How I Started Programming (Part Two of Two)
Rambles and Tangents on How I Quit Programming, Started Again, Quit Again, and Beyond
Part one of this origin story can be found here.
Note: I said this would be a two-parter with a generally-useful and broadly relevant ending — and it still is! This just got long, so Part Three of Two will be posted in the next couple days.
If anyone was hoping that part two would be more focused and have less tangents and even less stories that have nothing to do with the larger topic I’ll hit on eventually: I’m sorry.
The University of Michigan
About halfway through my senior year of High School — where I only had to go to school for a half a day as the other half was considered eligible for “extracurricular work” (or some such) — I told my parents that I didn’t really want to go to college. I just wanted to see if I could get a job somewhere doing a thing I think I could do (which was likely more true then than it was by the time I finished college). They, being parents, weren’t huge fans of that idea.
Eventually, an agreement was made: I only had to apply to one college, but if I got accepted, I had to go. My first thought was MIT because I figured I wouldn’t get accepted (which, in hindsight, would not have been a great bet to make), but their application was expensive.
So, my school advisor told me to apply to the University of Michigan. And since UM had a pretty decent rejection rate, I figured that was as solid a bet to make.
I’m Not Smart
So, in Fall 2003, I started my first classes at the University of Michigan. WAIT — I missed orientation.
Freshman orientation occurred at some point in the middle of the summer of 2003. I say this with some amount of hand-waving because, the day before I went to orientation, a book I was co-authoring had the other author drop out of the project the day before we needed to submit a set of chapters for a milestone deadline. I was fairly close to having most of the deadline done anyway, but not, like, oh the other person isn’t delivering anything at all close. I got the call at a friend’s graduation party, had to head home, and wrote as many words between 1:00pm until I sent off the email to the publisher at 3:30am the next day. I hadn’t ever pulled an all-nighter at that point in my life (now an all-nighter doesn’t phase me, but that’s an insomniac’s thing, so what can you do). The first day of orientation was basically a blur and I fell asleep during a Spanish placement test. Someone woke me up either after that test session was over (or the session after that).
Spanish 101 was where I ended up being placed, by the way. ¿Which is better than Spanish 100?
Computer Science
It was a good start to my college experience. I started in the engineering-oriented Computer Science program (there are two programs — this is relevant) because, obviously, that was my thing and of course I wanted to major in Computer Science. Why wouldn’t I want to do what I’ve loved since I was 13–14?
Turns out: there were a great deal of reasons why I wouldn’t want to. My dreams of working with other students on programming assignments and finding other people to, finally, maybe work on a game with was crushed into pieces within the first month. And the subsequent month those crushed pieces were reassembled with super glue so they could be crushed again. Those CS students were just mean. I once saw another student obviously struggling with a programming assignment in a computer lab, walked up and offered to help, and he jumped up from his chair to cover his screen with his arms while saying “don’t look at my work.”
“That’s a hilarious isolated incident,” I thought. It was not an isolated incident.
I switched to Computer Science in the college of Literature, Science, and Arts (the previously foreshadowed alternate CS program) the next semester… but the only real difference was that, uh. Well. I didn’t need to go beyond Calculus 1 nor take any physics classes, anymore.
First Major Digression
I’d love to say that my ventures into complex physical simulation in Steel Hunters the last year would have benefitted from physics classes. I really would like to say they would have been useful, but I got half a semester into Physics 1 (geared towards engineers) and, to this day, I cannot remember a single, solitary example of what was taught in that class. I remember the professor spending an hour writing extensive proofs for fundamental physics principles and laws, but there’s really not a lot to take away from that other than: hey, you’re a student, learn things.
And I love research; give me a topic that seems interesting and I’ll go to town on it. But despite taking physics and the math and physics of optics (camera lenses, f stops and exposure, rays of light intersecting through a number of differing types sizes of lenses, etc.), both of which were taken my second semester of my freshman year. Physics seemed like a “weed-out” course. A weed-out course being what it sounds like: an intentionally difficult course curriculum to see which new students drop and which persist. Physics: dropped. Calculus 101 was the same sort of course, but: persisted. And got a C-. More on this later.
The physics and math of optics engineering course should have been fascinating. It was not. The running theme of a lot of these courses is the curriculum focusing on the academics of their subjects. Very rarely were we presented with practical applications as assignments. I believe I got a B in that class. And that sounds good, right? They basically had two assignments that counted towards your course grade: a mid-term and a final project and presentation. I got a C- on the mid-term because I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to be tested on, so I didn’t study (yeah, it’s entirely my fault). The final project was a group project and my group had their idea immediately. At that point, my interest in the class was non-existent, but it was a group project, so I needed to help as a moral imperative. The group, formed from three clearly long-time friends (and me), had no desire in an outsider helping, but I still showed up to every meeting and found my role fairly quickly as they geared up for their class presentation. It was like watching Leo McGarry’s VP debate prep in the final West Wing season. I asked for all their notes the week before the presentation and to trust me.
