Trainwreck Interactive

As I sit here watching the opening of the Blackhawks Playoffs game in a city where things like this really matter, I figured I would do something that I’d promised and type up a blog post on my experiences so far. If that previous run-on sentence didn’t put you off the trail yet, then you clearly enjoy run-ons, and you’re in for a treat.

So to start, Toronto is a city for city newbs. It never occurred to me that a place with a metropolitan population of 8 million could be more inviting and comfortable than my hometown of Richfield, Wisconsin, but here we are. My experiences have ranged from pleasant, to polite, and back around to affable pretty much every moment I’ve been out here. Even the taxi ride didn’t feel like a journey into some strange subculture where people chatter away endlessly in Swahili on cell phones about their brother-in-law’s gambling debts.

This is perfect for my needs. As much as I like to put on a façade of worldliness, I really have no idea what the Hell I’m doing at any time in any place. In something as “perilous” as a new city in a different country, I should be quite dead in some gutter somewhere. Like that time I was killed in Hong Kong by triad ninjas. I made that last part up. Ninjas are Japanese.

My first day in was a surreal blur. I’d spent the previous night expending nervous energy and cleaning my home in preparation for its newly sole tenant. After spending about 24 hours awake, Matt was kind enough to see me off and drive me out to the airport for my flight. After an unpleasant encounter with a broken reservation system, I was finally on my way.

I fell asleep on the plane and woke up with a sore shoulder that is still giving me no end of grief. As if that reminder of my advancing age was insufficient, I think I’ve located some grey hairs in my chin stubble. This should go over well on my first day on Monday, where I will likely be 5 years older than anyone I work with. I would shave to remove the evidence, but that smacks of a level of grooming and hygiene I simply cannot commit to.

I arrived at my temporary housing tired enough to have trouble remembering the word “reservation” which led to a few awkward minutes of me staring down a baffled security guard while I searched for the words to explain what I was doing there. After I got in it was time to sleep for about 14 hours, which went pretty much according to plan.

On my second day I traveled with a relocation agent that helped me acquire the various identification cards necessary for life in Canada. Without exception, every government office, bank, and official office asked if the young lady and I were “filing jointly,” which we both found tremendously amusing and by the end of the day we had quite a shtick going. It was a great introduction to the various neighborhoods as well, and I got to range around the downtown core with someone who was clearly proud of her city and its inhabitants. Later a visit to a local Irish pub full of an odd mix of bankers and construction workers capped the evening nicely.

Today I was left to my own devices, though I spent a large portion of it narrowing down apartment choices. They really come down to four options in my mind:
1. High rise “city place” apartment with scary 51st floor balcony and yuppie neighbors
2. Haunted loft in a haunted toy factory in an area haunted by hippies
3. Smack dab in the middle of downtown surrounded by banks, theaters, college kids, and about a billion bars
4. Apartment right on the water: a little removed but you can’t beat the view or the quiet

I’m leaning towards the high rise, since that seems to be a landing pad for most of the tech professionals of my age, and will likely be a happy hunting ground for drinking (by which I mean video game nerd) buddies. They also have the nicest amenities, including one building that has a BOWLING ALLEY, which currently is at the top of my list.

During the afternoon, I decided to stick to my plan of exploring the commutes during rush hour. It seems I’m going against traffic if I live downtown, so the news is largely good. However, I did discover that when it rains in Toronto, it does not screw around like in Seattle. This was that awful, billowing, sideways rain of my youth, and the $3 umbrella I purchased in desperation came apart in the wind like a frog in a blender. I suck at analogies. Anyways, the moral of the story is that my walk home was spent soaked to the bone with my ancient leather jacket absolutely reeking of the original animals it came from.

Tonight I went to a nice little bar called Green Pants or something in the Eaton Center. At the bar, I met four people who were in from Ottawa on some sort of convention for court justices. Mentioning my own trade, I was suddenly interesting to talk to, as nearly everyone has a friend, a child, or is themselves a gamer of some kind. I reflect on how much this reaction has changed from 9 years ago when mentioning that I was in the games industry would typically net me a controversial and unpleasant conversation about the impact of Doom on those idiots from Columbine. Thank you very little, CNN.

I was actually invited to dine with these folks and we had a fun conversation about living in the US, coming to Toronto from small towns, and most importantly, NFL football.

Well it seems the Hawks have gone up by 1 since I started typing, so it’s time to loose this E/N garbage on to the Internet and start paying attention to my new national pastime.

Rick News Personal

I keep hearing about the death of AAA retail videogames thanks to the surge in popularity of “casual” titles found on Facebook, mobile devices, and flash websites. Folks wonder how I can be deaf and dumb to the “shift” towards social/casual experiences. Why would I, an industry engineer with the kind of online dev skills well suited to social online gaming ever consider a move to hardcore AAA development?

