12.30.08
Vin Dazzle
Last night was a pretty nice night. My friend Woody drove up to Glendale and after making fun of Thomas Kinkade for a while, we walked over to the Chinese place near my house, where the lady taking our order greeted us nicely, and then her eyes widened and she greeted me again more enthusiastically because she recognized me from the handful of times I’ve stopped in for sit-down dinners or carry-out over the last several months. Funny.
Bret was able to join us over at my apartment a bit later, knocking on my door as I was in the middle of showing Woody an epic battle (har) on the Suspense map in Unreal Tournament 3. It was actually a little bit hilariously depressing to say, “Oh, and there used to be this big gap in the rocks and rooftop here, and then they fixed it, and I –” and then I would fly over this spot in the Raptor, and those gaps were still there, glaringly obvious. “Haha!” I would laugh, in a weird sense of anti-triumph, “I totally bugged that!”
“And they didn’t fix it?” Woody asked incredulously.
“I … thought they did?” I replied, and I actually furrowed my brow, because suddenly, it felt like Backwards Day. I know I bugged it, because it was ‘my’ map, but that was back when we were testing for two other platforms that were not the 360. Is it possible that they regressed to an earlier build, or re-tweaked something that caused an old bug to re-occur? Quite possibly!
“You know,” said Woody, “when I play games and see stuff like that, I think, ‘why didn’t their test team catch that and fix it?’ – and now I know that they probably did!” I nodded and laughed. The development process for any game is a labyrinthine twine ball of esoteric progress. The only way over is through, but only every other Tuesday that falls on a full moon. The job gets done, but by the skin of our teeth. Etc.
I ran him through a bunch of maps, telling him funny stories about the stuff that used to be broken or completely different, scenery-wise: “See, this map did not have mountainous bookends to it. There used to be buildings here, and a long concrete tunnel, and a bunch of trees. But it was too much, the LOD would flicker in and out, and so they just made it all rock.”
“Oh, and this mesh here? Didn’t use to have collision on it. I would bug it, and then have everybody play a deathmatch with me. I’d get the Rocket Launcher, hide in this wall here, and point the tip of the weapon right at the outside edge of the wall and wait for dudes to run by.”
And then I’d catch myself, “Dude, I must be boring you. This must be insanely yawn-inducing.” Woody turned to me, looking a tiny bit like a kid on Christmas morning. “No! Actually, this is really fascinating!”
That was an awesome feeling, right there.
So Bret and Woody and I had brownies warmed up in the microwave, with mint chocolate chip ice cream over them, and we played Rock Band until far too late, when they had to head back to their respective homes for some shut-eye before work the next day. Me, I just gamely shrugged, and figured I’d sleep until whenever and then work on the old resume, or get rid of more stuff.
Which I did do, but under a miasma of weird sadness brought on by the fact that I really haven’t had a lot of social time like I did last night, and it was really nice and I forgot how much I just missed hanging out with a few people at a time, talking our heads off and playing some game. It’s just been too crazy in my immediate universe to have enough basic social contact since the moment I first decided I was going to pack up my entire life and go live somewhere entirely new and truly begin my career in the gaming industry.
And that, my friends, was back in February of 2007. Yikes.