Plan for Jeff Tunnell

Many of you have probably seen Alex Swanson's name associated with Marble Blast and Marble Blast Gold as the level designer and builder, but now he will be doing much more than that here in the garage. Alex has been working part time as an intern from the University of Oregon for the past two years. Luckily for GarageGames and our community we have been able to figure out a way to bring Alex on as a full time employee.

Alex will continue doing work as a 3D artist and level builder, but his main focus will be on creating documentation and tutorials, working on the web site, and providing support. He will begin a program to recruit and communicate with GarageGames Associates as well as providing a much needed focus on the community and GG developers. Watch the Make Games site for continual improvements once we get through the holiday season.

As an example of what to expect, today, Alex and I have been redownloading Torque, building it, and looking for ways to improve the "out of box experience" (OOBE). I am even getting in there and working on creating documentation myself because I am enough of a noob to feel all of the pain:) This summer, Ben Garney, Pat Wilson, and Chris Weiland worked on the C++ documentation, and it has been a big help to the most technical of Torque owners, but our new push is for tutorials and scripting documentation. If you know of good documentation or want to help us, please let Alex know at alexs at garagegames.com (use normal email address syntax).

Alex's journey from intern to employee is interesting because it illustrates the value of the GarageGames community and how you can possibly benefit from what we are doing. While we have not formally defined what it means to be an Associate or even the process of how to become one, we will soon have that info published.

For now, getting the title Associate mostly is a means of recognition for community members that contribute more than the average member. We have helped some Associates get jobs in the industry, brought some in on projects that require NDA's, offered others projects that we felt have the best chance of market success, and brought others into our offices as interns. So far, we have hired Alex and will soon announce another hire from our past interns.

If you have any interest in being an intern here at GarageGames, send me an email at jefft@garagegame.com. We can't pay, but we do provide free housing, the occasional Friday beer (assuming you are 21), and lots of hands on work that will help in your chosen career.

Currently Robert Blanchet, of Legends fame, is just finishing up a three month internship here at GG. Robert has worked on many things, but his primary contribution has been working with Rick Overman on figuring out how to use DocBook for formatting our growing documentation library. Working with Robert has been tremendous fun, and we will miss him when he leaves.

-Jeff Tunnell GG