A on presentation, B+ on project, and it counted for 50% of the course grade. So, hey, I did a thing right my freshman year. That one thing.
Let’s Have Trent Work on a Satellite Monitoring Tool
I ended up sticking around Ann Arbor for the summer after my first year and, being that I was living off my own money (which is just as much a joke then as it is now) meant that I was living off the empty husk of a bank account. So, I started previewing, reviewing games and interviewing people throughout the industry for an internet game site that no longer exists (including one of my heroes at the time: Jeff Strain, who I got to work with in a small way last year, so that’s neat). That job lost its luster after a month or so (but I kept it for another six months).
I needed to be around people, so I got a summer job at the University of Michigan Space Research Building. The job was to convert an old FORTRAN monitoring tool of the Ulysses spacecraft to C++ along with making improvements along the way. (My knowledge of FORTRAN started at the beginning of that job and lasted for, roughly, a week after I was done).
Fun fact: Ulysses was decommissioned in 2009. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.
Join the Marines or…
At some point during that summer, I decided that I was ready to drop out and join the marines (because… I’m still not sure where that idea came from, really. Maybe I watched Black Hawk Down or something).
I ended up canceling the meeting with a recruiter and decided to switch my major to… English. With a minor in Secondary Education. So just about as opposite a choice to being a marine or a CS student as you can possibly make. Regardless, Future Trent was to be a high school English teacher.
Obviously, I ended up going a somewhat different direction at the end of my time at UM, but that was still my goal up until a month into an internship at Stardock Entertainment (the games team, not the desktop applications team). And, finally, the dream of working alongside other people on a video game became a reality. That’s not foreshadowing as much as it is avoiding a really short segue into my post-graduation events in favor of a list of jobs.
Also, yes, I’m glancing over four years of college stories, some of which are pretty solid stories. But I have to get the real point of this series, so this is my attempt to limit myself.
The English Major
This may sound a bit silly, but switching my major to English was, by far, the best decision young and stupid (well, younger and stupider) Trent could have made. I always thought I was a pretty solid writer, but in English 101 (ENGLISH 101!) I kept getting, at best, B- to Bs on papers I would write. And the professor would ask me to stay after class to talk to me and explain why none of them ever got As.
I’ve always wondered why me, of all the people in that class, was deserving of direct feedback without going to office hours. But I felt like an alien wearing English major skin during that first semester of my sophomore year, so I never asked. My sophomore year was really just one of those “character building” times in life.
I got an A on my final paper in that class with the note “This is what I’ve been waiting to see.” (English teachers always know exactly what to say).
Being that class had been over for a week by the time I picked that paper up to see what my grade and, because I’m me, I never sought the professor out to ask: I have no idea what was special about that paper to this day.
Second Major Digression
I believe it was a paper about “love” and its role, regardless of its particular subject/target, in the strength and resolve a person has in taking on what are perceived to be seemingly-impossible tasks or goals. I was allowed three pages and, for the first time in years, was a paper I wrote, asked a friend to proofread and make changes for trivial typos, and I turned it in. Maybe it was well structured, had supporting arguments for its concepts, or whatever made it my one successful paper in that class.
I took from it a lesson that was likely not the desired one: I cannot proofread my own writing. Every iteration just washes down what, for the first draft, was like an argument I wanted to use to capture and engage an audience. And I’ve taken that approach… pretty much ever since then. Game design, programming, level design, art, visual effects, whatever: as many iterations as possible. Writing, while I absolutely and completely end up with articles 3–5x the length they could be, is where I try to capture the essence of the storytelling that I excel at: something uniquely me.
And, I totally understand why people dislike that, but a unique written voice, especially in an increasingly video-focused internet, is a concept I absolute love.
Over the remainder of my time at the University of Michigan, I turned my 2.1 GPA from my freshman year into a… 3.4 GPA (ish?) at graduation? Which I was okay with. All the poetry classes — which, really, why is that a requirement anyway — ended in me passing by a very narrow margin. But the creative writing, literature, linguistic, and oration classes were my jam. My parents probably could have told anyone this years before that point, but arguments were never something I shied away from. And writing arguments for a number of classes on a wide variety of subjects made me better at it. In one class on greek mythology, I had to write a paper about any piece of writing, film, or general historical topic. The teacher was very specific about one thing, though: “do not write a paper about O Brother, Where Art Thou. I’ve read so many by now that the best grade you could hope for is a C.”
