The 7 Secrets of Mr. Magpie Ch. 06

Part Six - Gold

When I went to start at Ordinary Exotic Games, the name that Marc had given to the game company, I almost expected that one of the g's in GG would stand 'gold,' since that was on schedule for very soon, but as it turned out GG stood for Gilbert Guttierrez, and he was as cheerfully queer as the day is long. GG;s an openly gay Latino, with dyed blue hair in a haircut that can only be called a flophawk. On the day I first met him, he was wearing a shirt with a 1980s style airbrushed unicorn on it that said "I AM the magic, bitch!" in large swooping letters all around it. And glitter. So very much glitter.

Within just a couple of hours, I knew GG and I were going to get along great, and I also found out why Maria had left both Marc and the project. Marc had changed tactics and instead of asking people to make his late changes for him, he'd taken to trying to implement them himself, and let me tell you there is absolutely nothing worse than a designer who thinks he's also a programmer or an artist. Maria's last straw was when he attempted to do some "cosmetic" changes to a model for the game, and in doing so, had completely fucked up the rigging and the animation for the model. It had been like two days' worth of work that he'd blown away in about three minutes.

GG had also threatened to quit if Marc kept dicking around with things, and I found out early on that between Maria leaving and GG being at the boiling point, Rose felt like she was one small step away from watching her entire investment go up in a puff of smoke from her brother's ass. And I couldn't say I blamed her for getting nervous. GG and Marc mostly seemed to get along okay, but GG was more practical, and he was well aware that their seed money wasn't going to hold out forever, whereas Marc seemed to be under that designer's pipe dream that the money wouldn't ever disappear.

I spent my first day just reading Marc's game design document, and I had to admit, Rose's read on the game was spot on - it was somewhere between a small deck builder and an auto battler, designed for three-to-five minute games, with only a handful of decision gates to make over the course of any given match. Giant robots and kaiju, sorry, giant monsters, but the mecha design wasn't quite as unique as I thought it could be, and the user interface wasn't at all how I would've done it.

My second day was writing up my collection of notes and things I needed to, and then sorting them into a level of priorities, and what I could do on my own and what I needed GG to help me with. There was loads to do and I was well behind the eight ball for the moment.

I started work on the camera system first, which let me and GG and Marc all sort of work as a unit up front, and let us sort of establish how we were going to work moving forward. There was a bit of friction when I started in on breaking down why the visual flow wasn't how I thought it should be, but after about fifteen minutes of me walking through how I thought it should be done, both of the other two were completely on my side.

It wasn't as though any of the work Maria had done was bad - it just wasn't me, and if I was going to put in somewhere between six and twenty-four months on this project, I knew I needed to make it look how I wanted it to look. Less soft edges and more sharp corners, less large chunks and more elegant lines, less stagnant camera and more dynamic movement tracking once a turn had been input and it was just playing out.

And good lord, the monster design was a mess. Everything felt like it wanted to be as close to Godzilla as possible without bringing anything new to the table. I had to redefine all the creatures, and that was an immense amount of work on top of everything else that needed to get done. I found myself working 10-14-hour days, not because anyone said that I had to, but because I was eager to put my own stamp on things.

If we were going to do this, we needed to evoke the familiar, but we needed to bring our own style, our own flavor, and we couldn't be beholden to anyone or anything. We needed to shock the system, needed to bring some heat to what we were putting into the world.

There were hints of the universe that Marc wanted to build in the design document, but despite for how much was in the damn thing, there was only a few hints of world building in it, and that bugged the crap out of me, so I started annotating and adding into it as I started building something Maria should've done on day one - a visual design guide, something we could adhere to and always go back and look at if we ever lost the flow.

