Why I am Spiffer

Hey folks!

It's been quite awhile, and I do apologize for the lack of communication. I've been quite busy with work and a lot of stuff in my life, but I wanted to take some time and get back into writing, one of my secret loves.

I get the same question quite often when I play online games, give people my e-mail address, or when people started reading my blog: "What's with the name Spiffer?" For me, good folks, it's a name that comes with a lot of history, so I decided to dive into that story for this evening. After this, i'll be getting right back to Production topics, I swear!

We must start where it all began: Fresno California, my hometown. I grew up there with my siblings and mother, generally living in more of the seedy areas of the city. It was never a real big deal, since we moved so often that I never really had a place to stay or call my own. The only things that were constant for myself and my family was each other and that's about it. It wasn't the best way to live, but we did it, and for how little we had, we had family, and that was enough to keep us happy.

Moving so often doesn't really teach you how to make friends, because you don't expect to see people more than a year, so I can't say that I even remember a lot of people that I went to school with. However, it was in junior high that, even though we kept moving, we finally stayed at a school for the long haul.

When you move a lot, you always come into a situation where people have been going to school together for so long it's tough to just jump in and start making friends, so the beginning of the school year is always rough. But you charge through it, taking each day by day, watching others go to lunch with their friends or play sports out in the field. I was always a friendly guy, but sometimes being friendly isn't enough. I figured that I needed to try something else, so I took a couple of electives, one of which was marching band. I always wanted to play something like the drums, so I thought this would kill two birds with one stone.

Per usual, the drumline was already a bit of a close-knit group, so they started me off by playing the cymbals, promising me that one day I could hopefully learn more and move into the other types of drums. At that point, I just took what I could get. I wasn't the only one that was ostracized to playing the cymbals in the corner, oh no, not at all. There were two others that just weren't really for the prime-time of the drumline, young kinds named Chris Yango and Patrick Donnelly. We introduced ourselves to each other, bonding over the fact that we were the worst and had to spend more time learning how to play. We became quick friends, discussing video games, girls, how much everyone else sucked, but quite frankly, never really getting that much better at the drums. But at that point, it didn't matter, we had people that were like us, and that was just fine. Chris brought his good friend Jon Curry out soon enough, and we quickly had our group that we would hang out with all the time. For someone that lived like myself, it was a great time, to have a group that I could confide in, just relax, and be myself. For me, this was what home felt like.

Remember I mentioned games earlier? Yeah, we LOVED games. We would play tons of games over and over, like Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, Rush 2049, Final Fantasy games, and various card games (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc). But there was one game that took up so much of our time: Counter-Strike (that's the old school one, folks).  Counter-Strike was the game that we talked about, strategized about, and basically ate, slept, and lived for. It was the one that we would spend hours at cyber cafe's playing.

The best part about it? We were a pretty darn good team. We wiped the floor of so many teams that people would get pretty pissed off at us. But we needed a Clan name. All of good teams had their own clan that they would call and prefix their names with, and with us being so good, we needed one for ourselves. Well, let's be honest, we weren't the best at coming up with names at the time, so the best we could think of was  -}ACP{- and then each of our code names. ACP stood for AlvinChrisPatrick. Told you we weren't that creative. :) Jon didn't play nearly as much as us, so we just kept it for the three of us, but he would join in whenever he was available.

-}ACP{-Scout (Chris, because he liked using the scout gun), -}ACP{-TeamPat (Patrick, because he always went off on his own), and -}ACP{-Spiffer. "But Alvin," you might ask, "where did you get Spiffer?" Well, good folks, I honestly have no idea. It was the first thing that popped into my head, and I really enjoyed writing it, so that's what I picked. Yup.

BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. The point was, from then on we had our group. Our friends. We had something that no one else could take away from us. For me, it was the first time that I had something that was just mine. No one else's.

We got pretty darn good. We would wreck house so often that we almost went pro, but we weren't coordinated enough to actually take on a lot of the elite teams, but we could definitely handle some scrimmages in our hometown. I have to say that those days were some of the best, because the only thought was how were were going to get more cash to head to the cyber cafe and keep on playing our favorite game.

