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mtmckinley

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Career Blog Part 15

Year 7 2006 (continued)

I hired a moving company to ship the majority of my stuff and I packed my car as much as it would fit and made my way. The trip took 3 days of constant driving! Drove through Texas, through New Mexico and Arizona, and into the Los Angeles area. Then started north all the way up California, through the mountains that separate the two states, and finally into Oregon. I made it on Sunday, the day before my job started! Took all day unpacking my car and getting that stuff set up. It'd take another week before the rest of my junk arrived.

The next day I officially began the day as a Buzz Monkey Software Environment Artist!

My first project was NFL Street 3. Now I'm not the biggest sports game fan (I like sports, just don't like sports games) so I didn't know what I would feel about it going in, but I came to realize that, while I didn't necessarily like the game, I DID enjoy working on it. My first task was to create one of the 8 "stadiums".

The NFL Street series was like a successor to NFL Blitz from the old arcade days. Smaller teams, limited rules, crazy tackles and acrobatics. Not "serious" football at all. So the stadium I worked on was a warehouse. The game would be on the floor of the warehouse with tall shelves of boxes and machinery all around.

I was nervous! The only projects I had worked on before that were fantasy, sci-fi, and more fantasy; so to do a "realistic" style was something I hadn't done in a while. But they gave me several weeks, and I learned a ton! In addition to creating the stadium, I had to also port it to the PSP version of the game as well, which meant creating a much lower poly, smaller texture memory version.

In one of my first few weeks working there, they had a ship party for completing work on Tomb Raider Legend. Even though I had nothing to do with that title, I was an employee, so of course I could attend. It was the first such part I had ever been to! NONE of the games I had worked on prior to this had ever shipped, so of course I never had a ship party! It was so great to see that, yes, it COULD be done! Everyone who was on that team all got these awesome decorative swords with the buzz monkey logo on the hilt and a good time was had by all.

The best thing I took from that party was the knowledge that at Buzz Monkey... games got made! But more importantly, games got FINISHED!

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