To me, it was like they'd gotten so caught up in the excitement of doing something new that both Marc and GG had forgotten all the rules of what it takes to get a project done. One of the things the first producer I ever worked for had drilled into my head was the Two Out Of Three Rule. Basically, it's this: "Quality, Speed, Cost - Pick Any Two." If you want something done well and done quickly, it's not going to be cheap. If you want it done cheap and quickly, it's not going to be good. If you want it done good and cheap, it's not going to be fast. When you start any project, you have to realize that basically, in life like in making videogames, you're only going to ever get two out of those three things, and if you haven't decided which one you're sacrificing, you're cutting from all three and going to get none of them.

My first week was spent almost entirely with my headphones on, taking time only to go and get meals with Marc and GG, and to keep them abreast of what I was working on, and what I needed from each of them. Marc had seemed to learn from some of his past mistakes, and was actually taking the time to listen to what I had to say, which was good, because I had a lot to say. But I did everything I could to engage them in the process, showing them some of the preliminary sketch work I'd done to try and get some sort of good approach to what they... no, what we were going to be building.

By the second week, I was ready to move past theory. GG and Marc had spent the time I'd been building the style guide getting the camera system configured to how I saw it working, and Marc told me over and over again he was shocked at how much of a massive difference that little thing had affected how people were looking at the game. People in the colocation space were poking their over at GG's terminal a lot more, and a couple of them had even come over to introduce themselves to me, eager to see how I was working through problems that had apparently been with the project for months, but things that I could see a way past, with a fresh set of eyes.

At the halfway point of the first month, some of the other people in the colo space started asking me out to lunch, just to see if I could give them a one-hour revisit of their project, to see if I could see anything they were missing that they could get cheap mileage out of. I was happy enough to make friends with the people around us, and it turned out that the legwork would eventually pay off pretty well, because by October, one of the other studios in the colo space had run out of money, and their team broke up.

And I made a phone call.

There was more than enough work for two or three of me, so I called up Rose and asked what it would take to get enough seed money to hire the two artists from the folded studio full time. She asked me if I'd talked it over with Marc and GG, and I responded that I was the art director, we didn't have a producer, so until we did, we were all just doing what we could to get the best project out, and if we wanted to be ready for GDC in March of 2018 to make a good solid pitch to publishers, I needed a couple more pairs of hands. She said she'd get back to me, and the next day, I told the two artists who were packing up their shit that if they wanted to, they could stop packing.

From that point forward, it felt a little like I was also the de facto producer for the project, because since nobody else had done it, I drafted up a schedule of what it would take for us to have a good presentable demo ready for GDC in 6 months' time. Marc told me that he'd been hoping we could just publish the game ourselves and that the audience would simply find us. I pointed out, and rightfully so, that none of us knew a damn thing about user acquisition, advertising or public relations. We could make the best game anyone had ever seen, but if we didn't know how to get it in front of people, that wouldn't make any difference at all. He wasn't happy about it, but he agreed that my argument made a lot of sense, and the timeline of us being in feature lock by December, content lock by January, and then spending all of February and early March in a combination bug hunt/polish pass was aggressive, but it was doable.

The two artists we brought on were named Astoria and Kris. Kris was an excellent 2D artist, so I got him to work building all our 2D UI and gameplay assets. He wasn't all that comfortable with his 3D work yet, and I told him that was absolutely fine, because we had a shitload of 2D art that needed doing, and even if he was just doing that for the next year, we'd have plenty to keep him busy. By contrast, Astoria was one of the best texture artists I'd ever seen, and she was also a pretty good animator, although her sense of modelling needed a bit more developing. But it was the perfect fit for what I needed. I made the model, sent it to her, she painted and textured it, sent it back to me, I rigged it up and animated it and then dumped it into the game. During the point when I had spare time, I tweaked the camera, added visual effects and generally polished our look.

Early December was when we had our first, well, only real disaster, as it turned out, but it was a fucking doozy, because I remember exactly how mad I was when it happened.

