Over the last two and a half years, I’ve posted on this thing, 6 times; 4 of which are hidden test posts. I question as to why this is. I installed this silly blog thing. Though, honestly, I couldn’t talk about work at the time, it was all in flux, nothing was ever solid. But with Emergent Game Technologies on the auction block, I can take a moment and reflect on what I did in my time there.
At EGT I was a Technical Account Manager or TAM, also know as an Field Application Engineer or a Product Evangelist. Essentially the tech side to the sales team. The sales team would pump up the product and the TAM’s would attempt to bring it back to earth without contradicting the sales guy.
Just had to keep it real.
All this is well in good, but EGT sells Gamebryo, and Gamebryo is a programmer’s render engine. With me being a technically inclined artist in a role normally filled by a customer friendly programmer (just as rare as a good technical artist), I quickly found myself only mildly useful. Sure there were always art questions rolling in, even better because Maya has taken a large slab of the game market, so I had ways to fill my time.
Just not enough of it really. Slowly got bored over 2 years, money was good till I did some research. Decided to actually get my feet wet as a technical artist and moved on to a startup that had been working closely with Emergent, doing demos and such for them.
My time at KillSpace Entertainment was full of ups and downs. It’s a startup, so things are brutal, just they way it is. But the team was solid, kept on pushing forward making cool things. Which always gave me interesting problems to solve. In between rigging and VFX, I got a chance to really refresh in MEL, slipped in a good chunk of LUA, and even got rolling with some Python. The real gain though was validation: you don’t know what you don’t know, and often you don’t know what you do know until you’re put in a position that requires you to know.
Though, like I said though, it’s a startup, and things are tight. So once the majority of my work was done, I was let go. It’s all good though, wish the team and the company the best in these hard times. And I learned a quite a bit about myself,the industry, team dynamics, and my level of proficiency.
So, now I’m on the auction block. Taking a bit to slow down. If only for the holidays.
But while I wait by the phone and refresh my e-mail, I have a few things to keep me going: working through a Python scripted modular rigging tutorial thing, rigging some friends characters up, and I might just get some animation going.
I’ll also be posting up some of the video and docs I did for EGT and I saved all my videos from the pulse.emergent.net website, so those will be available in here soon.