Twenty Years in the WorkForce
My first job out of college started 20 years ago. That’s two whole decades of mostly consistent employment. Here’s a retrospective!
Short Burst of Educational Game Dev
You never forget your first time.
Mine was at Whoola Inc. The project was open-source(!!) and can be found here.
I don’t think anything I coded is in there though. The stint’s duration was less than a year but I learned a lot, especially because of good mentorship. The biggest takeaway was about how to think about code architecture, something that still helps me today.
I think the oddest thing about the job was it was at a dot-com tech incubator after the dot-com tech bubble burst. That is to say, it was mostly dead. Rows of grey cubicles, nearly all of them were empty. It was eerie.
Video Tutorials Galore!
All that we are while we are, we are teaching.
I sacrificed four-and-a-half years of my prime here. It was great until it wasn’t and the “wasn’t” was caused by fast growth, believe it or not. Teaching can be rewarding but selling tutorials is not. Piracy was rampant, competitors were petty and critics were everywhere. The company had to adapt to survive and what it adapted to, I didn’t agree with so I departed. Eventually, the company was acquired by Pluralsight and some of my training material is still accessible there. Here’s a comprehensive list of my works.
| Pub. Date | Cover | Title | Notes |
| 2005/03/03 |  | Backwater Bunch 5 | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/03/23 |  | Intro to Hypershade | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/04/06 |  | Mastering Render Nodes | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/04/29 |  | Advanced Shading Networks | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/05/06 |  | Ultimate Fluids | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/06/24 |  | Intro to RealFlow 3 | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/07/22 |  | XSI Particles | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2005/09/22 |  | XSI Soft/Rigid Bodies | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2005/10/04 |  | Intro to Render Tree | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/11/15 |  | RF3/Maya Integration | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2005/12/02 |  | ActionScripting for Games | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2006/02/20 |  | XSI Rigging | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2006/02/20 |  | XSI Enveloping | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2006/02/15 |  | Intro to RFM | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2006/03/14 |  | Maya Toon | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2006/05/09 |  | Using Syflex in Maya | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2006/05/07 |  | Intro to Trax | Curriculum Research/Development (A personal favorite) |
| 2006/08/23 |  | Game Techniques in XSI | Curriculum R/D and Instruction (co-authored with Kyle Green) |
| 2006/11/08 |  | Intro to RealFlow4 | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/02/05 |  | Shave and a Haircut for Maya | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/03/01 |  | mental ray Nodes in Maya | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/06/11 |  | Artists Guide to MEL | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/07/11 |  | Intro to RFM 2 | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/07/18 |  | RealFlow Dynamics | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2007/09/20 |  | Intro to XSI Hair | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2007/11/15 |  | Intro to Dynamics in Maya | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/11/27 |  | Intro to nCloth | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2007/11/27 |  | Python Scripting in Maya | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/01/03 |  | Introduction to Houdini 9 | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/01/16 |  | Introduction to Houdini Dynamics | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/02/06 |  | Introduction to Maya Muscle | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/02/27 |  | RealWaves in RealFlow | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/03/06 |  | Intro to CDK | Curriculum R/D and Instruction (Another personal favorite) |
| 2008/03/24 |  | RBD in Houdini | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/04/09 |  | Realtime Shading with XNA | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/05/01 |  | Maya XNA Pipeline | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/05/09 |  | Flash Maya Integration | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/07/09 |  | Shader Pipeline with XSI and XNA | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/08/06 |  | Introduction to ICE | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/09/25 |  | ICE Node Reference Library | Curriculum R/D and Instruction (Longest material I produced, 10+ hours) |