On the first Friday in December, we'd gone out drinking to celebrate three months of me being with the company, and it felt like a nice little party where everyone was talking about how far we'd come. Rose and her partner, a guy named Dylan, were there, and Rose told me how glad she was that I'd sort of taken on the role of producer, since Marc had a tendency to get a little lost in his spreadsheets, tweaking and balancing numbers in hopes of making sure the gameplay landed the way it needed to. I told her that everything Marc was doing was vitally important, and that I was happy to do whatever it took for the five of us to get the project to the point where we could sell it to a publisher. GG laughed and asked how he could get another programmer on the project, and I promised him that as soon as we were greenlit by a publisher, getting a second coder on the game would be my number one priority. Marc asked if he could get someone else to help him in design, and I sort of laughed and joked that he would never want to share the responsibility of game design with anybody.

I hadn't meant the comment to be mean, but Marc took it that way, although I didn't know that until we came into the office Monday morning. Because the distance was so great, we were basically working remote two days each week, and only came into the offices on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday. I was on CalTrain commuting in when my cellphone started buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out, glancing at it, seeing GG's smiling face on the screen of my iPhone.

"Hey GG, what's up?"

"How far out are you?"

"We're at Milpitas right now, and I'm on a bullet, so I should be in the office within half an hour. Why? You sound angry."

"I'm fucking pissed, but there's no point in telling you about it now," he sighed. "I'll tell you about it when you get into the office. See you soon."

And then he hung up on me, leaving me to wonder what sort of nightmare I was heading in to find, but whatever I might have considered, I don't know that I would've thought of this one in a million years.

When I finally got in the office, I saw GG was the only person from our company in the colo space so far, although a couple of other studios had a handful of people in. They were all very intently focused on their own projects, headphones on, trying to be in a zone, or, more accurately, trying to avoid catching any of GG's excess wrath, because he was ready to burn the fucking building down. He wasn't just pissed; he was fuming with the anger of a thousand dying stars, in all his rainbow glory.

"That useless shitcunt!" he shouted, slamming his fist down onto the desk next to his keyboard, making his My Little Pony figures jump and fall over. "That's why he isn't here, you know! Because he knows if he walked through that fucking door right now, I'd take his nutsack and pull it up until I could wrap it around his neck and fucking strangle him with it!"

"Jesus, GG, what the fuck did Marc do, and how do we go about undoing it?" I said, placing a cup of coffee down in front of him, his exact order without him even asking, hoping it might placate the angered coder even for a moment.

"So you remember on Friday he was talking to us about implementing a rarity system for the mechs and monsters?"

"Yeah, he said we needed to have, like, five or six rarity tiers, and sell them in sealed packs, like collectible card games. I told him all that was monetization shit, and that it could wait until after we'd finished our vertical slice to show off at GDC," I said before closing my eyes, my hands balling up into fists. "He tried to implement it on his own, didn't he?"

"He did."

"And he fucked something else up in doing it, didn't he?"

"He very much did."

I sighed, looking down at the ground. "How bad is it?"

"Oh, he implemented his fucking rarity into the asset database. He just assigned it to a slot that was already holding data."

"And the old data?"

"Was erased."

"And he forgot to branch his changes?"

"He overwrote the backups with his changes."

My fists clenched even tighter. "What data did he erase?"

"The animation database."

GG was lucky he was quick on the draw, because he scooped up his cup of coffee just a fraction of a second before I brought my fist down onto his desk, making the whole thing jolt.

"So, GG, we're not entirely fucked, because I keep an offsite backup that's completely removed from all the systems, so we can roll the assets back to that one, but because we went to the party last Friday, I didn't back it up, so basically all the animation work I did last week just got lost, never to return, and I'll have to do it all over again. Thankfully, I don't have to go back down to San Jose to get it, because I was going to back it up this morning when I got in."

"This is the kind of shit he used to pull on Maria, you know?" GG said, as I handed him the flash drive I was using to keep my back up on. "I thought you and Rose said you had a way to make sure this didn't happen anymore."

