The Caffeinated Coder

WARNING - There are some mild spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide in this post. Read with caution! The Beginner’s Guide has certainly thrown everyone for a loop since its release. Many pieces on it have been somewhat vague at best, mostly due to the almost paradoxical message it communicates. At its core though, I believe the Beginners Guide to be an exploration of how we value ourselves and those around us. Something that concerns both the creator and the consumer.

Value is a fairly complex concept. It’s used to define what is most important to us, and to other people. It helps us compare, contrast, calculate and ascertain. The value we place on each other, ourselves, and our creations is at the core of the dialogue within the frame of the Beginner’s Guide. It’s clear the stance of valuing one’s self through the eyes of others is one the Beginner’s Guide is trying to drive home, going so far as to call it a ‘disease’ of some kind. And while the narrator certainly comes to this conclusion, I believe the piece’s ultimate goal is to directly ask the player: what do you value?

While the game may appear to revolve around a personal story, the final scenes reveal the Beginner’s Guide to be more about self-reflection. As the player moves through the last few levels, it gives them time to contemplate the piece as a whole. The seemingly never-ending maze within the final moment of the game serves as a meditation on the ideas at play, on their depth and complexity, ideas that encompass both genres and mediums alike.

We would like to think that we don’t take any outside opinion when it comes to valuing ourselves, but this would be untrue. Humans are built to observe their social environment, and make judgements based on those surroundings. As such, we always seek confirmation from our peers as a survival technique. When I finished the Beginner’s Guide, I was, as the narrator puts it, almost in a state of illness. I saw myself pawing over my multitude of attempts at approval. Not even specifically from my peers, but from everyone.

So, I’m obsessed with Bloodborne.

While it’s certainly due in part to the addicting combat, and my devotion to mastering it’s many nuances, in the end the biggest draw overall has been the world itself. From the minute I took that first frightened step out into the decrepit, sprawling city of Yharnam, I was just overwhelmed. Every single piece of information being conveyed within that moment, through the texture work, the lighting, the audio (my god, that audio); all working in such coherence.

And that’s really the crux of what I believe to be one of Bloodborne’s biggest strengths. Coherence. If you take a step back, the actual aesthetic style doesn’t really stray too far from the gothic horror tropes we’ve seen in many other games. Yet despite being mired in this, Bloodborne understands the theme to such a heightened degree, that it transcends what other games have attempted in expressing that theme.

I’ve had many moments within the game where I have simply stood still. Slowly panning the camera; revealing the multitude of ominous parapets and spires, overshadowed by the ever present blood-red moon. Murmurs, scuttling, biting noises can be heard from the streets around me, and the looming chime of a distant clock echoes throughout, signaling the new hour.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since GDC, and I’m still attempting to get back into the swing of things. The Playtest This podcast is coming along at a good pace. We’ve got our first guest speaker coming in this week, the second episode is getting relatively close to completion (despite my non-existant skills in audio production), and I feel as though we’re slowly but surely figuring out a format the works for us.

I’ve been lazily working away at my fulltime job. I say lazily, just because the CEOs are currently away in Europe trying to sell the products we hit feature-completion on a week or so ago, and it’s left me with little in the way of hefty project work. That said, it has given us the time to do some major refactoring, which is usually difficult to find during production. Silver-linings I guess.

Also made some decent progress on City Stacker, which is the working title of the puzzle game I’m developing. I’ve been somewhat taking liberties with the system design that I drew up a little while ago, just as a result of some unforeseen issues I came across. All all in all though, it’s coming along at a good click, and I’m hoping to have it ready for preliminary play testing relatively soon.

With the dust beginning to settle from my first GDC experience, I've begun to process what exactly happened over the last week or so. A lot of hand shaking, meeting new people, meeting old friends, listening to developers express their ideas and thoughts etc.. Yet within all that, I'm bombarded with the same question which I feel most of us now have: What now?

I can't go back to before GDC; where none of these now present possibilities/questions existed, I have to take some kind of action. 

But I'm really scared. 

Not necessarily of the potential for failure, although that's certainly part of it. No, I'm more terrified of the other more complex questions that I need to answer for myself.

What is important to me? What is success to me? What impact do I want to make? What is it I want to be?

I think it's going to take a while before I can genuinely answer these questions. In the mean time, I guess all I can really do is be reflective, receptive and above all, grateful for the opportunities I have and the support of the people that surround me.

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Girls Make Games presentation a couple of weeks ago. While I can’t say for certain what the exact mission statement was, from what I could ascertain it was all about getting girls engaged with game development at a young age; with the hope that they pursue it as a career in the future. This all being in aid of, what I assume to be, the tech industry’s prevailing issue with diversity.

There are quite a few programs like this out there that try to resolve this problem; usually attempting to enroll the minority groups at different stages of their education/development by exposing them to various aspects of the industry. It’s great to see this kind of effort, yet there is one particular aspect of which I feel gets overlooked. The individual thoughts and opinions of the minority groups.

When I was listening to the girls giving their presentations about the games they had created, I was waiting for that moment when they would express what their opinion on game development was going forward. And while a few girls did express this (if only briefly), for the most part the event was more about what they had accomplished within the weekend, and not so much about what the program had done (or not done) for them on a personal level in relation to working in technology.

