Happion Labs GameDevBlog

GTD With a Twist

I mentioned "Getting Things Done" in an earlier post - as a twist on the system, I decided to start measuring exactly how many Things I got done each day.  Every time I finish a task on my to-do list, be it 'Clean the closet' or 'Read the next book on the pMBA list' or 'Take out the trash', I increment the counter by one for that day.
"That's silly," you say.  "Surely 'Clean the closet' is a much bigger task than 'Take Out The Trash.'  What a useless measurement."
Well, yes, but - in the long run, I think it averages out.  This is why tracking the number of open bugs as we approach our ship date is actually a useful thing to do.  So while on a day-to-day basis the number might not be useful (spent the whole day reading Book X, therefore I only got 1 thing done) - tracking on a week-by-week basis probably is.
Right now I seem to average 1.25 things done per day.  So if I can get to the point where I'm getting 2 things done per day, I can be happy.  For a while.  And then try for 3.
Of course, I will no doubt start gaming the system.  Breaking tasks into smaller sub-tasks;  calling things I wouldn't have called tasks (like writing blog entries?) tasks;  and so on.  To a certain extent that's fine - breaking up tasks makes them more manageable, and recognizing that I'm being productive while I'm writing a blog entry seems fair, too.  And at some point I'll run out of ways to game it, and I'll have to come up with real ideas for increasing my productivity.

The "Let It Be" Manager

Levitt thinks that Ben Barnanke will be a good chairman of the Federal Reserve, apparently because he won't actually do anything.

I imagine the training regimen for his job involved lots of web surfing and Microsoft Solitaire.

I'm being flip.  People who recognize that no action might be the best action are rare, and I can imagine jobs where you need these guys to fill the spot because if you don't, a "doer" will end up in there and screw things up.

And the Good News Is...

I haven't forgotten how to surf!

It's been over two years.  First there was some construction on my condo that made it a real pain in the ass to get my surfboard down to the car;  then it was my daughter.  (Daughter + Job + Surfing > Total Available Bandwidth, but Daughter + Surfing < Total Available Bandwidth.)

Only caught four waves today, and they were crappy waves at that, but I caught them, and they were mine, and you can't take that away from me.

Crucial Conversations

So, continuing through the pMBA reading list, I just read the e-book version of *Crucial Conversations.*

Man, I *hate* the language in some of these management books.  The acronyms ("S.T.A.T.E. your path!"), the new terms ("master your stories!"), the clever rhymes ("don't move to silence or violence").

All that aside, unfortunately, it's a very important book.  I kept recognizing myself in the pages, ways I've screwed up important meetings and whatever.

So I get to the end of the book and I think, "How am I going to put this into practice?"  Now that I'm not at work anymore, crucial conversations don't come up that often.

Well, today I got a call from Activision, where they asked me nicely if I would please not mention any of my old Activision coworkers / friends in conjunction with the skills they know or have learned at Activision.  I was flabbergasted - I was used to being mildly reprimanded about my blog while I worked there - but I kind of expected that to stop once I was a free man.  When I asked why, she said because I signed an NDA and that although an employee's title is public information, what skills they know is actually confidential and proprietary.  Like, not just the skill, but who knows that skill, is confidential information.

Well, I fucked up another crucial conversation.  I got angry.  I got defensive.  I accused her of threatening me.  I said things like, "Well, according to *my* knowledge of trade secret law, information isn't a trade secret unless it's clearly marked 'confidential and proprietary', and it's not like my friends have 'confidential and proprietary' stamped on their foreheads."  And I said things like, "Or else *what*?"  In short, if they weren't thinking of suing me before, they might actually be thinking it now.

Last thing I want to do is piss Activision off.  When I get a company started, they'd be my first choice of publisher to work with. 

Probably the thing to do was say something along the lines of, "Well, I don't have any plans to do that anymore," and leave it at that.  Or, if I really wanted to contribute some "shared meaning into the pool" - something they say is important in *Crucial Conversations* - maybe I could have said, "Look at it from my point of view - I've got these friends who did some cool shit, and I like to publicly recognize that cool shit, and if some recruiter comes sniffing around trying to hire them away to another company that's willing to pay more than Activision to have that cool shit done, and Activision has to give them a raise or do other things to make sure they stay happy, then that's a good thing."  A real pro-labor stance, you know.

And maybe Activision would argue that they trained the person in that skill and therefore it's not fair that they jump ship to another company.  Hell, it's practically stealing from that point of view.

And maybe somebody like Joel Spolsky would argue that what skills the employee knows isn't as important as how smart that employee is and whether he gets things done, because the terrain of our industry is constantly changing and any given skill only seems to be useful for a few years before it's obsolete, so why not talk about the cool shit while it lasts.

Anyhow, just how the hell am I going to learn this *Crucial Conversations* stuff?

Adventures in Faxing

So I'm trying to look businesslike.

That means faxing.

I've got to resort to this stone age technology because when it comes to signing contracts and whatever that's simply the way it's done.

