Latest Prototype

Here's the latest from Jinghui, just getting in the shape changing.

Many thanks for the work he's done on this, he had an internship in China the past few months and had to do this on his free time, thanks Jinghui!

Team Building and Creating a Culture

 

Have you ever been to one of those company sponsored, team building exercises at your work? The kind where you take off for a few hours to an offsite location, or a company is brought in that specializes in these type of activities? Your managers come into these with a little more enthusiasm than normal, as if they were ordered from their bosses to be more enthusiastic, or they just finished reading a manual or received a powerpoint presentation on how to be more enthusiastic. Often times they tell you at the beginning how excited they are to be there. The people running these activities are totally juiced to be there as well, as if they've found their callings in life, and that included putting you through one of their research-based, time-tested, life-altering team building exercises? Sometimes they have loud music playing, sometimes there are decorations, sometimes t-shirts are handed out. 

For these team building exercises, you usually divide up into groups and are given tasks to complete that make you feel and look really ridiculous, but should force you to work together to accomplish a goal. As you complete these tasks, I think the people who organized them expect you to bond with your fellow workers, and be inspired by what you can accomplish when you work together as a team. I think they hope you take the skills you learned in these exercises to follow you as you sit down at your desk the next day and punch in your tps reports.

The idea for these things seem to be born out of your company's management discussions around a long conference table, as managers seek ways to improve company morale, employee cooperation, and personal investment. It seems to be the first thing these managers and hr people reach for when trying to solve difficult problems within a company and workforce.

I'm currently working my way through Ed Catmull's new book Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, and it doesn't take too long into the book before you realize that Dr. Catmull is not one of these managers.

I've been impressed by the insight, the candor, and the perspective he shares with the readers into the culture and processes of the company he co-founded, Pixar as well as the one he now oversees at Disney Animation Studios.

What impresses me most about Catmull's book is the sincere desire he seems to have to analyze, diagnose, and solve the problems that exist within his own company. He recognizes the complexity of these situations, and the human natures that are creating that complexity, as well as how those human natures might be utilized and understood to solve the problems that are perplexing his company and culture. I don't' know if it's the result of his engineering and academic background, but he's able to present his thoughts and ideas in a way that is objective and refreshing, presenting the facts as almost self-evident.

I was able to personally meet and talk with Ed Catmull a year ago at the U, when he came in to view our game program and participate in some exercises we had planned for him and his engineering colleagues. In the short time I was able to talk and interact with him, I was impressed with his brilliance, humility, and the perspective with which he saw things. Immediately following our exercises with him and his group, he made a b-line to our professors and started to engage them on our program, and what he saw as common trappings and mistakes within creative endeavors. He started offering recommendations for our program as well as anecdotes from his experience at Pixar that would illustrate what he was talking about. I was impressed at the humility with which he approached this situation, and the urge he had to diagnose and offer help to those in charge of a very creative endeavor.

I don't make this post to review the book or offer my opinion about Dr. Catmull, although I have done both. Rather, I make this post because as I've worked on this project I've thought a lot about companies, cultures, teams and their leaders. I truly believe that the creation of a company and a culture is a highly creative endeavor. And I don't think we can make these things succeed in the long term unless we are willing to go through the tough and honest introspection that Catmull exhibits in this book, and even then, there's no guarantee. As I observe creative companies and organizations, it appears that rare is the individual who is aware and willing to perform the kind of self surgery needed to overcome the problems that exist in their companies. It's difficult to fault them in this however, because I think it's a very difficult thing to do. But it'd be nice to have more people that did so.

iOS design, movement, and development hang ups.

After thinking more about the movement of the player for iOS and how I want to keep things simple, I'm leaning toward the following design:

The player has constant movement. The circle moves the slowest, the square moves faster, and the triangle moves the fastest.

The left joystick will rotate the player and move him in that direction. He will only be able to shoot in the direction he's pointed. This has been my biggest hangup because I'd really like the player to be able to rotate the shooter independent of his direction. I think it's important to be able to move away from a shape that's chasing you but rotate your turret toward that shape so you can shoot him. This would work fine with console controllers that have 2 joysticks and trigger buttons, but for iOS I don't want the player to have to lift his finger off one of the joysticks to shoot.

I could be wrong, and it might not be that big a deal. I've also played with the idea of tilting the ipad to determine direction. That's definitely something I'll iterate on, but for now, I think I'll take a pass at the single joystick. Here's what the interface might look like:

  

This whole notion has revealed a major flaw and problem I'm running into with development of this game. I'm not iterating fast enough and frequently enough. It's really difficult to design this game and make any progress forward when the rapid prototyping phase is essentially non existent. I appreciate the support I've received so far from everyone working on it, but he lack of programming and technical support and resources has really hurt this process. Not having the ability to test and iterate on prototypes has really proven the value and importance of this process. 

I have a few ideas on how to fix this, and who I might be able to talk to, so hopefully this part of the development can move forward.