261 - Like a Boss

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
Posts: 2316
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:48 am

261 - Like a Boss

Post by matt »

While being the boss is great and the dream of every game developer who goes indie, it is a tough job. In this developer diary, I talk about some of the tough choices you have to make being the boss.

-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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evilkinggumby
Posts: 297
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 8:41 pm

Re: 261 - Like a Boss

Post by evilkinggumby »

ok before anyone watches this.. you gotta try this: imagine Matt has his arms behind his back for this video and the hands you see are actually another dev's hands, who is hiding down off camera and doing all the gesticulating for Matt. Go on.. watch the video thinking that.

Pretty awesome, right? lol.

I love your hand gestures. seriously. seeing you talk with your hands is much more interesting then seeing you Max Headroom it all through the video.

whats the name of the cloud service you use? and does it just hold files in a general spot or can you make folders and properly sub-divide them? You mentioned it but i couldn't make it out and I don't recognize it.

It's kool to see you use skype to communicate back and forth weekly. I made it a practice to ahave what I called "Weekly Roundtables" for me and my IT TECH folks so we can see eachother face to face (we don't use skype, we use GoToMeeting which has video cam functionality) and catch up on projects, news, problems and nightmare stories about users LOL. some of the time it's not all that productive but I have found getting that time to just chat and hang out is immensely good for team building and coordinating projects. Now I need to go loook you up on skype so I can cyber stalk you and send you random messages..muhahahaah (just kidding, I don't use my skype much at all except when chatting with game dev's on ideas, or writers about beta reads).

I don't envy you being the boss. whereas you have all the say, as you mentioned it is you keeping all the plates in play and spinning. anytime you go overbudget, over a deadline, an idea falls flat, or a major issue comes up, it's on you to deal with and keep the project going. This is not only working all the assets and bugs within the game.. but wrangling the team and keeping them focused, getting along, and cooperating. If you have a kickass team, that might be easy, but I've found putting extremely intelligent, creative and critically thinking minds together for a project has a lot of potential for interpersonal problems. If ya'll don't deal with that... yer LUCKY.

or maybe everyone is so afraid of Matt they hide the problems when he is around *teehee*
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[I am Evilkinggumby on DeviantArt and Steam if you want to looks me up!]
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matt
Posts: 2316
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:48 am

Re: 261 - Like a Boss

Post by matt »

We use Jira by Atlassian (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira), and they have cloud hosting. That's where we put all of our stuff for task management. For our source files, concepts, assets, etc, we use Perforce hosted on a virtual server on the cloud.

I can try and keep my hands in frame, but I'm having a bit of a challenge finding the optimal camera placement so it doesn't try to focus on the window. :-/

Most of the team doesn't really interact with one another (save Adam and Joe who live together), so pretty much everything goes through me - other than Dan gets tool bugs from Joe. That's not exactly by design. It's more a side effect of everyone working different hours. (Dan lives in Taiwan, Joe keeps weird hours, Adam is on Eastern, I'm on Pacific, etc) Sometimes I think Joe shares more hours with Dan than Adam despite living with Adam...

Fortunately, everyone is pretty easy going (except me), so we don't have personality clashes. haha
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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