Hello everyone and welcome back to another Firefly Studios video,
Aaron here back with another episode of Stronghold & Chill.
To that end I bought in Jack Massey, one of our Junior Programmers here at the studio.
You guys know the format: One of the developers from upstairs, I bring them down here, put them in what I call the
hot seat, it does actually get hot, don't worry, so we can get to know some of the
developers a little better, some game dev related, some just you know general life
questions. Jack, are you ready to get started?
I hope so.
Yes, I hope so too, Jack. Otherwise it's going to be a shit video.
While I set up my resolute castle defenses and have everybody comment
saying how shit they are, could you take us through what exactly you do here Firefly
Studios and your average day within the studio and what you'll get done in
every day, that sort of thing. In regards to what I do, so I program on one of our
lesser-known project, so I've been working on that basically since
inception, it's what I was hired for and I've been doing that time immemorial
basically. My main day-to-day is I'm a programmer I work with the Unity game
engine. For those who don't know what the Unity game engine is that's just a
a game engine much like Unreal and Frostbite, if you've ever heard of
those in the games industry it's kind of a similar kind of fish, but I spend my
day coding fun into games, so if if I'm told "hey we need a feature or it needs
to be fixed" it's usually either my fault or my responsibility to work that out, so
that's kind of my day-to-day just making sure things get fixed, things get implemented,
people have a lot of fun. That's what I do. I think that's something we can all
get behind. So during these interviews I like to do one of ones, so one
game development question and then one general life to know you. Yes, try
and understand the face behind the brunt code so to speak. Oh, that's a very good
way to say, I'll write that into the script. Let's jump into our second question and this is I think the
audience doesn't know this, one game I like to know this about another gamer,
what's your favorite game of all time? Well that is a difficult question as a
game developer I think most people in our studio have a broad palette
in terms of games, many just to kind of keep up with the industry like
everyone's like playing the latest games and that just to make sure, but I think
my favorite game of all time is I'm probably gonna say it's Dwarf Fortress in
all honesty. Which is quite interesting given Firefly's history of strategy games,
Dwarf Fortress does have elements of strategy whilst it doesn't have the pretty
UI and graphics of Stronghold, it's certainly playing towards those
elements and it's quite useful in forming decisions that I have in the
studio. Okay, so wait, just let me deconstruct
this answer first. Dwarf Fortress to my mind is that weird,I don't even
know how to explain it, it's like, I'll put an image on screen right now but,
isn't it text based?
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress is rendered in what's known as ASCII
based graphics, so for those who don't know ASCII is like an American standard
for punctuation symbols and various other symbology in keyboards. However
obviously I'm not that masochistic, I use what's called a tile set, so it loads
in a bunch of graphics for me, I'm not unfortunately so hardcore that I play without
the graphics, so there are options to add graphics to the game, I'm not
looking at @-symbols and brake slashes and all that for my
information, I'm actually looking at graphics, but obviously those have to be
modded in, they're not in the base game. To bring it back to game development,
just generally did you always want to be sort of a game developer or did young
Jack pick up a N64 and was like "I want to do this"? So some people in the audience may be
able to sympathise to this, but my parents really hated video games when I was a kid.
When I wanted a SNES or an N64 they were like "No, games are gonna rot
your brain blah blah blah" all that sort of stuff, so when I was like four
five six when I think a lot of my peers had a game system in their house
at some point, I was banned from it. The only time I got to play games was
at my mates houses, but I think ironically that led me to want to
be involved with games more. Originally it wasn't games, it was more science and
tech, it was in the same ballpark but then I realized as I was doing my
A-levels I was like "How can I get this degree into video games?" I was like okay,
maybe I should consider that as a career option instead. A lot of
people persuaded me against it because like "Oh you're never going to get a job
in that industry it's so hard", a lot of people say the same about TV as well, but
as long as you're willing to persist and go to the correct events...
People say that all the time, but some people get jobs in...
Yeah, someone needs to do the job.
Now that you're in the games industry, you're working on MetaMorph,
hopefully working on Stronghold in the future and you said you've
only been here a couple of years, but I still want to know you Jack, what's your
happiest memory while you've been at the studio? Not just in general, I'm not your therapist.
Therapy & Chill. I think it'd be our first Christmas party back in 2016. We met a man called The Ram
as he self-described and he was just great to
talk to. It wasn't just that, it was the entire
night of meeting or meeting all the developers, meeting the people in QA,
meeting some of the people from America, it was kind of like really eye-opening
to see how many people and how much effort goes into these games. We may
be a small company, but we know how to focus our efforts and I think
we're a talented bunch to say least. To counteract that, to sour that,
what was your worst? Oh worst memory. I think it would have been, it was actually
in my first four or five weeks so I just joined and I would not call myself
or I wouldn't have called myself a hotshot programmer, wherever I am
now is up for debate, but back then I was very new to the industry and extremely
nervous, because obviously big opportunity getting your first permanent
job, it's kind of a huge thing to be involved in and so they sent me out to,
not many people may know this, but we actually have part of our company in
America, and I was sent out there for the week to familiarize
myself with some of the other MetaMorph programmers, mainly Tony.
