The Importance of Wearing Many Hats

The Importance of Wearing Many Hats

There isn’t much that is more frustrating than not knowing what you’re supposed to do. You don’t just want to sit around doing nothing, but you don’t want to step on anyone’s toes either. This is how I felt when I first joined Batteries Included as a Gameplay Programmer.

My name is Keegan Gifford. I joined Batteries Included about 6 months into production as part of the second round of new hires, and the transition was a little rough. After 6 months of working on a project, the team had already developed a good workflow: everyone has their place and knows what they need to be doing.

Honestly at first, it wasn’t bad. For the first few months I was tasked with some technical documentation and small bug fixes to get accustomed to an already large codebase. The project was going through a major AI overhaul that was supposed to be done in 2 months, which I would be managing the behavioral side of. So finally, after a few delays, and 5 months of bug fixing, The new system was finally ready. I was finally able to start pushing out content ….. for about a month.

After a month with this new system, our Core Design changed. After hours of playtesting the designers found that players just were not reacting well to some of the core game principals, so the design needed to change. With that came a new, much different Environment system utilizing a hex based tile design,and a new AI direction. To top it all off, the programming team was also going through a bit of restructuring. Working on a VR game without a VR headset can be very difficult at times, so leadership shifted to allow for people without headsets to take on a more managerial role. In the end, we all had new roles, which put me at the head of AI and, oddly enough, animations.

With the new AI design as simple as it is, It didn't take long to push out a decent first-pass implementation. Animations, on the other hand, ran into a number of technical difficulties. We had not received any usable animations for the characters in the game, and this caused the game to look a little odd.  However, we finally set up a pipeline to import the animations into the engine, which I will be putting into play soon. And that puts me where I am today, fixing the AI bugs as they come, and doing other odd jobs for other departments. I just finished working on some additions to the Hex system, and I am back to working on some AI bugs as a result.

To be clear, this is not a negative story.  I’m confident that everything that I have done for this team has been helpful and I never felt that I couldn’t contribute at all. I will be the first to tell you that jumping from department to department can be a very frustrating….. but you must keep going. Eventually you will find your place and you'll be glad you stuck with it.

-Keegan Gifford

Gameplay Programmer