Static Zombie

That Ain't Working

I haven't had the chance to mention that I changed jobs about a month ago, and I'm a lot happier. For the past seven years I've been working on software for developers. The last five have been focused on text editing. It was a perfectly fine job, but nothing to get my blood boiling. I was getting burned out, and I really needed a change.

Change found me. A friend in the Games division was starting a new team and asked me to join. Ok, if you twist my arm. If it's never happened to you before, let me tell you that it feels very good to be specifically sought/recruited by someone. This wasn't a case of someone doing a friend a favor, although it certainly was that. This was someone saying to me that they were creating a new team, they had an open position, and that I was the person they wanted for it. That's flattering. And daunting, because now I have to live up to that trust. Stephen, thanks for your faith in me. Whack me upside the head if I start to blow it.

So what am I doing? The team is in a division called All Access Gaming. Don't ask me what that means, because I'm really not sure. We're not making games targeted at the blind or amputees. In fact, I'm not really making games per se. My team is a prototyping team tasked with conceiving and developing new gameplay experiences. The team is to be cross-disciplinary, meaning I'll be a programmer, tester, game designer, brainstormer... pretty much anything but an artist, because we've got three of those on our little team of eight. We'll likely have multiple projects going on at a time, with fairly short timeframes (after 5 years on the same project, that sounds terrific). We're not focused on any particular platform, so we may be working on the 360, Windows, mobile devices, Surface, the web, or something completely new. The hardest part will be that once we've proven a concept, we'll hand it off to another team to actually create it and bring it to market. It will be interesting to see how I feel about that when it happens.

So I'm now working in the same building where I've been playing board games once a week for the past few years. I've got a 360 dev kit on my desk, and I'm learning to write 360 games using XNA. I'm working on a project with the potential for high visibility and coolness. I'm in brainstorming meetings where people toss balls around and festoon walls with concept art. I attend all-hands meetings where the subject matter is actually interesting to me, both professionally and personally. Conversation in the hall centers around gameplay, fun, and what happened at PAX. I'm still a programmer, but the context is completely different. And context is everything.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Posted by Peter at September 19, 2007 4:58 PM