As you may have noticed, my career focus has shifted recently, and returned to where it was when I got started in this business. When I saw movies like TRON and The Last Starfighter, I knew I wanted to get in to computer graphics. Back in those days, they were just making their way into films, and I saw how amazing they could become. So I applied and was accepted to the Computer Science degree program at the University of Southern California.
When I got there in the fall of 1986, the degree program was still completely focused on the Engineering side of things – there was nothing available to learn the CG effects stuff I was truly interested in. So I changed tactics and came at it from the design side, switching majors to Fine Arts with an emphasis on graphic design. I kept current with trends in the computer field while developing my skills in the more traditional arts.
After two years, I took some time off from school to work as a graphic artist for a local print shop, Panda Printing. When I came in for the initial interview, they handed me a business card to reproduce,and I did it on sight – I knew the program (Pagemaker), I recognized the font (Avante Garde), and gauged the font sizes and layouts by eye – only needed some minor tweaks in Pagemaker. The whole repro process took about three minutes. The owners were noticeably impressed, and hired me on the spot.
I worked for Panda for a few years, then returned to art school. By that time, Macs were beginning to enter the classrooms and I registered for every class I could. However, due to my two years’ experience in the field, I often had more experience in the programs than the instructors did. Invariably, I would complete the assignments right away and then spend the rest of the classes helping other students learn how to use them. This was probably my first “real” experience teaching, and I enjoyed it.
USC was starting to offer classes in computer animation in the film school, but I had already put so much time and effort into my degree by that point, it wasn’t practical for me to change majors again. I was already pushing the financial limits with my schooling and I didn’t think I could ask my family to support me in a degree change at that point.
I moved to Colorado in 1993 with the intent of finishing my undergrad degree (I had one English class left) and pursuing a Masters in Computer Science. I worked a range of jobs, mostly in design, before landing in what remains my favorite job I’ve had so far – with the Interactive Television Network (iTV). iTV was a great concept that was a few years too early – we developed games that were broadcast on cable television that people could call in and play with their touch-tone phones. I was hired as a video editor and quickly transitioned to doing game art, animation, game design, and game audio. It was a great job with a great group of people, and I was extremely disappointed when our funding dried up and that company closed.
Around this time, I was connected to the people at Alterian Studios, who were looking for someone to do some CGI for a film they were doing – “Invader”, renamed to “Life Form”. I was contracted to design and animate NASA computer screens for them. I created the individual frames in Photoshop and hand-animated them in Premiere, ultimately creating about 6 minutes of loopable footage. For those who don’t know, there are 24 frames per second in film animation – I did it “on threes”, meaning 1/3 of the frames needed – I created about 2000 frames by hand for the project. And I became a credited special effects artist! Happy days. 🙂
The internet was just coming mainstream at this point, about 1999. I had been online since the early 80s and saw the potential of the World Wide Web. Then it happened: I started seeing Toyota commercials ending with http://www.toyota.com a lot. That was the trigger, the inflection point for me, and I knew the web was going to be a game changer. I doubled down my efforts, got back into coding, completed my undergraduate degree, and did everything I could to get a job as a web developer. The time was right, the web was hot, and I needed work experience more than I needed a Masters degree. Then, while supporting my buddies at Robot Wars in San Francisco, I got the job offer from Rocky Mountain Internet, and my dev career took off.
I had worked for RMI for a couple years, building my rep as a humble rockstar developer, when the dot boom hit. Suddenly, I was inundated with offers from all sorts of companies, for substantially more than I was making at RMI and the promise of hitting the jackpot with stock options. I went for it, hopping around from startup to startup for a few years, trying to find that home run. It never happened.
I gradually learned not to chase the money and empty promises, and took what I thought would be a safe, secure job, with Qwest Digital Media – a subsidiary of Qwest Communications, now CenturyLink. I had a good corporate job at an established company with big corporation backing. Then the CEO of Qwest came under investigation for insider trading and Qwest shut down our profitable Digital Media arm. I suspect it was shut down mainly to get some sort of bounce back in the Qwest stock price, which had dropped 50% when the CEO scandal was revealed. This taught me that safe, secure, corporate jobs can go away too.
I started my own dev shop, Kamikaze Designs, and had some success working with my Project Manager girlfriend, but neither of us were strong in sales, so when our clients ran out of work, so did we. I took other dev jobs at companies for a while before being hired by my friend and former boss Jim, the CTO at Cdigix.