I think there’s some confusion over this, since the player base buying $60 retail titles has actually continued to increase, but hasn’t seen the same rapid growth as the social/mobile gaming fad. Sure there’s been a hiccup due to global economic factors, but the group of people buying blockbuster games hasn’t taken as big a hit as say, the group people going out to dinner.

Here’s the thing, the people playing Facebook games now were the same folks that only a few years ago were only playing solitaire and minesweeper. They’ve gone from simple card games to management simulations, action puzzle games, and intricate social interaction models. At the same time, you have a generation of people gaining manual dexterity and spatial reasoning skills playing with tiny handheld devices that have the ergonomic profile of a potato peeler without a handle. They’re going to find it tough to complain when they get their hands on an Xbox 360 or PS3 controller. Sure, people like the freedom of their iPads and their Nintendo DSes, but they still own TVs, if HDTV sales in the last few years are any indicator.

There is no death of the hardcore as far as I can see. Instead we have a whole generation of gamers that are being seduced from their card and board games with flashy online trinkets and social rankings. The causal gamer is a myth, instead you have gamers that are being introduced through the new social/mobile games surface area. This makes me excited, because it’s a whole new way to introduce people to an exciting and cost-effective form of entertainment, and I didn’t have to invest anything. I’ll let the folks building Facebook apps and iPhone games duke this one out.

Inevitably, some of these new people are going to want to trade up to the pure, un-cut Columbian shit. There you will find me, waiting with the hard stuff, $60 a fix.

Rick Article Personal

I’ve taken a new job in a new country with a radically different set of responsibilities. My current day job is that of a developer support / consutant engineer on a game platform and I’m switching over to a senior position in title development.

The limitations on someone doing title dev work are technically and ethically different than that of someone on a platform team. On a platform, new IP, even independant, tends to aid the platform and offers me pathos for the title development partners I work with.

As a title developer, I feel that any sort of entertainment that is competing for a person’s disposable income is a potential competitor with the videogame. Therefore, I cannot in good concience create any IP that is truly independant.

Trainwreck is my ever present side-project. It’s just a name I attach to my IP creation projects that is more memorable than “Rick.” So today, Trainwreck will cease to exist as an independant development company and instead be a collecting place for my IP experimentation and other creative work. However, any game I work on here are not intended for redistribution through the Trainwreck entity until I move on. I am very interested in seeing these IP projects evolve into retail offerings, but while I’m with my new employer, they will be the sole production house for any creative work that I do.

That includes my novel work. If my new company isn’t interested in publishing my novel or picking up one of my independantly built titles, then it won’t ship as a retail project for the duration.

On the flip side, I still intend to release free content whenever appropriate. These may include simple, free games, short stories, graphics demos, and other free-form projects. Notably, these will not carry the polish or weight of a retail release, but they will give me a creative outlet in those times when my real-life work becomes unsatisfying.

Admittedly, that seems less likely given the new position. I’m within leaping distance of my dream role in the games industry. This is a good thing, and I may yet end up doing exactly what I want to do in my career. Some very good things are ahead.

Matt and I will continue to work on these not-intended-for-retail-release projects. It’s hard to imagine working on projects like Arc without him, and so I won’t.

Rick News Personal, Project Status

They’re coming along.  I haven’t spent much time tweeking variables or optimizing yet.  Lots of little shader tricks left to enhance the visual effect.  The diffuse is still Oren-Nayer, but I haven’t added the new specular effects in yet.

Rick Developer Blog Zero Crisis, Zero Horizon

So I’ve got a name for the Zero Crisis prequel -> Zero Horizon. I figure if EA isn’t going to make me a decent fantasy snowboarding game to play, I have to start doing it myself.

I’m also returning to some XNA goodness by dusting off the old Shader Series 3 to work on “Zero Lighting” — a look I can’t describe well until I can actually render it since I’m such a crummy artist.

I’m also resurrecting River’s End as my most complete action game at the moment that will easily support a networked multiplayer mode. I am going to use it as my research project for network LOD, dead reckoning, bicubic spline-based motion path interpolation, and view-biased misprediciton recovery techniques. In the last few weeks I’ve been looking at Kalman Filters as a way to reduce error in my dead reckoning systems. Sadly, I am simply too dumb to understand how to apply them properly. Therefore, I’ve purchased some college-level math books and I’m slowly making my way through them. I picked up “Linear Algebra Done Right” by Sheldon Axler. So far so good — not a determinant in sight.

