals and a drive to work, cursing the cold and cursing the other drivers who don't know how to drive and generally cursing all that. From there on, it's a mixture of caffeine, mousebuttons, hotkeys, crashing 3D software, some dull polygon grinding, some creative polygon grinding and testing the results in current game build. That's the general outline, but it has lots of small cracks that hold little things and is covered in the general atmosphere of the place. I'll try to talk about those, as otherwise it would be just another blog about vertices and blah.
Working here is best described by a mixture of stuff that comes to mind when I start to think about things that would explain it all in one swoop. It's a bit like a constant family gathering. Often it's like an improvised stand-up show - sometimes very good, often going horribly wrong, but always amusing. Then there's the occasional close equivalent of Pamplona bull run (you know, dodging a barrage of flipped-out insane bulls). Most of the time, though, it's quiet personal drive towards completion of my own tasks, headphones blaring anything from hectic snarling of Hardfloor to the discogoddess Madonna's latest album. Girly men in tights singing 80's heavy rock isn't my thing, I'll leave that to the guy next room.
I haven't checked today what spiderman and killerbunny are doing. One guy here has a cool fully articulated (fingers and all) Spidey doing all sorts of unhealthy and curious things with a fluffy bunny that has big killer fangs. Last I saw them, they were hanging from a ceiling lamp and doing something bizarre and very intimate. Won't go into details, but if you're over 18, you're allowed to think about it.
It's not a surprise to see spidey stabbing at the bunny with a plastic fork. Strange apparitions built from scratch spawn up and stare accusingly at everyone who passes by. Janne, our boss, following a stream of spilled coffee all the way from kitchen to someone's desk. A "dirty dishes inside" -status-paper-sign-thing over the dishwasher scribbled full of musings about pretty thoughts involving monkeys. Oh, and I have a Foucault's Bondage-Beetle pendulum hanging from a ceiling light fixture, mere millimeters off the top of my monitor.
Get the drift? Workplace ceases to be boring once there's at least one or two creative minds. We have 40something of them, although not all of them let their creativity flow and solidify into hands-on strangeness. It's a way to vent off some steam and the stress from the non-avoidable milestone pressures. Oh, we have been able to minimize the mad rushes that plague the industry through some clever and well-thought management, but I don't think it's possible to remove it completely from the whole equation of game developing. What we learned from FlatOut didn't involve just the game, but also the game making. Looking back we saw a bunch of stuff we could improve in our large-scale workflow, and improvements on large scale trickle down to the small-scale bits and bobs that keep the company running - the employees, us. It all works, although I'm sure we'll find things to improve again, and again.. Some of those improvements are project-specific, as the company has to change it's shape to let go of the previous brainchild that grew up and accommodate the new baby.
With FO2, the doctor would be shouting "I can see the head!" just about now, but that doesn't mean the work is over.
Sometimes, I have to add, it's also about some heavy personal sacrifices to get the job done. Want me to elaborate? This could get scary and should send shivers down your spine and shrivel your particulars, if you're thinking about getting the job in the industry and doing the things I'm doing.
Prepare for the terror I just faced: My damn coffee went cold while writing this blog!
-Ilari, contemplating on leaving a fake trail of spilled coffee to someone else's desk right now
