Today I saw our developer support team install a giant television in our hallway. In a company where you literally have to go to the bathroom to escape a television monitor, this is hardly noteworthy. What is noteworthy is that this TV is connected to some magical folder somewhere in the building where people can drop video clips that will automatically be added to the "loop" that this television displays. The entire tech team is now focused on hacking into this folder to replace the current game clips with more appropriate "wang" clips...but I digress.
Ask yourself, when did IT at your company throw something like this together in their spare time for the pleasure of the company? My experience with IT at other companies has traditionally been a group of people who may or may not fix your outlook inbox after you "accidentally" get it filled with spam for various pills and mail-order partners. I mean this with all sincerity, our game would NOT ship at the quality we have without our awesome IT staff. In fact, we found calling them that to be so inadequate for their duties that we refer to them, justly so, as "developer support."
On top of the lightning fast response time (we are talking minutes) to any issue we may have, I'd like to present a list of the things these guys and girls do that makes a producer's life infinitely easier.
* Today we had a 10 minute meeting to discuss our options for storing priceless game data that we have never dealt with before. 10 minutes...and it is solved. I didn't have to call people, get quotes, follow up...nothing. It is solved. I've had multi-day meetings with people on my own team where we literally can't decide where to go to lunch, let alone build a server infrastructure for huge volumes of data.
* Prior to this game, bug tracking was done in excel and on a twiki. Think of that for a second. Is your mind as blown as mine? Within a week of asking, we literally had a fully working and configured issue system that was personalized for our workflow. Every time we want a new feature or upgrade, it just magically happens. Thanks to this team, we now have an automated way to ignore feature requests from artists...we no longer have to manually delete them from a document.
* We have dozens upon dozens of custom buildbots that check everything from build stability to performance and memory. We have custom scripts for perforce check-ins and reviews. We have websites with charts and graphs for all this stuff. The tech team adds fancy new tools every damn week...and somehow it magically appears the very same day on a server that never dies. God knows we try to make these things explode...can't do it.
* Configuring devkits and updating SDKs is hardly a task for standard IT. Our guys can do it blindfolded. Note: Tomorrow I'm going to make them try this.
* Want a 100% secure remote Perforce depot to China the same day you ask? Our guys have done it. How about running an automated installation and upgrade system for a local "art tool" via the web to some friends in Canada? Done. Are you SO concerned about security that you need a system that uses a one time use key to encrypt data? We've been.
Frankly, this is the "easy stuff." You can't imagine the strange and obscure needs a team full of tech-savvy game developers has. When it is "crunch time" and someone needs a local proxy to some other team's depot, every second can count. Frankly, even though they are on call 24 hours a day, we've never once had to abuse this, since the team always seems to be here when we are...and we work some pretty crazy hours.
Despite all of this, they still find time for our "fun" requests to keep morale high like the "Wang TV." The tech team wants to make a podcast. Not content with poor quality audio, and wanting to make us look good, Developer Support is using spare parts, dusty licenses, and duct tape to put together a pro-tools enabled Mac just for us.
In summation: Lupe, Ryan, Steve, Calvin, C-Bass, Jen...Thank you!
Also, Happy Birthday Mom!
Also, Calvin is wicked good in the post.
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