Edit: I don’t know if this will work, but here’s a link to my facebook page showing Zero Crisis logo work:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=2046318&id=1051001256

Rick Developer Blog Project Status

Folks, I need a name for my Zero Crisis prequel.  Here’s what we have so far.  Genre is, uh, nothing anyone has seen before.  Imagine Wipeout XL on skis with some Space Harrier and light RPG elements.  The Zero Crisis universe is a trippy, psy-themed vehicle for me to play with some really odd subject matter.  I’d describe it as Tron meets milkdrop, but that really isn’t it either.

Also note, my goal for trainwreck game titles is to always have them somewhat abstract, made up of two simple words.

Anyways, here’s the list so far (thanks to my contributors on Facebook and in RL):

Zero Dive
Aboslute Zero
NullNullZero
Zero Gravity Grind
Zero Tolerance
Coke Zero
Gravity Killer
Gravity Shredder
Avatar Zero Zombie Massage
Zero Chance of Completion
Ninja Zen Zero
Zero Grindage
Rippin’ Zeros
Zero Pull
Zero Genesis
Zero Basis
Antecedent Zero
Chipher Impulse
Infinite Dive
Zero Plunge
Zero Plunger
Null Vortex
Mass Cipher
Zero Collide
Zero Collect
Oblivion Core
Before Zero
Zero Founder

Clearly, we need help.

Rick News

I am officially in love with this IP. When I started into my NaNoWriMo Sci-Fi novel about a Libertarian American Revolution lead by superheroes, it was a toungue-in-cheek experiment. Now I’m thinking these are characters worth saving. I’m going to refactor on this and try to actually release this novel. My ego demands it. I simply cannot let the world remain without a superhero that teleports an opponent into the air immediately over a helicopter rotor.

Rick Uncategorized

My godawful Novel-In-A-Month is underway. I’m creating a novelization of a Trainwreck IP called “World 2″ for this year’s “competition”. I’m less than 50 pages in and we’ve already had giant fighting robots, superheroes, Texas, and a cowboy hat with “Born to kill” embossed on the side.

Rick Uncategorized

Where’s my update? To my throngs of readers: fear not. I’m working on a post just this minute! Or was, until real life distracted me.

Also, if you are spamming me in Russian, please know that this is a Cyrillic-free zone, as madated by the Geneva Convention Protocol II.

Rick Developer Blog Personal

“Rick, we should start adding real posts to the Developer Blogs section on Trainwreck’s site.”

“… I’ve been doing that for two weeks.”

“…”

“…”

And so I admit that I haven’t been reading this site recently, as I was under the impression that it was a test-tube baby still awaiting implantation in Rick’s womb of content.  Wow, that’s awful imagery; let’s move on.

I started playing video games on the Intellivision before I turned three.  I was regularly defeating my father at NFL Football for said Intellivision before I turned five.  In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about why I work in this industry, and why I associate myself with it so strongly, even before I worked at a game developer.  I have many different charming rationalizations, but the early exposure has implanted a reptilian, “just because” directive into my cortex.  Unfortunately, that’s really boring to talk about, so let’s discuss the rationalizations instead.

The most charming rationalization I have is that game development combines my two loves:  performance and engineering.  I’m driven to perform for people, and like everyone who has ever been successful on the stage, I crave applause.  More generally, I crave appreciation.  In fact, I think everyone craves appreciation, and that desire manifests itself in various ways.  Engineering combines logical “solving” – what Rick would call “hard fun”, or at least Rick channeling Koster – and artistic creation from the aether.  In one video game, I wrote the code that made it rain, and I was the first person to see it rain in this game.  This powerful act of creation, and the fact that millions of others experienced that creation (albeit without associating it directly with me), is like a drug.

Like all drugs, the desire for more “hits” can lead you down some undesirable short-term paths.  At this point in my career, I don’t want to work on crap, and I don’t want to work for no possible reward.  I don’t want to just complete my assigned tasks as an employee; I want to play a meaningful role in the creation of the game.  I don’t want to make any old game; I want to create something special – hopefully many somethings.

Unfortunately, I realized a long time ago that the only IP that I can create doesn’t pass my own “crap” filter.  Fortunately, I found Rick, who has many compelling ideas and is even interested in doing all the boring businessy work.  I just want to entertain people and make money at it, as money is a meaningful barometer of success at entertainment.  More than that, I want to lead a group of people to collectively entertain others in ways I could never do by myself.  The DaVinci to my Edison is definitely Jim Henson.

Rick once told me that there are four aspects to a career in the games industry:  “creative”, “technical”, “business”, and “people”; you get to pick two.  He had chosen “creative” and “business”, and my talents and interests obviously lie in “technical” and “people”.  This should work out fairly well for us.  On the other hand, I am mindful of the wisdom of Homer: “I lost creative control of the project.  And I forgot to ask for any money.”

Matt Developer Blog Personalities