[TRENCHES] Thursday, August 22, 2013 - Spreadsheet
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Spreadsheet
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/spreadsheet
Landing the dream job?
AnonymousAll my young life I had told my parents that I was one day going to make my living playing video games. Little did anyone know, one day would be quite sooner than expected.
My mom befriended a receptionist for a local games developer at a cub scout training camp who invited me to go and have a look at how they made games. I checked out their website to learn about the company before going in, and like many pre-2000 websites, it was a train-wreck with missing images and no recent content to speak of.
Visiting with the developers, artists, and planners to see the magic behind the making fulfilled all my boyhood dreams. At one point the CEO dropped by to see how I liked everything and I flippantly remarked how badly their website sucked. At 16, I had no commercial website experience, but I had made scads of my own sites and those were better than theirs by far. The CEO liked my work and a deal was struck, I came onboard to work under one of the designers building their website and worked on the testing crew playing games in my off website time.
At 16 years old, being a game tester made me a veritable rock star in the circles that I ran in. But after the website had been modernized and updated with current information (the one triple A title we had been testing out the door) there was a total wasteland of great games to test and the shine was off the apple.
Nothing will make you seek greener pastures quicker than spending an 8 hour shift playing a bowling game non-stop to make certain that there aren’t issues with music playback over a marathon gaming session.The music for the game was under license so the publisher wouldn’t provide us with any permanent audio assets until the final stages of production. A helpful developer dropped in a 20 second loop from the circus classic “Entry of the Gladiators” (look it up) as a placeholder for the music so that we could test playback…
8 HOURS and turning the “music” off was NOT an option. Sufficeth to say, I didn’t stick with testing long, and I hate bowling games to this day. I don’t make my living testing games, but for two years or so in my young life, I lived the dream.
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Sadly, those days are gone. Anyone can now maintain a professional web-site, all you have to do is drag and drop.
When I was in high school I wanted to be a computer programmer and game designer. College will take a dream and an idea, and break that shit into pieces. I do construction and facilities maintanence for the government, and I've never been happier. It's wierd how things turn out.
I agree, but this can also apply to other job areas as well. In the thread for "Amelioration", I discussed the different categories of Contract Attorneys that a friend of mine devised, and I think that system applies to jobs like QA testing. Actually, I think it applies to any temporary assignment, no matter how long term it is, where you have to deal with others in the same position as you and where there is a chance to getting promoted into a permanent position. There's something about that potential "carrot on a stick" of a promotion to get some real fun actions and reactions from those in "Temping Hell". From what I hear, that still goes on among Contract Attorneys, even though next to nobody gets a full time promotion with a firm from doing that type of work anymore, although there are various reasons for that.
Also, I like how Cora is using "betrayed" to describe Gwen's promotion, when Cora tried her best to get out of the dungeon herself using some bullshit calendar system and pizza parties to get projects done on time. Haha... Welcome to "Category 3", Cora...
Cora is just as willing to screw over and sell out her co-workers as Isaac, she just usually has delusional self-righteous motives while Isaac is more unrepentantly out for himself and himself alone.
I wouldn't want to work with any of these people.
But it's amusing that both Cora and Isaac would characterize Gwen getting herself promoted as a "betrayal" when they've both been trying to climb out of the basement themselves by hook or crook.
I guess that's what we're supposed to see about the characters, though. They so fundamentally misunderstand employment that someone doing their job well feels like a betrayal. I've seen this weird mentality in teams of lower-level employees. The entire team functions as one in their failure.
Real pros still write HTML.
I don't get why you couldn't use the music yet though. Like, I realize they didn't have the "final" track yet, but surely they could have put *something* in there more representative of what the game's track will be. But this sounds pretty old so maybe it predates the era of widespread digital music availability (not necessarily pirated music, but just MP3s in general... midis were all the rage back then though).
He may admit to hating bowling games, but you just gotta know that song has also damaged him psychologically as well.
Real pros set up a CMS and walk away.
Real pros sell the CMS, add-ons, themes, support, and implementation.
This.
Nobody did because it was all brand new.
Right now the bat guy seems to be the best guy there. And he hangs from ceilings.
Any isn't Cora up there anyway? Considering the position she's in its pretty insane she's down in the cellar.
Don't even get me started about Cora's twisted sense of self-righteousness...
Some game developers want to hose a bunch of strangers playing an MMORPG? In comes Cora to leak everything to the public.
Q wants to potentially fuck over Anders' legacy, for the sake of extra profits, by adding apocryphal material to a game based on Anders' life's work? And that game, lute playing Sloths and everything, is also licensed by Anders (which makes all parts the game seem like they are approved material)? Cora does nothing in response. Nice.
Cora decided to side-step what her actual job is supposed to be, created a bullshit job for herself where all she apparently would have to do is set up arbitrary deadlines for others to do their work and then write X's on a calendar and call pizza places for delivery orders every week or so. I can't see that con game lasting long before Q or someone else gets wise to it and sends her back into the dungeon. And, maybe with Gwen's promotion, we may see that Cora was dumped back into the dungeon to clear up space for what would become Gwen's desk. Q did say they had a space ready to go for someone when he announced Gwen's promotion. It might have been the desk Cora commandeered.
Also, I don't think most of these characters are supposed to be likeable, especially Isaac, Cora and Marley. After all, those three are supposed to get dumped on on a pretty regular basis. It's hard to do that, and make it funny, if the characters are likeable. After all, Charlie Brown got dumped on repeatedly, and he was a very likeable character. But that would sometimes turn "Peanuts" into a bit of a depressing comic. It's much easier to bring the jokes when an unlikeable character gets crapped on all of the time instead of a likeable character.
That said, my favorite character so far is Cora's father. To me, he is a cross between George RR Martin and Hunter S Thompson.