He loved writing shaders, but couldn’t devote enough time to both them\u00a0and his other\u00a0duties\u00a0to keep up with the pace of production. To solve the problem, he removed the bottleneck: himself.<\/p>\n
“I realized, you know what, this is cool, I do it well and it’s awesome, but…I need to find a better way,” he said.\u00a0“So I ended up finding a super awesome woman, just out of college, and she wanted to write shaders, so she basically became our shader queen. She’s written almost all of the shaders in the game.”<\/p>\n
This is a practical, timely example of how Allen solved a production problem, something he\u00a0believes game devs should constantly be looking to do\u00a0if they want to be good leads — even when it means making yourself obsolete.<\/p>\n
‘Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do’<\/strong><\/p>\n Hiring someone new onto the team helped dislodge Allen as a\u00a0bottleneck,\u00a0since shaders were\u00a0someone else’s full-time responsibility now. That also meant\u00a0he suddenly had a bit more\u00a0free time in his work day, and to fill that time he went looking for something to solve.<\/p>\n “I moved\u00a0on\u00a0and started looking at what our problems would be,” he said.”One of the big ones we ended up tackling was all the facial animations for all of our orcs, and the 40,000+ lines of dialog, and how we were\u00a0gonna animate all that with all the actors.”<\/p>\n So Allen and other folks on the\u00a0Shadow of War\u00a0<\/em>team spent about a year “completely redoing” the animations for the game’s monstrous maws, revamping how many bones were in each face and how they move in response to the data they’re fed. Looking back now, Allen isn’t sure it would have happened if he’d kept happily\u00a0writing shaders.<\/p>\n “If I hadn’t said ‘alright this thing that I’m doing, that I love doing…I should move on,’ if I hadn’t thought through that, then all of that updated face tech, that improved pipeline….well, it probably would have existed, but the system\u00a0was already sort of long in the tooth, and\u00a0by focusing on it, I think we got it to a lot better place than it would have been otherwise.”<\/p>\n Allen shared\u00a0this specific example from\u00a0Shadow of War<\/em>‘s development to illustrate a piece of game dev career advice he wants other devs to think about: always look for new problems. Someone told him that once, when he was feeling stuck, and it’s stuck with him ever since.<\/p>\n “I once got really great advice from Samantha Ryan, who used to run WB [Games], and before that was\u00a0Monolith’s studio head,” said Allen. “She was my manager, and she said the best thing you can do, for yourself and for us, is to make yourself obsolete. Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do.”<\/p>\n There’s a lot to unpack there, this notion of going to work every day and looking for ways to\u00a0make your job extinct.\u00a0Allen acknowledged\u00a0that it can feel counter-intuitive, but suggested\u00a0devs who want to be good leads\u00a0think of it less\u00a0as eliminating their value and more\u00a0as solving problems.<\/p>\n “It seems very counter-intuitive; I was like, are you just gonna fire me then?” Allen recalled, with a laugh.<\/p>\n “And she’s like ‘no, because there’s a certain personality type that will always look for the next problem. And if you’re too busy focusing on existing problems, you’re not doing the thing that’s best. The best thing for you to do, would be to look for the next problem. Because when you look for those problems, and solve those problems, we as a company are better, and you are more valuable. So really her whole point was, shift responsibility onto folks. Which seemed counter-intuitive and weird, but I don’t know, I loved it, and I’ve lived by that ever since.”<\/p>\n Of course, many devs will feel like they’re in a position where they can’t shift responsibilities onto others\u00a0— if they’re working alone or in a small team, for example, or doing remote contract work.<\/p>\n Allen acknowledged this as well, noting that his experiences are most relevant\u00a0to devs at large studios but can also serve as a general reminder to try and solve problems permanently whenever possible. If you can figure out a permanent solution to something\u00a0you regularly spend time working on, you can move on to solve bigger and better problems.<\/p>\n “Always look for new problems. Look to solve new problems, look for people to help you solve them. Being stuck someplace is really about not pressing through, sometimes,” added Allen. “Our\u00a0industry is unique in that, the whole point of the job is constantly solving problems…so every day you can sort of learn something new, solve a new problem.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Matthew Allen loves\u00a0shaders. “I love putting on the headphones and writing shaders,” he told Gamasutra recently, while chatting at an Xbox press event.\u00a0“It scratches the technical itch and the artistic itch, because I get to make things look shit-hot by writing code.” But there’s a problem:\u00a0Allen loves shaders a bit too much. He most recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sickgamedev.win\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/shadow-of-war-dev-says-to-be-a-better-lead-make-yourself-obsolete.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
“The best thing you can do, for yourself and for us, is to make yourself obsolete. Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n