Now, I don't have a fax machine.  But I have a scanner.  Should I bother scanning in the contract, I wonder?

Maybe - it seems you can cheaply fax over the internet.  There's a whole nice FAQ on it: http://www.savetz.com/fax/.  The FAQ is the number one hit on Google when you search for 'fax' - but not when you search for 'online fax', which goes to show that sometimes, with Google, fewer search terms works better than more.

So I go through the various faxing options in the FAQ, starting with the cheap-as-free and going to the very cheap and then just the cheap.  Various technical problems and what-have-you stop me with each one.  It gets to the point where I figure it'll be cheaper and easier to just drive down to the UPS Store and have them fax the damn thing for me.

So I do.

Turns out it costs $1 a page at the UPS store.  Well, at $15 to send a single fax, I'd rather subscribe to www.trustfax.com for their $19.95 a year deal.  So I drive back.

Sign up for TrustFax.

Scan in my fax.

Try to send it.

And there's an error.  Filetype not supported.  What?  It says in their FAQ that they support jpg.  Sup?

A call to their support line, and it seems like they think the bug's on their end.

I'd really like to fax this today.  Is there a workaround?  They suggest converting to the pdf995 format.

A quick look at the pdf995 format and I decide they're nuts.  I'll try png.

It worked!  I send a test fax to myself and get it.  All I need now is the cover letter.  Trust me, this fax has to have the cover letter.

Somehow, when I add the cover letter message, it stops working.

Arg.

I e-mail support instead of calling this time.  They ask me some questions about what operating system I'm using and then fail to get back to me.

So I experiment.  Different modes, different numbers of files, different punctuation in the cover letter.

Right now, I think I may have got it.  I've used up almost all of my free faxes on tests (for some reason every succesful page seems to count as 2 faxes), so I'm faxing straight to my real target.  The last I checked, the FaxTrust fax-tracker said my fax was in 'queue'.

Here I go.  I'm going to see if it was succesful.  Cross your fingers. 

(It's now 6:20 PM by the way.  I've been at this since like 8 AM...with breaks for lunch and dinner.)

Here we go:

SUCCESS!  Such a sweet, sweet word.  I was expecting to have to type 'ARRRRGHHHH!' here, so I'm a pretty happy man.

More Horn Blowing

I haven't updated my resume since 1995.  Jeez, have I really done that much stuff?  I forgot that back in the early days, on Magic Candle III, my second title ever, I was the one who instigated the move from assembly to C and got our debugger up and running.  A productivity/process geek even then.

My career move made blogged out...so I guess it's news.

Had some adventures in consulting this week:

I met with one studio - they brought me in because they wanted to hire me full time, but I tried to sell them some consulting anyway - and after discussing their process and technology at length decided they were kicking a lot of ass and didn't know if I could help them in any way. 

And I'm doing some pro bono consulting for Strange Company, a machinima group in Scotland using Neverwinter Nights to make a feature-length machinima.  The hardest thing is to find time when we're both awake to IM each other - we had a good session this morning, but then the cable guy came to fix my DVR, and in the process managed to knock out my broadband.  Yay.  Back online now.  We're all fine here.  How are you?

Which brings up a point - even if you're not in LA, and have no money, you might still be able to benefit from my services.  Doesn't hurt to ask.

More On This Consulting Thing

Almost every time I talk to somebody working on another team, when we start talking software engineering process, I usually am surprised that there's something they're not doing, or doing sort of funny.  And I'm not talking about things that are a big pain in the ass to implement, like unit testing or code reviews.  I'm talking about simpler, more basic stuff: stuff where all you need to do is buy an off-the-shelf product and give everyone a one-hour meeting on how to use it, or at the worst where you'll have to spend a few coder-weeks to write an in-house tool of some kind, and teach the ranks how to use it.

Now, you're probably thinking, "My team is at the top of their game.  Jamie couldn't possibly have anything for us."  At which point I should remind you of the whole "first hour free" thing - if we talk for an hour, and I've got nothing for you, then we can just walk away.

So, interested yet?  jdfristrom@gmail.com, or 310.529.1593.

I quit

Today was my last day at Treyarch / Activision.  I'm leaving to pursue other opportunities.

No, I wasn't fired!  I really am leaving to pursue other opportunities.

In the meantime, before any of those other opportunities kick in, I am available to do CONSULTING.

Here are some of the things I can do for your team:

  * I can talk to you about your current organization and process, and make suggestions.

  * I can give management training - either lectures to groups of people or more one-on-one stuff.

  * I can talk engineering.  If you'd like advice on any given engineering topic, I may or may not have the answer.

  * I can write code.  If you need something done and are having trouble finding the staff, you can borrow me.  It won't be cheap, but if you're in dire straits, it's an option.

  * I can critique gameplay or game mechanics.  (Yeah, your team will love that, some guy coming in talking shit about the game.  But it could still be valuable.)