My paper on O Brother, Where Art Thou got a B+. Luckily, I’ve never taken statements like “Do not <…>” as a challenge ever again. I’m kidding, of course, “Do not <…>” is as far as I hear before I’m like I’LL DO IT. WAIT, CAN YOU FINISH THE SENTENCE THOUGH?
On a related note, I was the only English major on a secondary education path that took every math class that I could make work for my schedule (the C- from earlier was unacceptable). Which ended up being: Calc 1–3, Discrete Math, Statistics, Theoretical Linear Algebra (It was my last chance for a math class and I couldn’t get into the non-mathematics-track class). Again: a purely academic exercise with no practical focus whatsoever — though, this time, it was my own fault since it was aimed at a very different sort of student.
The Abridged Career of Trent Polack
Within the scope of this particular post: the journey is not more important than the destination, so here’s the run-down:
Game developer at Stardock Entertainment where I worked on Galactic Civilizations 2: Twilight of the Arnor, Sins of a Solar Empire, The Political Machine 2008, and Demigod. It was a wonderful job and I appreciate the hell out of the team taking a change on me, but programming, still, wasn’t as fulfilling as I was hoping.
- Also: I adored Chris Taylor’s work at the time and, since we partnered with Gas Powered Games on Demigod, Chris came to the office one day and I think I was told not to give him a hug and I can’t remember if I did anyway or not. Anyway, he gave me a copy of Grandma’s Boy that he was given by a relative. I’m not sure why. And I still haven’t watched it. But that was amazing.
Okay, one brief interruption of this list. During my time at Stardock, I started learning about the role of a “Game Designer”. This was an entirely new concept for me. So, I started reading about designers and, most notably, listening to a variety of talks from Clint Hocking. It didn’t take me very long to realize that being a designer sounded wonderful. I think I failed to get an offer from about six-seven phone interviews, and even more non-responses from other applications. Towards the end of that period, I got to the point that I was going to take a contract job as a designer on low-budget Spongebob Squarepants Game Boy Advance game (the DS had been out for a couple years by that point, to give you the idea of the caliber of that project). I decided against it, and days later I got an email from the first studio I sent an application to (three months earlier). It was to schedule a phone interview, which led to an in-person interview in Salt Lake City, Utah (I FINALLY SAW MOUNTAINS). And that led to the most painful week and a half of waiting before finding out one Sunday while playing Forza Motorsport 2 that I got the job. I hadn’t celebrated so ridiculously since beating Emerald Weapon in Final Fantasy VII. And I’m not just saying that for the sake of a nerdy reference/joke, it was almost literally the same over-the-top, ridiculous celebration. Except this time I got to dance like no one was watching, because I made sure no one was. Anyway:
Designer/Senior Designer at LightBox Interactive where I learned that I know nothing. While there, I spent years on Starhawk, a cancelled PS4 prototype game, and then the initial design/development of Plundernauts.
- I have never been so nervous about failing at a job before. I had no safety blanket if I didn’t make it work. I knew no one at the studio, I had never lived outside Michigan or been west of Illinois. I had no idea if I was a good game designer or even a mediocre one. Fun fact: it’s not imposter syndrome when you literally could be an imposter who happened to do well in an interview.
Creative Director and Executive Producer at Team Chaos, working on games like SUPERCHROMA, Rooster Teeth vs. Zombiens, Loot Raiders, SPACE COLORS, Cat vs. Aliens, Dragon Academy, and Elements: Broken Lands. If you’ve heard of any of these from somewhere other than me, then congratulations, you’re in a small group of people. This job was, well, I don’t talk about my past jobs outside of portfolios or anecdotes for interviews. I will say: I learned a great deal of wonderful ideas in the mobile game space that I’m applying to Steel Hunters (not free-to-play or timers or boosters or whatever; this is more player experience and engagement stuff).
- It is a monumental achievement that I stayed in games after this. Even more so that I retained my excitement and optimism about games.
I worked for about four months as a Senior VFX Artist and Technical Artist at ArtCraft Entertainment on Crowfall to help establish their VFX pipeline/workflow and then a number of character and environment shaders and post effects.
Following that, I got out of the games industry proper to work on a project intended to replace traditional school curriculum with a digital multimedia and interactive curriculum pilot program as Lead Experience Developer at a startup called planet3. It was during that job that I started working on what would become Steel Hunters.