| 2008/10/13 |  | Introduction to Mantra in Houdini | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/10/23 |  | Introduction to nParticles | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/11/12 |  | Scripting in RealFlow4 | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2008/12/19 |  | Fluids in Houdini | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/03/20 |  | ICE Strands in Softimage | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/03/26 |  | mental ray Online Reference Library | Curriculum Research/Development |
| 2009/06/05 |  | Intro to Maya 2009 | Curriculum R/D and Instruction (Authored by all DT Instructors, Last Physical Product) |
| Pub. Date | Streaming Content Drops | Notes |
| 2009/08/03 | Houdini Courses: Fur; Stereo; Rigging; New Features; Digital Assets | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/08/03 | Softimage Courses: GEM; Normal Maps; Python; ICE States | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/08/03 | Others Courses: Physics in MotionBuilder; RF Particle Morphing; Pixel Bender Intro; Pixel Bender Filters | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/08/03 | Animation Tips and Tricks | Instruction Only (R/D by Mark Nunn) |
| 2009/08/04 | Rigid Body Tips and Tricks | Curriculum R/D and Instruction (some of the craziest hacks in Maya ever!) |
| 2009/09/03 | Houdini Ocean Toolkit | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/09/16 | RIB Archives in RFM Pro | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| 2009/09/16 | Python in Houdini | Curriculum R/D and Instruction |
| Date | Live Instruction |
| 2005/12/03 | 3December |
| 2006/08/02 | XSI Training Center @ Siggraph |
| 2006/09/07 | Austin Game Conference |
| 2006/10/15 | Nerjyzed |
| 2006/11/16 | Brooke Army Medical Center |
| 2008/06/07 | Industry Giants |
| 2009/01/19 | Motorola |
| 2009/04/20 | Motorola |
| Release Date | Special Training DVDs |
| 2006/08/02 | DT XSI Siggraph 2006 Edition DVD |
| 2006/08/02 | Pixar Siggraph 2006 Special Edition DVD |
| 2007/02/06 | DT Artist’s Guide to XSI (XSI 6) |
| 2007/08/06 | Pixar Siggraph 2007 Special Edition DVD |
| 2008/07/17 | DT Artist’s Guide to XSI (XSI 7) |
Gone in a Flash!
This too shalt pass…
Resigning during a Great Recession in the hopes of seizing a better life in California was one heck of a move. In the end, it did pan out but the initial road was rough.
I got on the iPhone game development train and that went nowhere. XNA game projects were taking too long to make. And the runway was slowly but surely dwindling. I did get some familial support but that came with hidden costs. I took small web development projects to keep money coming in but that ate into my development bandwidth. The writing was on the wall…
Before I knew it, my first attempt at going Indie came to an end and I found myself back in the WorkForce as a Flash developer. I worked at a Japanese MLM company and moved on to an “umbrella” company that even Facebook was afraid of (and did illegal things to). I was earning more than I ever did and things were looking up. Until Steve Jobs proclaimed Flash was dead.
The tides were shifting and the gravy train I was riding was about to run out of tracks! Right as it went off a cliff, I found myself leaping off and landing in the game industry. It turned out that UI development in AAA games was mostly Flash-based, driven by a quirky middleware called Scaleform. That was my ticket into the industry I struggled to break into.
BTW Steve Jobs died before Flash did.
Finished Level 3
The game has just begun.
Getting into the game industry was one thing. Surviving it was another. Crunch was real and it was no joke. Beyond that, burnout and stagnation were other issues to contend with.
It’s worth noting that Scaleform reached its End of Life but I learned to not fear obsolescence but to embrace it. Part of that process is improving my skills, learning new tools, and never getting complacent. Oddly enough, I also think about ways to make myself redundant such as documentation and process automation.
It’s been 12 years since I started at EA. I somehow survived, through luck and persistence more than anything. While I was at Ubisoft, the COVID-19 pandemic happened which changed things up. Feeling that life was short, I tried to go Indie one more time; unsurprisingly it didn’t pan out but it did sharpen my skills and also undid my burnout.
With remote work being more prevalent in the game industry, I was free to try contracting and take other risks with my career. I got lucky and found steady employment at Plastic Fern Studios. I currently work on porting Indie games; so in some sense, I have succeeded at going Indie. My goal now is keep making games and add to my ludography. Whether AAA or Indie, make no mistake, game development is difficult; it can be addictive, it can be challenging but it’s mostly difficult.
Still, I’m here.