"I told Rose this was going to happen, but she assured me Marc had learned his lesson and that he wasn't going to go about pulling this kind of shit now that I was around," I grumbled. "Okay, look, this is going to cause some waves, but right now, I don't fucking care. Remove his access to commit changes on his own. Everything he wants to check in or out of the dev environment goes through you from now on."

"For how long?"

"At least until we're past GDC," I said, moving over to my desk. "I didn't want to treat him like a fucking child, but if he can't be trusted not to act like one, then we're going to do what we have to in order to protect ourselves from his fucking incompetence. And I need to go and make a phone call to Rose, see if she's really got a way to reign her brother in or if we're wasting our fucking time. How long will it take you to get all the assets from my back up into our code?"

"An hour or two, tops. Thank God you made a backup."

"Yeah, well, I made it clear that I didn't trust Marc when I got here," I said, turning on my PC. "Now you know why. You get us back up and running, get Marc's access revoked and hopefully by the time all that's done, I'll be off the phone with Rose."

I stepped into the meeting room that the colo space had and closed the door. Then I slammed my foot into the brick wall about as hard as I could. Once I'd cooled down a little, I called Rose, who picked up immediately.

"Tell me you can get him in check, Rose, or I am walking. God help me, I am walking off this project and leaving you holding the fucking bag!"

"Whoa! Easy, Raf! What happened?"

Over the next few minutes, I explained to her that her brother's carelessness had just cost me a week's worth of work, and if I hadn't been so overly cautious and paranoid, he would've probably borked the entire fucking project because he wanted to try and sneak in a feature even when I'd told him it could wait.

She was, understandably, just as mad as I was.

I told her that this was exactly the sort of disaster I didn't want to have happening, and was the reason why I'd been so apprehensive about working with her brother. She told me that she was coming into our office and that she, Marc, GG and I would have a meeting as soon as we were all in.

Just as she hung up on me, even through the thick walls of the conference room, I could hear GG shouting. "Don't fucking start with me, flapdick!" he yelled. "You're so fucking lucky that Raf's thinking ahead, otherwise you would've killed this whole fucking project!"

I stepped out of the conference room and shook my head, as Marc looked at me with an expression somewhere between embarrassment and frustration. "If we didn't put this in..."

"Then what Marc? We're completely unprepared to ship as it is! Monetization is a fine thing for us to implement... as a team! Later! When we've got a fully functional game we can show off, then maybe we can start worrying about how it'll make money. But you nearly prevented us from being ready for GDC! Even with me having a backup, we're still going to be losing a week's worth of my time that could've been spent implementing things or polishing things, just because you couldn't be patient and had to do the things now!"

Twenty minutes later, Rose was in the office and the four of us went to sit in the conference room, while Astoria was getting started on reimplementing some of the things she'd seen me do last week, knowing that since our workflow was temporarily broken, helping out wherever she could would be better than twiddling her fingers waiting for directions.

It turned out that Marc hadn't realized quite how badly he'd screwed up, not understanding that his sloppy work could've easily undone the entire project until it was explained to him. GG did it, because I was still fuming mad, and Rose looked like she wanted to beat him about the head with her umbrella. He'd thought he'd just implemented the feature without realizing that he'd overwritten existing data, because he didn't understand GG's filetree properly. Once he did, he was mortified, but still somehow adamant that if we would simply implement more of his feature requests, things would go along better.

That was the point where Rose laid into him, telling him that since he hadn't been able to stick to a schedule, she'd heard from GG that I had laid one out, and that we were sticking to it, and that meant I was also the goddamn producer on the game, and my decisions on the project were final, and that if he didn't like it, he could be removed from the project. As it turned out, Marc hadn't read the founding papers for the studio closely, and didn't realize that everything he'd done in terms of game design was owned by the studio, and since GG and I each controlled 30% and Rose controlled 10%, if both GG and I agreed he couldn't get his shit together, we could simply terminate his employment by the studio and get another designer. I think that scared the crap out of him.