And I was asked "Hey. why don't you make the health circles underneath enemies
kind of have an animation so when you attack it flashes up white with the
amount they've lost and then in spills back in so you get the
flash away and it shrinks back into the next amount" and I was struggling with
this really badly. I've done something, I've broken it and
we're going to continue meeting, I was "Oh no, I haven't done it yet, I'm
there I'm panicking and then I go home and about halfway through my bath I
stand up and I realized what I've got to do, so the following morning I go and
fix it, but I was it was just the sheer panic of my first few weeks.
It was beginner nerves in away,
I'd say that was my worst memory so to speak but it's
now resolved and we've improved from there. Yeah, I feel anyone can
sympathize with that, or any new company there'S
always those weird awkward first few weeks where you put way too much
pressure on yourself. Now that we've sort of raided your
memories of Firefly, if somebody came up to you and said "I want to get to
where you are right now, your exact position", in other words what would
you say to a younger you who's trying to get to where you are? So I think
specifically to a younger me, there are a couple of things I'd probably say.
First of all, whilst there is it an imperative reason to
get into the industry it's cool and all that, don't crush yourself with the
pressure of getting in. There are a lot of things you can do, like going
to game jams, going to various industry events, so [???] who are
two of bigger people in the industry to hold a lot of events where you can
meet devs, so even students get like a student membership
with a lot of university courses, yeah. So if you're starting in games and
you've got that membership, take advantage of it, meet these people,
they may be your future bosses, they may be your future colleagues, definitely
worth meeting up and helping them. If you're a programmer specifically like I was
aiming to be, program. That's about as much as I can say. There are going to
be times where you struggle, you don't
get something and people are like "Oh, I got this immediately," they probably didn't,
they're lying to you, they probably spent a lot of time sitting
down, figuring out, but it's just sitting down and pushing yourself to it that
does apply to other areas as well, but I'm not an artist, I'm colorblind,
don't let me do art, I don't do music - I'm not musician, I'm basically
tone-deaf, so again, programming was the only thing that was left for me, so that's what I
decided to pursue, but I appreciate it as much as I could, so put a lot of
effort into it ,but don't crush yourself or the pressure of doing it can be very
easy to stress yourself out and go "Oh no, I don't think I've done everything
correctly" just try as hard as you can. Again, to reel back from that serious game dev
talk, we'll get to know a little bit more about your music taste, so could
you tell everybody what your favorite musician of all time is?
I'd say I don't have a favorite musician of all time. I'm being pedantic, I know.
Some people are like "Oh, just answer the question," but I don't know a
favorite musician all the time. Currently my favorite musician is however Childish Gambino,
I've been listening to 'This is America', I've been very late to that train.
But I've been listening to it on rotation,
it's kind of amazing, really really well done, this video.
So again flipping back to
gamedev, we're back in the land of the professionals. I know
while you've been here you might have worked on a few projects,
mainly MetaMorph - Now on Steam, Early Access - but could you name us your
favorite Firefly title if you had one? So I actually, prior to my interview at
Firefly I bought a bunch of the games and started playing through them, I
think I do think Crusader HD is one of my more favorite games. I think
the thematicism of it, you're
talking about the Crusades and that is kind of quite a big portion of religious
history and it's quite interesting from that point of view, so that's kind of the
answer I'd go to. I mean really, this will shock a lot
of people, I'm an Age of Empires fan. We share the love. Every gamer
loves to know this about another gamer, what's your highest number of hours
played in any game ever? Can be with the Steam hours, pre-Steam, it can be an
estimate. This is I would like to say embarrassing, well I'm also proud of
it. Anyway, this actually came up as a conversation in the studio
a little while ago because we were talking about games and people talking
how much time they'd spend in Overwatch and so me and one of the team members
Andy started talking about MMO's. Now, I'm gonna reveal this, I played a lot of
Warcraft between the ages of 11 to 23, so a good 12-13 years, and I
recently went back for the recent expansion, so I had I actually had a good
chance to check recently. In the recent expansion I have put in, there are 24
hours a day, I put in 16 days. That's about 380 hours in the recent expansion,
give or take. Over the lifetime across all my characters I've put in, I want to
say close to 8500 hours, give or take,
into World of Warcraft. Which is both impressive and depressing at the same time,
considering some people use that time to get a PhD.
Losers. So we'll finish with this question: What are you doing at the end of this interview, Jack?
Oh, that's difficult. it is Friday night, I'm half tempted to go down to the pub,
but seeing as we'll still be at work I'll probably be working on what I'm
working on at the moment, with the intentions to possibly go to the pub
afterwards. So now that we've glimpsed into Jack's life, learned that he's an alcoholic...
I'm joking, I'm kidding. ... and the siege has failed, well my War Wolf is still going
strong, oh I'm just gonna march into his kingdom. Yeah, that's me done. We will
finish here. Firstly, Jack I want thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you for having me, I really enjoyed talking about me. Yeah, I love talking
about myself. If you guys have any developers that you'd like to see in the
hot seat, although I've done most of them now, leave a comment below and let me
know and as always if you liked the video, make sure you leave a like and
subscribe here on YouTube for more Stronghold goodness every single week.
See you next week.
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