Why would you want me to do any of these things?

I usually don't like blowing my own horn, but here goes:

I've been in the industry a long time with an impressive track record.  The games I've worked on, altogether, have sold close to ten million units.  During my time at Treyarch, I've instituted a number of processes that have made us more productive and improved quality.  On the engineering side I've worked on just about everything:  rendering, networking code, AI, special effects.  On the design side my claim to fame is that I invented the critically acclaimed swinging system in Spider-Man 2.  How's that for an accomplishment?  Invented a whole new game mechanic, beloved by millions.  (Not that it wasn't a team effort:  guys like Eric Pavone and Andrei Pokrovsky improved greatly upon it.  But I was the one who stayed late at work prototyping my crazy idea, and if it hadn't been for me, the swinging system would never have existed.)

Also, I've done some writing (the *Manager in A Strange Land* column on Gamasutra and post-mortems in *Game Developer*) and speaking (at the CGDC and NFT).

As far as price goes, I'm thinking first hour free, and if you think I'm worth a damn, we can negotiate the rest.  I'll charge teams at big companies like EA more than small teams that are just starting out. 

This is a limited time offer because at some point I'm going to be working at a job that needs my full attention again. 

If you're interested, e-mail jdfristrom@gmail.com, or call 310.529.1593.

I suppose some people are wondering why I quit.  It's not because I'm sick of Activision/ Treyarch or anything.  Activision and Treyarch are both great companies.  It's just because this other opportunity has come up, and while pursuing it I didn't feel like I could give my full attention to the current project I was working on.  I felt a little like I was phoning it in, and needed to quit before the guilt overwhelmed me.

Anyhow, so here I am.  Get it while it's hot.

War Stories: The Screwed Up Pitch Meeting, 1998

Seven years ago.  Treyarch was young.  We had just finished *Die By The Sword*, and the industry thought it was cool, even though it didn't sell that many units.  We were hot.  And we had a friend at Origin systems, and thanks to him, they got the idea that maybe we could do the third *Ultima Underworld* game.  We could just paste *Ultima Underworld* color onto the *Die By The Sword* engine - step one, underwear;  step three, profit!

How cool would that be?  I had met Richard Garriott AKA Lord British before, at Computer Camp, while he was working on *Ultima 2*.  It was the summer between 7th and 8th grade for me, I think.  I took his class on developing graphical adventure games.  I was a fanboy.

A bunch of EA / Origin guys came to Los Angeles to visit and talk about the deal, including Richard Garriott himself.  Richard played some of *Die By The Sword* while we watched, and I was like, wow - ten years ago, it was me playing his game while he watched. 

We sat in the large conference room, and the question came up:  "How long do you guys think it would take to do this?"

I opened my big, fat, stupid mouth, and said something like, "Well, it's going to take at least eighteen months, because we need to follow the John Carmack rule and rewrite our engine from scratch."  I'd just seen Abrash's Quake lecture at GDC where he told us the John Carmack rule was to Always Start Over.  Why was I even talking?  I don't know.  I was in a room with Pete Akemann, Don Likeness, and Chuck Tolman, which meant I was probably the dumbest coder in the room.

Producer guy said something like, "Why?"

I said something like, "Our networking code is a synchronous model.  To do the cooperative multiplayer thing we're talking about, we need to start over."  (Okay, two things:  we could do cooperative multiplayer with synchronous.  It wouldn't have been ideal, but we could have done it.  OR:  we could have dug in and fixed every single line of code in the engine that made synchronous assumptions.  Wouldn't have been pleasant, but would have taken a lot less time than starting over.)

"You're frame locked?" he asked, Getting It, dismay in his voice.  And, musing to himself, "I don't know if we're ready to fund engine development."

Pete and Don didn't invite me to any more pitch meetings after that.

----

As a side note, isn't it weird that on the basis of saying a stupid thing that you wish you could take back or amend later, a whole deal can go sour?  If I had kept my mouth shut, we might have gotten that deal.  And *Ultima Underworld III* would have been the game we wanted to make:  a cooperative multiplayer action game with RPG elements.  Somebody would have needed to talk some sense into us and said, "Don't rewrite your whole damn engine you dumbasses!"  But if we could have been convinced of that it probably would have been a home run - for everyone involved.  EA / Origin missed out, too.  I imagine the same problem happens in interviews - somebody says the wrong thing, doesn't really mean it, or accidentally forgets to spellcheck his resume (you know who you are) - and a potentially mutually beneficial relationship is destroyed.
Flip side of the coin, people with more charm and less honesty than me end up getting deals made that are destructive.  Maybe this whole talking thing is overrated.

Digital Books

I've downloaded three e-books in the last two days.

Why?

Because I don't want to wait for them to be delivered.  This instant gratification stuff rules.

I just read *The Bootstrapper's Bible* - a book about starting a company with no resources.  It's pretty good - there's one idea in there, that if it pays off, I'm going to owe the author a real nice dinner.  Or something.