I Love Slushies
AUTHOR: Jeff
You know that TV show about those kids who sing all the time? You know, the one with the 20-somethings we’re supposed to believe are in high school? There’s a recurring gag on the show where the popular sporty kid throws a cold slushie in the face of one of the nerdy singer kids.
I myself have been on the receiving end of that kind of thing a few times in my life. I was a hardcore gamer in middle school, way (way) before it was cool to be a hardcore gamer. Let’s just say that the football dudes at my central Texas high school didn’t exactly respect my l33t skills at Ultima…um…1.
Later in life when I started working in the game industry I started receiving regular slushies to the face from some of my fellow developers. Metaphorically, of course. These were the guys who would listen to my super-brilliant game ideas or design proposals, and then tell me all the reasons they just wouldn’t work.
These slushie guys don’t sit around for years working on the mostest awesomest thing evar. They get shit done. They finish games and get them into our hands. They make it happen. Because they understand that the one thing that all of the greatest games ever made have in common is that they shipped.
John Zipperer is our slushie guy.
I started working with John back in 2003 when he decided to leave the hallowed halls of Intel chip design and jump into the game industry.
I’ve always been blown away by just how much John knows about how computers actually work — all the way down to the electrons. He’s the guy who tackles the hard, often unsexy parts of game development. Build systems, distribution systems, character variation systems, shader compilers, animation systems, fixing kernel-level driver bugs — John does it all, cheerfully and quickly.
Of course, we try to make sure he gets the sexy stuff too. When you start blowing arms and legs off the zombies in Class3, you can thank John for the awesome dismemberment system.
And then there’s the occasional slushie to the face when one of us starts talking about how cool it would be to accurately model the Butterfly Effect to drive a real-time dynamic weather system. Sure, we could do that. Or instead, we could make an awesome game and actually get it into your hands.
You can be damn sure John wants you to have that awesome game in your hands.
Welcome to Team Zed, John. It’s a true pleasure to work with you again.
Jeff
P.S. Don’t forget to check out John’s welcome to his fellow survivors!
it’s been said often before, but there is always a dirty job, and a man or woman willing to do it.
I’m thankful there is a guy willing to do those difficult and less glamorous jobs, so I can finally play my dream game. Keep up the great work..
Thanks Josh
John mentions he has a lot of patents in computer vision so obviously he understands the idea of taking ideas to the next level even if currently they aren’t feasible.
The quicker we determine feasibility of an idea, the quicker you get the game. I’m here to facilitate making the game as quickly as we can. Thanks for your post Marley.
Completely agree John. Sometimes the fat has to be cut from specific ideas. You can sometimes take a minimalistic approach to an idea and implement enough to make it work and then put in the other amazing stuff later.
But, like I mentioned, a lot of the times it is a nice feature to work on after the product is out the door. Or, as a proof of concept as someones side project. A lot of developers do work on side projects.
I work in the computer security field right now (Mostly web application stuff right now but I enjoy system security as well) but even at home I dabble in security work. I like to poke around at websites to attempt to find vulnerabilities and then report them to their websites owner. I tend to look for less severe ones first as I don’t feel like getting in trouble until they say it is alright. I’ve had some companies not say anything, and others who are really happy about being told.
Welcome Comrade! Great to have a hero of you’re stature on the team!
Thanks Luke, its great to be here.
Dantron likes slushie guys; Dantron is a slushie bot**. Slushie guys are individuals that ground a project in reality and prevent pie-in-the-sky people from having goals too lofty too achieve. Though, Dantron concedes that lofty goals (and the humans that set them) are necessary (and preferred!) in certain circumstances.
**Dantron is a slushie bot in that Dantron likes to get things done (when not napping or eating pie). Dantron is generally opposed to frigid beverage facial assault.
I’d love a slushy to the face in this hot weather. Welcome to the team John, I’ll defiantly remember to thank you every time i blow a zombies head off
I’m very happy to have you around John. There is a lot of things we have talked about in MMOZed forums that quite a few of us including myself feel aren’t as important as the actual video game. Ideas as broad and en-cumbersome as weather. I hope you keep these huge, and ultimately “games of there own” ideas to themselves. I wanna kills zombie and survive, and I think your going to be the one that helps me do exactly that!!