This, and the whole Shovelware Mine series, is a repost from cohost
If you missed my first post about how I got my job at Data Design Interactive, you can read that here.
Before I get into more of my experiences, I should probably give some backstory on Data Design Interactive (or just DDI). It was a British game studio founded in the 1980s. They released a few games over the years, most of which received average to mediocre reviews, but nothing particularly noteworthy. That was until the Nintendo Wii came around. At that point they shifted from decently produced games to churning out heaps of shovelware - basically prioritizing the quantity of games released, rather than quality, resulting in a ton of really awful games such as Anubis II. They quickly become infamous for this among the gaming industry and communities.
For a few years this strategy worked well enough that they were able to open an office in Sarasota, Florida. By 2010 though, they had run out of steam and closed the office in the UK. This is where I came into the picture as a junior programmer.
With my tenure of a single day, I was given my first assignment. A client in Italy was requesting a version of Kidz Sports International Soccer that they were going to use in an arcade cabinet. The cabinet was basically just a Windows PC with all controls mapped to keyboard inputs, so there wasn't a whole lot that needed to be done. Most of the changes were primarily UI-based, like adding a high score table. Karl, the lead programmer and only other person in the office regularly got me up to speed on the build system and I was off to the races.
DDI really prided itself on its in-house engine called GODS. I think it officially stood for "Game Object Development System", or something generic like that. It was written primarily in C and used a rat's nest of IFDEF blocks to allow for compiling to Win32, Wii, Playstation 2 and Xbox. Compiling for other architectures was actually pretty smooth, so I can't fault it too harshly there. What I probably can fault it for it the bizarre markup language used for handling the UI. I don't want to get too technical here, so I'll just say that most of the UI code lived in a single file that was about 20,000 lines long.
After 2 or 3 days I had gotten a handle on the system and finished the requested changes, got a build setup, sent it to Stewart Green (the CEO) to pass along to the client, and went home with my head held high. The next day Stewart calls me over and shows me an email from the client. It turns out the high score screen breaks if you do X and Y first. He then starts to go on a spiel about how products going out to clients needs to be properly tested first. Bugs will make the company look bad, after all. Back during the interview for the job, he mentioned something about "helping with many different areas of game development", to which I obliviously nodded and said "Sure!". This is when I realized what he meant by that. I would need to be my own QA tester, among other things.
As I said before, it was just me, Karl and Stewart in the office, but Stewart, being exclusively a businessman, would often be out of the office for long stretches doing "business" things, leaving just me and Karl most of the day. Karl was a legitimately cool guy - casual, good sense of humor, very good programmer. I'm pretty sure he's gay too. After a few weeks, though, the office situation changed. One day, a man who I can only describe as a Tommy Wiseau look-a-like walked into the office. Stewart got up and introduced him to Karl and me. I can't even begin to remember his name so I'll just call him Tommy, but he was apparently a music producer who would be sharing the office with us. Keep in mind this was a roughly 20 foot by 30 foot studio that would now be housing two businesses.
Tommy setup his desk by the door the following day. It was an awkward day. Yet another day later, Stewart had called in some people to build some walls to keep things separate. Separate how? One end of the room had been blocked off and split down the middle, creating two small, private offices for Stewart and Tommy.
Anyway, the big question was how were we supposed to actually make games with just 2 programmers? First off, Stewart's daughter was supposedly an artist that helped with some assets, but more substantially, most creative work such as music, animation, 2d art, etc, would be contracted out. "That sounds completely untenable!" I can hear you say. The way this was viable is that... we weren't making any games. At least not any new ones.The newest game DDI released was My Personal Golf Trainer (there's a lot to say about that later) on the Wii back in 2009, and no new games had been started since then. The focus was entirely on supporting and re-releasing existing games. If the writing on the wall for DDI wasn't clear on day 1, it absolutely was when I realized this.