Some of my most treasured experiences in software development has been in the moments where I discover a narrative. While this can take the usual form of early listening to an older developer rant about the days of punch cards and 'rubber-band compilation', I find many show themselves in more overt fashions.

Recently I have been looking over a PHP project that has been in development for a few years now; worked on by a few different developers with differing backgrounds. Delving into any project written by another developer, let alone many, is always a daunting task. While standards exist within any developer community, there are always differences (some quite subtle) in the styling and structure.

Yet it's within those differences that you find these stories. You see the developer desperately working at 3am in the morning; cobbling together the last pieces of a UI system. You see the initial excitement that comes with any new project within the README's overly detailed description. You see the struggle within the comments of someone trying to understand this random collection of statements and operations.

I relish in the discovery of these stories. I imagine it being akin to scouring the ruins of an ancient civilisation; feeling initially disconnected from the former inhabitants, until that eureka moment where you feel that tinge of connection across time and space.

I've been in the process of learning Japanese for the past 6 or so months now. It's been quite an interesting experience to say the least. Japanese is a language so far removed from English (albeit with some similarities), that making the necessary shifts in literary structure, pronunciation etc. have been quite a challenge.

Initially I began learning as a way of exploring other cultures. Having travelled around Europe for a month or so last year, I was astonished at how so many diverse cultures were packed into such a small continent. Not only that, but the amount of effort the residents affording to learning each other's languages, traditions and practises, was admittedly quite staggering. A fairly sobering reminder of how inward thinking we can be as a western culture.

Some of the most eye-opening moments during my time as a novice speaker of Japanese, have been in the 'conversations' with native  speakers. I use those quotation marks, not as a stab at the speakers, but at my own fumbled attempts. Trying desperately to construct a sentence while the listener waits to hear, what will undoubtedly be a question regarding where my pants are, has been humbling to say the least.

I believe we as a predominantly white society forget all to often that feeling of being on the outside; of being uncomfortable. A privilege that, funnily enough, isn't even predicated on a majority. We need to feel uncomfortable; to be wrong, to mess up, to have people tell us that we're wrong, if we're ever going to better understand each other and ourselves.

I admit that I'm not a particularly consistent reader. That's mostly the result of how slow I can read; inevitably resulting in the whole process feeling way more tedious that it should be. That pace at which at consume literature is really born out of a need to pick up on every detail. In the back of my head I always wonder if there is some hidden meaning within the kerning, and that if I were to miss that detail I would be doing myself a great disservice.

Given the many forms in which a piece of fiction/non-fiction can take, this notion that every work needs to be put under such a scrupulous microscope is kind of silly on the face of it. While it's certainly true that the structures of say Crime novels rely heavily on the minutiae, other popular constructions otherwise rely on the reader being more in tune with the broad strokes being painted.

Take Heart of Darkness. If you were to focus on the granular tidbits of Marlow's often fragmented tale, it would be easy to miss the overarching themes of humanity, madness and reality. I'm sure the Congo's vegetation was as decrepit and uninviting as you so heavily explained Marlow, but I  wonder if that focus on the inconsequential wasn't just a sign of you desperately trying to forget the more complex and confronting facts. As a literary friend of my succinctly put, it's really a matter of 'seeing the forest for the trees'.

A few years ago when I was neck-deep in contract work, I always wanted to make more of an effort to attend developer meet ups in Melbourne. I'd always kick myself whenever I put off going. I mean, why would I go and talk about code when I could be coding! Nevertheless I always wanted to attend them; if only to see what new ideas I could extract from the people I would meet.

Having now landed a steady (and less stressful) job at LOKE Digital, I found myself attending more and more meet ups; made all the easier with having coworkers to go with. Having now been to a few (including MelbJS and  Cocoa Heads) however, I find myself more often than not walking away from them somewhat dissatisfied. 

This isn't to say that the people were awful, or that the speakers were weak in their presentation, or even that there wasn't enough alcoholic beverages to go around. It was more that I found the topics discussed to be somewhat limited in their scope. Specifically, most of the discussions seem to revolve around the tools we use; showing samples, running through demos, or live coding demonstrations (heaven forbid).

While these kinds of conversations are certainly useful in their own right, I feel there is a significant lack of discussion regarding the more high level concepts we face as software developers. How should our requirements be dictated? What challenges do we face when it comes to communicating with different departments? What impact will a particular development pipeline have on our team?

Not only do I feel these discussions to be lacking, but they are so universally fundamental to how effective we are as developers. It doesn't matter what programming language you use, the conversation on communication is one that we can all relate to. And it's subjects such as communication that form the basis for everything we build, that any shortcomings can have catastrophic repercussions throughout an entire project, development team, or even a company.

Having not had much experience in good version branching practices, I found myself somewhat dubious when it came to properly versioning a large-scale project. Now that the product is quite a few months into development, I've been looking around for different methods that I hope will be more maintainable than what I'm currently using.

After a little bit of googling I found this article by Vincent Driessen; explaining a particular branching practice that he and his team uses. After having given it a read, I'm hoping to give it a shot in the next week or so to see if it suits the project's needs.

I've linked diagrammatic example of the model in question. Definitely worth a look if you're interested.