Since then (planet3 was shuttered), I did some contract work for High Fidelity, but mostly a variety of work for Simul (whose middleware, trueSKY, I use in Steel Hunters). And for the last couple of months I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to work full-time on Steel Hunters (instead of it, basically, being a second full-time job thing where I spent money from another job).
Steel Hunters
I want to talk about this endeavor specifically for a bit, as it’s going to be relevant for Part Three of Two — the article that I’ve been working up to that isn’t just me-about-me.
I never thought about going independent and starting a studio for most of my career. Or, well, any part of my career, really. But I started getting some interesting offers to be a game director at some smaller, successful-and-growing studios. Which is insane given that in 2011 I was seriously considering a Spongebob Squarespants Game Boy Advance game with no budget that the guy I talked to even said wasn’t really worth taking.
But, Steel Hunters snuck up on me. It was intended to just be a technical art/visual effects playground in Unreal Engine 4 where I could relax and blow off steam without ever thinking of it as a real project. And I just kept getting more and more into it, which was the complete opposite of what happened when I started a project called Sacrilege in 2015. Sacrilege was, I think, a solid idea, but no matter how many prototypes I put together, it was… Uninteresting. To say the least.
But here I am. A year and a half (with change, if you consider the aimless sandbox days) into the project. I’ve spent the last year primarily programming the game backend and core systems along with tech changes and some middleware integration into UE4 itself. And in the last year, I’ve written approximately 90–100k lines of code (not including engine changes) which, over time, has become the best, most robust, and most flexible programming I’ve ever done in my life. Through iteration, refactoring, and redesigns/rewrites, the project stands at about 25k lines of production-ready code.
My brain is basically just a cauliflower with some placebo neurons scattered about.
To say this project is risky for me is as sweeping an understatement I can think of. But, because I refuse to stay in relationships that have no future, have no children, and currently live in a cheap area in Michigan, I had one conclusion: there will never be a better time to try.
On Steel Hunters, I am the sole person working on the green light demo (which I’ll be shopping around to publishers for funding to finish the full project with a small team). That demo will be simultaneously sent out the day I release the first real, public footage of the game in the form of a 1m:08s trailer. I am positioning it as a AA co-op action game (with a mission structure akin to Monster Hunter) with a substantially lower budget than a game like that is generally done in games.
It is, without a doubt, the most complex, physically and mentally demanding, isolating, frequently soul-crushingly demotivating, and goddamn rewarding endeavor of my career. I have no doubt in the game itself; it’s worth everything I’ve put into it, and after all this time of working on it, I still have that feeling you get when you start a project and see the world as an oyster that can be destroyed in a free-roam 8km² sandbox where you can blow that oyster out of existence.
I love it.
And I have confidence in finding a publishing partner who can see the same potential in the game as I do and fund the rest of development (as I’ve been barely able to fund getting here as it is).
But, if that doesn’t happen, this will still be at the peak of my career thus far.
The Promised, Generally-Aimed Conclusion
… This got too long. So, that will be Part Three of Two. Coming in the next couple of days.
Remembering How I Ended Up Here
The rest of this is going to be a big ol’ list of shout-outs because I wouldn’t be here without a lot of these people. And I’ve never done something this lengthy about me before, so I buried it at the end of this article solely so I could not care about how long it got.
I’ll be making this point a few times in the final article that this is all a lead-up to, but I want that article to be not as much about me, so I’ll get this in here: remember everyone along the way that helped you get to where you are and become who you are.
In that spirit, my list of shout-outs:
GameDev.net (2000–2006)
Initially, I just found the site through google search results, but eventually I frequented it more and more. And, since people used IRC back then (if that’s unfamiliar, then think: Slack, but wonderful and not consuming gigabytes of RAM), I joined their channel. It was on this channel that I met the people who run the site, various industry professionals, and people who would become friends of mine to this day. Like Melissa Brown (my COO for Joy Machine), Mike Stedman, and Scott Hilbert (who recently had his game, Splitty Robot named Best of Show at MAGFest this year, yay!). Along with industry professionals Joseph Fernald (who apparently keeps no public profile anywhere) and my beloved Richard Benson who, at the time, just finished work on Undying and gave me way more advice than could ever be reasonably asked. Especially given how annoying I was then.
Stardock Entertainment (2004–2009)
While I think the CEO, Brad Wardell, may have less fond memories of our frequent debates than I do, I learned some astounding things about efficient, low-cost game development that have stuck with me ever since my time there. My manager, Scott Tykoski, is potentially the most relentlessly friendly, personable, and hard working developer I’ve met in the industry (he’s an okay friend too, I guess). And Kris Kwilas, then-VP of Stardock, who is just about family to me to this day.
