Tomorrow is my last day of work at Radical Entertainment. After almost eight months, my contract has come to an end. It feels good to have finally taken a contract position to its intended conclusion. As many of you know, my first contract job didn’t work out so well.
Overall, working at Radical and on Prototype 2 was a great experience. The last two games I worked on, I was basically just going through the motions. While those two teams had great people, the work I was doing was boring and left me dissatisfied. I felt like my work made no real difference in the game. Things were completely different once I signed on with Radical. The work was interesting, utilized my strengths, allowed me to learn new skills, and at the end of the day, I felt like my efforts had a real, genuine impact on how the game plays. When Prototype 2 ships in April of 2012 I’ll be able to easily and proudly point out gameplay elements that I worked on.
My employment at Radical was a long time coming. I remember sending in a resume to apply for a testing position at Radical after my first year of university. I never even got a response back from them. I was finally able to close that loop with this job. As good as the work was, I also have to mention some of the great people that I was able to toil alongside with. I had a really good project manager. He is a very pragmatic, logical, and transparent guy when it comes to managing game development; an awesome guy to keep things under control. The lead programmer is my area is another solid individual. He knows our systems in great detail and was able to get me up to speed very quickly and never hesitated to answer any of my questions. It also helped that he has a good sense of humour. In general, I worked with extremely talented and nice people which made it quite easy to go to work every day.
My future might include another stint at Radical someday down the road but we’ll save that discussion for much, much later. For now, I’m just happy that I got the chance to work there for the last several months. Now it is time to relax and rest up.