That was a long time ago now, just about 15 years. In that time, I moved to Orange County, got a job in the game industry, my friends have kids and a family, and are happy in their lives. Time had passed, and while we haven't lost touch, we just don't see each other as much as we used to.

I wrote this today because I wanted to express something. People ask me why I use Spiffer. Or why I have ACP in my gamertags. ACP and Spiffer, to me, are mine. They are my link to the past, the link to a great part of my childhood, the thing that keeps me forever connected to some of the best friends that I know.

I wrote this today to say one thing. Times change, people change, you move, you get angry, you hurt, you lose touch. But like ACP and Spiffer, special symbols and great friendships will overcome.

-ACN

Project Management Programs and YOU! Part 2, The Search

Why hello. You may remember me from such blog posts as: Moving, Loss of Computer, and Reminiscing on the Past, and Project Management Programs and YOU! Part 1, The Questions. Well, I'm back for Part 2 of the series, Project Management Programs and YOU!

Where we last left our hero (which is you lovely folks), we discussed what questions you should be asking yourself and your team when choosing the perfect PM Software to use.

For me personally, I started my search by taking a number of ones that I already had used (Asana, Trello, Basecamp) and seeing what I liked/didn't like about these in particular.

Here's my issues for the ones that I have already used:

• Asana
• Asana is one of the most widely used program currently for attempting to have your team work quickly and efficiently, without sending tons of e-mails. They have a pretty nice layout for developers to view, and an awesome "followers" system to help people stay informed about tasks that they need to be aware of. In addition, you can create a number of sub-tasks for each, as well as sub-sub-tasks if you really need it.
• At the time, there wasn't a good way to track time, nor how much time was left in something like a milestone.
• They now have a Calendar view, as well as Instagantt
• Trello
• Trello is a bulletin based program, which is pretty darn amazing to just see what has been done, what needs to be done, and what's currently in progress. It's very easy to add new tasks, comment on each one, and move them from one status to another.
• Trello is great for a small team working on a specific task that has little to no end date. But as soon as you add more people, it becomes very confusing as to what needs to be done when. Great program, just not good for a large team.
• Basecamp
• Basecamp is pretty similar to Asana, in that it's pretty easy to create tasks, add files onto each one, and track the to-do lists of each project.
• I personally thought the layout was a bit more confusing than all of the other software programs that we had used. It felt way more clunky than something like Asana or Trello. And again, with more people, the tasking got more confusing.
• SharePoint
• Sharepoint is a Microsoft built program that has been in use for years by a lot of large scale companies to store files, build lists, track tasks, and create separate sites for each project. It's great for task management, and easy to build Excel documents from all of the lists or tasks.
• Sharepoint is great for a strict company that has a very waterfall method, since it's mostly built with lists. I personally love that aspect, but teams generally hate it, and it's VERY clunky.

With that knowledge in mind, I knew that something that would be good for me would be a good melding of both Asana and SharePoint. I went to a website that I had heard about which linked a good number of other software choices, http://project-management.com/ .

This website holds a lot of knowledge, not only for software, but general information about managing a team and how best to schedule teams. I would recommend taking some time to go through a bit of it, but there's a lot. I also don't think that a lot of it is relevant for a gaming company, but it's good to know anyway.

In any case, this website led me to a new program that I have personally begun to enjoy, called Teamwork PM. It has a lot of the aspects of Asana, but the dashboard of Sharepoint.

It has a pretty efficient way to input tasks, assign tasks, and view all of the tasks that each developer has assigned to them. In regards to Project Management, it's easy to get a quick view of all the various projects and the overall schedule, as well as create a gantt chart to track what the status everything is. You can also create sub-tasks like Asana, add dependencies for each tasks, and  track your milestones on the calendar. I haven't yet gotten the chance to use it, but right now I think it's pretty awesome!

The important thing is that whichever you choose, make sure that it has all of the pieces that will allow your team to do the best job they possibly can, and you can take care of your job as well.

Folks, that's all for today. I'll probably add a Part 3, but i'll come back to this conversation later.

What do you think about these programs?

-ACN

Moving, Loss of Computer, and Reminiscing on the Past

Sorry for the lack of blogs recently. I recently moved out of my place and I'm looking for a new one. As is the case, I've clearly decided to change EVERY FACET of my life.