I was employee number three at Cdigix, brought on as a web developer, and we had a good product. Cdigix initially provided video-on-demand services to colleges and universities, added a music download service in the early days when iTunes was just getting started, and then there was my baby: cLabs. cLabs was a Content Management System for course content. Professors could upload content, mostly videos, for students to watch, and I developed the core system to manage content and track usage. Investors were interested. I believe cLabs was key in helping Cdigix grow from a small startup of four people serving three universities, to a venture-funded corporation serving about 100 colleges and universities. cLabs was a hit with the colleges, and may be my greatest professional accomplishment to date. (Although I am still partial to the special effects I did for Invader.) The company secured substantial funding and with the new investors came a new executive team, some big names from Seattle. They decided Denver wasn’t hip or techie enough and relocated the company to expensive offices in Seattle. They wooed the original team with trips, fancy dinners, team-building outings, and the like in attempts to get us to move to Seattle too. Some did, I did not. I did not have faith that the new leadership recognized the true potential of Cdigix, they were focusing their efforts on the music space, and I knew Apple’s iTunes was going to make our system obsolete. If they were intent on focusing on cLabs, I would have seriously considered making the move. Sure enough, the company went bankrupt a year later. Glad I stayed put.
In 2014, I started Otaku Ventures to do web dev, graphics, social media, marketing, and game dev. I had some good clients, but the work was sporadic. I was still learning to go out and sell myself, my company, my services. I was offered a UI dev job at Cliintel, a big data analytics firm doing some serious business intelligence for a big cable client, and I jumped on that chance. I worked their for almost a year before the client decided to pull the work we were doing for them in-house, and my position was eliminated. Back to the grind.
While working on building my network and seeking opportunities, I came across some amazing footage hyping the Oculus, Vive and other Virtual Reality (VR) technology. It clicked. I think VR is going to be another global paradigm shift – the way the web was, the way mobile was to web, VR is the next evolution. It’s early days still, and we’re just at the beginning of the growth bell curve: the early adopters and techies will get in this year, when the costs are still pretty high. There are big companies pushing the tech already and a lot of marketing money is going into the space. It may be five years before VR becomes prevalent and mainstream, but I want to be there when it hits that point.
So how do I go about doing that? Right now, the closest analog is game development. Where else can one build immersive, interactive environments? I started digging and quickly discovered signal number two: most of the top-end game dev engines are now free for personal or small business use! Part of the reason I didn’t pursue this direction in the past was that the barriers to entry were prohibitively high – the software I need to learn was expensive (several thousand dollars), the classes I could take to learn the software were few, far between, and also expensive, and there weren’t a lot of job opportunities available even if I was qualified.
When I saw two of the hottest game engines – Unity 3D and Unreal were now free, my heart leapt. This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for! I spent the night downloading, installing, registering, and configuring the engines. Then I started looking for tutorials, first on their respective sites, then YouTube, then looking into online courses. I discovered several courses at Coursera that looked to be great fits. They are reasonably priced at $80 each, and offer certificates upon completion. I regged for two of them – Game Design from CalArts, and Game Development (with Unity) from Michigan State University, a leading school in the industry. I started watching the lectures right away and they resonated with me – the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn, the happier I became. This is what I was meant to do.
I started reaching out through social media, expanding my network to the game design and development arena. I reached out to my friend Linda, who has been doing CGI work for the film industry for two decades, with many popular animated film credits, to see if she’d be interested in talking shop and possibly being a peer mentor. She responded positively, and we’re going to set something up next week.
As I was digging through my files, looking for portfolio material, I came across an old game concept that a friend and I threw together in a day back in 2010 – Acorns. To my surprise, it still works, for the most part. (The audio does not.) I threw a copy up on the Otaku site – you can check it out here: Acorns Game 🙂
I went to Meetup to find more creative professional and game dev groups in the area and discovered several. I went to the Denver Creative Tech one on Thursday night, which was a great generalized group. And I found the Colorado independent Game Developers Association (CiGDA) which seemed to be perfect, and I went to their Northside meetup last night. I met a great group of guys, made some promising connections, and am excited at the opportunities that may arise because of it. I’m also going to their Southside event on Wednesday – it’s a smaller group, but it’s more local, and who knows what will come from that? It’s all good.
So I’m very happy to say that my efforts are paying off. I’m loving what I’m doing again, have some great ideas that I can’t wait to build out, I’m making great connections, and the future looks bright! If you have any suggestions or know anyone that I should connect with, please let me know. Game on!
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I watched it hit an ATH first thing in the morning at 18.15 and sat back to see what developed. The previous three ATHs had been followed by big selloffs, and I was looking (hoping) history would repeat. With earnings being reported next week, it did not. Hope is not a strategy. 😉