LightBox Interactive (2009–2014)
While this was the most intimidating job I’ve ever taken, it was also the most rewarding. A wonderful studio filled with incredibly talented people working seamlessly and effortlessly together unlike any other team I’ve ever seen. Studio head and director, Dylan Jobe — who I’m pretty sure disliked me for my first, like, six months — is just a model game director and inspiring team leader. The man is a force of nature and an encyclopedia of, well, a weird variety of topics. Bruce Woodard, our technical director, frequently spent time answering my questions about aspects of development and rendering (in general and in our in-house engine) to help me understand ideas and concepts that were, in no conceivable way, relevant to my role at the company. And my BFF, Josh Sutphin, the guy responsible for finally putting me in a Game Design position and the best person I’ve ever known to bounce ideas back-and-forth with on a daily (hourly) basis with.
Austin Game Development Community (2009–2016)
I’ve gotta just go list form on this:
- John and Brenda Romero: I randomly met up with these folks a couple weeks after moving to Austin, solely as a result of a tweet asking if anyone wanted to join them for dinner. I was new to Austin, so I was like “SURE, I’M READY FOR THIS”. I was not ready for that; it was humbling and amazing, not to mention the first time I actually have met anyone I grew up reading about in games.
- Harvey Smith: A good friend and, while I’m not sure if this title is mutually agreed upon, a wonderful mentor. He and Arkane founder, Raphael Colantonio, were apparently in the audience of a micro talk I did (my first-ever talk about game development/design) and talked to me briefly afterward and said nice things. And I have bugged him (and Raf) whenever I needed smart people to help me on difficult things I knew nothing about.
- David Kalina and Randy Smith (no relation to Harvey): Co-owners of Tiger Style and, come to think of it, while meeting these guys through games, I don’t think we actually ever talked about games all that much. Does that matter? Not even a little. Despite its increasing size, the game industry still feels small, and a shared interest in the field is just a catalyst for meeting great friends.
Etc.
Another list of people who don’t fit neatly into any one category.
- Matthias Worch: I saw a talks from Matthias at my first two GDCs and his design brain is just wonderful. I don’t think we’ve ever met in person other than a brief “hey, good talk” exchange after one of those GDC presentations, but yet he’s a good friend I get to talk to daily, and also a great person to tell me when I’m doing something stupid (Note: by the way, find people like this).
- Roderick Kennedy: I’ve used Roderick’s middleware, trueSKY, for ages, but it wasn’t until last year that he and I actually started talking outside of my occasional email about a bug or issue. We’ve since worked together on various things and I am eventually planning on fusing parts of his brilliant brain into mine, but for the time being: talking to people who can challenge you on things that you think you’re confident about and, well, prove to you never to be confident about that subject ever again is a treasure. Much like Roderick.
- Every single supportive company who has helped me on Steel Hunters: an obscenely kind group of folks at Epic Games, the incredible people at Persistent Studios (who make PopcornFX, hence the link), everyone ever who works on/around NVIDIA’s GameWorks solutions, and everyone I’ve talked to at SideFX and SpeedTree.
And, Finally
My parents. Who, really, are to blame for raising a person who can ramble on and on like this. Or instill an ambition for what may be the impossible. Or constantly remind me growing up to “take initiative’ and “always be thankful” and all of those other things that wonderful parents do. And I say “wonderful” because, while growing up, it can get pretty grating, since everything is always followed by:
“[…] and you’ll thank us for this some day”.
And, you have to admit, that’s a really, really long-game to play. And also that they ended up being so completely right beyond a doubt.
This is so far from being a complete list (and if anyone is left out, I promise it’s not personal; I felt self-conscious about how long this article got about seven pages ago), but, hey, how often does it make thematic sense to give a shout-out of appreciation to people that have shaped your life in great ways?
Thanks for Reading Me-About-Me; Next: Part Three of Two (or: why all this context was needed)
Finally, for Part Three of Two and the entire reason I wanted to write my backstory: as much advice, warnings, big ol’ red stop signs, and, much like the last section, a continual reminder to never forget what’s important to you and everyone who got you to where you are.
And why do these two pieces exist? I didn’t want to write technical articles since I’ve been programming 16–18 hours a day for seven days a week the last month. But, more importantly: I don’t think a compilation of advice, ideas, thoughts, warnings, and things thereabout really can carry any weight without knowing about the person writing them. Without context, that’s just a list of maxims or words that read well but lack substance (a thing I’m against, by the way).
Also: I recommend writing something like this some day when you’re feeling a bit demotivated; like, say, when you’re working from home on an ambitious solo project’s greenlight demo.