I guess the fates have the same idea for me as well. My computer completely died this weekend. So, if there is a bit of delay on other post I'm apologizing in advance. I'll need a bit more time to finish up PART 2 of Project Management Programs and YOU! since Part 2 is about the search for a good program. In the meantime, I wanted to give a bit of history as to how I even got into the industry and how I became a producer.

Brace yourself, this is a longer blog post.
                                                                                                                                                  

I was 18 when I first got into the industry. A big eyed and bushy-tailed kid fresh out of high school with no idea what he wanted to do with his life. I had an amazing teacher at Newport Harbor named Mr. (Dr. now) Naaz who taught psychology, and my mother also went to school for psychology, so I thought that it was a natural fit for me to see about going to school for Psychology and seeing what kind of job I could get with that degree.

I couldn't afford one of those big wig UNIVERSITIES so I started going to the local college near me. It was there and 6 additional months when I realized that I wasn't cut out to be going for another 8 years. I knew that I had to do something, and it had to be something that I would enjoy for a long, long time.

Honestly, there weren't a lot of things that I really enjoyed doing, nor were there a lot of things that I was generally good at. I was always the kid that was "ok" at everything, but never excelled at anything. I am a decent writer, an ok photographer, terrible artist, not a strong swimmer and I wasn't tall enough for basketball. But one thing I was always pretty good at was people and playing lots and lots of games. Ever since me and my siblings were younger we played tons of games. From Commando and Zelda on the NES, to all the Final Fantasy games, to WWF games, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Rush 2049, Super Smash Brothers, Chrono Trigger, Tomb Raider, Thief, and Super Mario, I played games. I thought that gaming wouldn't be a bad idea to try.

I searched through the various ads online and found a local hiring agency that had Quality Assurance positions for a local publisher named Crave Entertainment. It had recently moved to Newport Beach and was in need of new testers for their upcoming release, World Championship Poker II Featuring Howard Lederer. I applied and almost immediately got the position. I didn't even know what the job of a tester was, but I knew it would at least give me an idea of what the industry was all about.

I didn't have a car at the time, so responsible Alvin took the day before riding on the bus to see what the best way would be to get to the office on time. The first day I was about 30 minutes early, and there was no one there, so I waited outside until my lead came up. He introduced himself and opened up the back door (seems I went through the wrong door).

Crave was a small place, mostly marketing people, actually. The gaming division was in the small cubicles off to the side, with 2 or 3 producers overseeing all of the projects that were in the pipeline. The QA was spread out in 3 different areas, each working on different games. It was probably the strangest thing that I had ever seen. People were just sitting with these strange looking versions of PS2's and PSP's and playing games. Just sitting and playing games. It made no sense to me but I loved it. It seemed awesome.

There was a large room off to the side where my seat was. There were about 10-12 PS2 dev kits and one computer where folks would write up all of the bugs that were found throughout the day. My lead introduced me to the various people that I would be working with, then showed me to my seat and console. After finding out that I have never done QA before, he went through a pretty brief synopsis of what a tester does. "Find any issue that you wouldn't want to find if you were an end-user and mark it in our database." Seemed pretty simple to me so I just started playing the game. It was a strange thing to do, to sit and just play a game and look for bugs. I was always the kind of person to try some strange stuff in games, and always see what would happen if I did something rather strange when playing games, so I ended up picking it up pretty quickly and grew to one of the better testers there. I also got pretty good a poker. :)

After being there for about 6 months, I realized that there was a definite ceiling there, and they were looking to cut a number of people, so I started looking for other places. I didn't really know how to find companies that were near, so I just started looking at all of the game boxes that I had and searched to see where they were located. One of the first ones that I looked at was Obsidian Entertainment. And look at that, they were in Irvine, not too far from me! I quickly put in my application, hoping that my 6 month experience would be enough to land me a gig there. I got a call pretty quickly, asking me to come in for an interview. I still didn't have a car at the time, so again I took a day before and scoped out the place to ensure I would be there on time. I knew that this place was going to be very different from Crave, so I wanted to make sure that I looked pretty good for the interview.

