Internship Complete (Press Start)

Well, today is the last of my internship at GG. It's been over three months since I hopped on a plane in Philly and landed in Eugene, completely independent for the first time in my life. It's not a big jump from dorm life, but it's still different (mainly not having a dining hall). I'm going to use this .plan to ramble on about my decision to intern at GG, the crazy experiences I had here, and my plans for the future.

The Boring Part

For most of my life, I've known what I wanted to do with the rest of it. Make games. And although being a game developer isn't up there with dreaming to become an astronaut (yet), there were tons of doubts along the way. I made a decision to take every opportunity I could find and work harder at it than anything else. That choice led to me to Garage Games, but not until after 2 complete (free and bad) games (one of which prompter Larry Niven to threaten legal action), 4+ commercial Flash games (which are on Discovery's Cosmeo site), an educational TV show script, and 4 internships. One of those games got me into an awesome college, too. All because I decided I was going to try my best and see what happens. I've been thinking a lot about all the 'follow your dreams' advice kids get - and I think a lot of people take 'follow' the wrong way. You don't follow the leader to your dreams, you live the dream until it's real.

The Fun Part

On my first day in Eugene, I wondered where the city was. Philadelphia is a city. Eugene is an overgrown suburb. It's awesome. However, being an overgrown suburb (and a college town, to boot) means that nothing makes sense. It took me almost an hour to figure out that when Tim Aste said the intern housing was at number 1863, that actually meant 1825. Or maybe that was just the first test for interns.

I soon got to meet the awesome people who wrote the blogs I'd been reading for the last few years. I found out quickly that Joe Maruschak is even cooler in person, Justin DuJardin is not (as his profile pic suggests) grayscale and yells a lot (occasionally at me but usually at inanimate objects, deadlines, or kittens), Davey Jackson can talk trash like a retired garbage collector, Matthew Langley is somehow immune to documationitis [sic], ... - actually, I found out that everyone at GG is harder working and cooler than I had imagined. I could go on and on about most of them, but that would be weird and they might not let me come back.

So, what did I do for three months? Well, I started by learning everyone's preferences for coffee and lunch. Then, each morning at 5AM, I'd get up and prepare everything. I'd be done by about 1, when I'd set up the banquet in the warehouse and ring the bell.

Actually, I got to work on some awesome stuff. Joe started me off doing all the TGB tutorials and taking notes (what is this? school?). It was actually fun, since I hadn't done them all and I got to make bug reports. I reported a lot, thinking I'd be helping make the docs better and save people from making the same mistakes as me. Little did I know that I'd later be fixing all those bugs and writing pages upon pages of new and revised docs for TGB 1.1.3 ;) After doing all the tutorials (they were still .pdfs at this point, so editing wasn't going to happen until Commander Langley had worked his magic on them), I was tasked with cloning a flash game - probably to see if I was competent or not. I ended up making multiple versions: basic, blingy (with the wave-propagation hinted at in my last blog), and multiplayer. The basic version will probably be released (with scripts!) sometime in the future.

The next big thing I worked on was for a Microsoft Press Event a few months ago. I probably can't discuss it, but it's awesome. I got to demo it a few times at Boot Camps (thanks Stephen Zepp!) and I know it'll make everyone even more excited about TGB. For this project, I got to work with the famous (at least to this MB player) Alex Swanson. I'd made a mockup of the project (using random art from all over) before being asked to make a full-fledged demo with Alex. I very quickly learned the value of artists. Having done everything on my own before, I was utterly unprepared for the shock of seeing both elegant code and beautiful, iconic art on the same screen ;) (Note: by elegant, I mean ugly, hacky, and shameful - but it was my first non-school pseudo-crunch, so it looked alright when I was up late the day before it had to be finished and bug-free.)

When that was done, I was thrown back into the documentation cage. Someone realized that Matthew Langley couldn't possibly write new docs and finish the new doc framework in such short order. (Actually, he probably could have - the documentation system was getting so complex that another week might have seen it become self-aware and start adding docs to itself) I wrote most of the Component Tutorials, added a ton of functions to TGB Reference, and fixed lots of oddities in the tutorials. Oh, and I indented every single code block in the docs by hand. *shudder* That period was usually managed solely by listening to hilarious banter in the room. The most memorable time involved Mark, Joe, Spider, and Justin discussing nuts and boxes for at least a few hours. It took me a while to figure out that they were talking about the UI for the textObject in the LevelBuilder.

Since the release of 1.1.3, I've been playing with TorqueX and polishing up some things that will be released sometime soon (hopefully). There's always lots of awesome in the tubes!


The Future

Although I decided to go back and hopefully finish school, I'm going to help out as much as I can from there and will surely be back in Eugene before too long. It wouldn't surprise me if Adam Larson was making TGBX so cool just so that I'd fail all my classes and have to come back and be forced to make games all day ;)

I've never seen some many awesome people in one place and I can't wait to see them all again. To anyone considering applying to intern, DO IT (even if you have to make flash games all summer to make enough money).

Despite the risk of sounding like a fanboy, Garage Games is ridiculously awesome. Thanks to everyone I got to meet and work with!

And, to the TGB forums - I hope I was somewhat helpful! I learned a lot from trying to answer every question. I'll still hang around over there - someday I'll be as knowledgable as GuyBrush Buscaglia and Ben R. Vesco...