I'm pretty sure I wore slacks, a long sleeve shirt, took a notepad, and got on the bus and made it there 45 minutes early. The receptionist had me wait in the lobby for awhile while the Producer and Lead Tester came back from lunch. They introduced themselves and took me to the Producer's office, where they asked me about my resume, how it was working at Crave, and what kind of games I played. My interview at Crave (or lack thereof) was different, but this had to have been the strangest one I've ever been in. I'm never been so comfortable in an interview, just essentially shooting the shit, talking about games.

I figured that after such a strange interview I definitely didn't get the job, but, they asked me if I wanted the position pretty quickly afterwards. I ALMOST didn't take it. They offered me a Lead Tester position at Crave, and I thought that it might have been a good idea to just take that and ensure that I would have enough experience to work at some of these bigger companies. Also, I was comfortable there, I knew everyone, and I was scared that I would be fired for some weird reason. My good friend (thanks again Roger Chang) told me that I should definitely take the position if they offered it to me. So, I accepted the position and pretty much put in my two weeks that day.

I started at Obsidian on the 2nd of January with 3 other testers at the time. Well, technically 2. Someone was late (we still give her shit about it) so she came in the day after. The rest of us introduced ourselves to each other and got to work. Our first task? Build our own chairs. The QA team was so new that we didn't even have chairs made. It was pretty darn strange, but kind of a nice, family-type feel. I knew this was going to be different.

The coffee was in main lounge, so I went to get some, but I couldn't figure out how the newfangled machine worked. A man came out of his office right in the lounge and offered to help. He introduced himself as Feargus Urquhart, the CEO of the company. He already knew my name and mentioned to me that I was currently the youngest person at the company. I was blown away. I still don't think I know who the owners of Crave were, and yet here I was on my first day at Obsidian, I meet the CEO, and he knows who I am? It was right then and there that I decided that I wanted to be at this place for awhile and that I would do what I can to work hard for these folks to ensure their games were as Quality Assured as I could make them. I thanked Feargus for the directions on the coffee machine and headed back to my office. I went up to my lead later that day and told him that I planned on staying here. He gave me a strange look, but I didn't care. I wanted him to know that I was going to work hard to stay here.

Flash forward to about 7 months later. I had been there awhile and by that time I was the Lead Progression Tester on Neverwinter Nights 2. I worked hard to become a lead because I felt that our team didn't get enough information about certain things, so by becoming a lead I could get more information, which in turn I could give to the team. By that time I had actually met a lot more developers, learned what a lot of them did, and decided that I wanted to go into Production. The second owner that I had the pleasure of meeting on a personal scale was Darren, and he was a pretty darn good example of what I wanted to do. I spoke to him and the other producers and told them that I wanted to learn how to be a producer, and that I would take any extra work off of them while continuing to do my own tasks. People love less work to do, so they gave me a number of small tasks to help them out with. I made sure that they were taken care of, while continuing to ask for more things as I finished. At the end of Neverwinter Nights 2, they enjoyed my work, so they kept me on for their new project, Alpha Protocol.

One of the producers, Chris Parker, sat down and told me that they wanted me to become a producer, but at the time there was no positions, but they had a technical position with the motion capture team that I could take if I wanted, until something opened up. I immediately said yes and set to work. I knew nothing about animation, let alone how motion capture worked, but I was willing to take some time to learn. I sat down with the team and learned what the processes were that we used, and after awhile I took what they taught me and improved the motion capture process from 2+ weeks for some animations to about 3 days. It was right around then that I officially became the producer for the Animation Team, and the rest is history.

I could keep going (write in the comments if you'd like me to!) but I just wanted to sit and write all of that down. It's definitely different getting in the industry now as it was in 2005, but with the determination and motivation, it's still definitely possible.

Next blog post will go back to Project Management Software, I swear. For now, I'm done writing. Peace out.

-ACN

Project Management Programs and YOU! Part 1, The Questions

First things first, in my last post I talked about some project management (PM) software that I was looking at to possibly implement at my new job. Take a look yourself, but there are TONS out there that people have begun to make. It seems that there really isn't a perfect way to manage a project, but that's another topic i'll go into later on.

In any case, when choosing software you have to ask yourself a number of things:

• Why (my favorite question!) do I need this?
• What's the reason that you need PM software? Are you working on a small project and you need to track what the team is doing? Maybe you're building a new feature for something and just need to see all of the items that need to be done. Make sure you actually need software before you start to look.
• Who is going to be using this?
• Is just your team needed to view the software? Does your team have an easy viewable way to track their tasks and mark them complete? Does your client or publisher need access? If so, then you need to make sure that the software has a view that is easy for them to digest. Or, it at least has a good way for you to export information. 
• What information is needed?
• How are you managing your team? Do they like having tasks and subtasks assigned to them? Do they enjoy only seeing their items and nothing else? Do you want them to track time? Do you need to be able to separate things by department?
• How many people are going to use this?
• A lot of the programs are based on how many users, so that is a big factor that you should make sure you're aware of. Some, like Asana, can be used by up to (don't quote me) 10 people before you have to pay, so that's something to keep in mind.
• What are the tools you use in tandem?
• Do you have your own cloud server that holds all your files? Does the program you're looking at support that server? Are you expecting the program to hold your files?
• How much money are you willing to spend?
• Let's be honest. A decent amount get expensive as your team grows. Make sure you're willing to put up some big bucks to use the "primo" systems (Hansoft, JIRA, etc).
• What kind of project methodology are you using for your team?
• Are you using a agile scrum type method? Maybe agile kanban? Whatever method you're using, make sure that the PM software supports it.

These are just some of the things that I personally think of when looking. What are some of the thoughts that you think of when choosing a program?

First Day at the New Job, and WHY?

So, after getting to bed around 4am last night, (yay jetlag), I started my first day at FireForge, an independent game developer, strangely enough, right next to Obsidian Entertainment. :)

I spent the beginning of my first day doing what I do best: analyzing my situation and assessing the team's structure to attempt to help with issues or fix pipelines in the current system. I believe that every Producer and Producer-In-Training should be thinking this at all times: "Why?"

"Why" really allows a lot of change to happen, if you really think about it. It's something that we did as a child (asking why), but it really got beaten out of us. One of the things that I learned from a lot of my personal favorite Producers that I have worked with is that they are constantly asking why is this the reason we're doing something a certain way. If you ask a artist or designer why do something, it forces them to think "could there be a better way to do this?" Honestly, even if they don't necessarily think that, as a producer I believe that you should. A producer's main job is not just to make sure the schedule is on time, but also to make sure that the team has the tools necessary to get the job done effectively. Asking "why" helps get the juices flowing to facilitate change and make things better.

Later on today, I sat for a decent amount of time talking to the owner about where the company plans on going, how the team is doing, what is needed from me to help get the game moving forward, and what I think we need to do to help get the game out on time. This was such a new experience, just being put in a situation where I actually have the ability to make some good change. That's not to say that I never had those situations at Obsidian, I actually had the ability to do a lot there, but in this instance I am brought on much earlier, allowing me to try a lot of new things that I always wanted to but never had the chance. It's a humbling feeling hearing that you have a bit of free range to try some stuff, but also just a bit scary.

I finished off today looking into various Project Management programs that we can use. This was such a fun thing, I'm going to make tomorrow's post simply about some of the ones that I looked at.

Ta-Ta for now!

-ACN

Starting Off

Well, I guess I should start some sort of blog to pass the time.

Oh, but I should introduce myself. I'm a 27 (at the time of writing) year old male who lives in the sunny state of California and works in the video game industry. At the time of this writing I work at FireForge Games, which is a relatively new game studio. I worked at Obsidian Entertainment for 8 years, starting from QA and eventually becoming a producer.

As a producer, I help manage schedules, assign out tasks, go to meetings, write notes, and help fix pipelines for the team. I gotta say, I absolutely love it. The best part is that my job is never the same every day. Each day and each project is different. Different people, different publishers, different issues. I really couldn't ask for a better job.

Well, this is how i'll start my blog. I might talk about Production, I might talk about games in general, I might talk about a recipe. But, I guess I'll just talk, so stay tuned!

-ACN