The day after I arrived I had a test at noon. So to warm up, I woke up early and went to eat at a diner in the village called the Teddy Bear Restaurant. I had pancakes and scrambled eggs for a cheap ass price. That’s how you start an important day. I had woken up early though; as a result, I had a decent amount of free time still in the day. I went back to my room and got dressed in a collared long sleeve. I went walking around checking out the town. I then made my way to Farsight—my hotel was so close that I just walked. Just from this bit of walking I could already tell the long sleeve was definitely a mistake as my pits were drenched. I had to keep that professional look though, so I persevered.

I arrived at Farsight a bit early. I actually feel like I was in the damn parking lot trying to catch some minutes because I had gotten there like 15-20 minutes early. If so, I’m curious if someone at the office seen this freaking 20 year old in a nice shirt just droning about in the parking lot. That’s definitely a great first impression.

I decided to go in a bit early. I was greeted by a secretary’s desk that seemed to be uninhabited by a secretary and inhabited by a bunch of shit. I was pretty confused. I didn’t know what to do, so I just fidgeted about in the main entrance until someone walked by. They directed me to Mike, the lead gameplay programmer, who then directed me to the conference room. There was a PC in there with a programmer test that I would work on. It was in Visual Studio, so I would have intellisense luckily. Mike told me that it would take me around an hour, and if I was stuck, I could look up anything on the internet as long as I accredited the site. He wished me luck and said that if it took me longer, that was obviously a sign.

There were three parts to this test. The first part was a bunch of questions that I had to answer, the second part was a bunch of chunks of various code that I had to implement, and the third part had me implement a little system. This was an incredibly easy test for me, and I definitely didn’t take the full hour even. I’d say around 45 minutes was what I ended up spending. I only had to look up something in regards to color bit shifting, but that was even something I had done in school. The logic was just completely scrambled in my head.

Anyways, after this test, I went out to eat with Bobby, the VP. We ended up walking to the village because I didn’t have my car. For food, I had to tell my little dirty secret: I’m a damn vegetarian. What if my coding skills were completely up to par, but they persecuted me because of my non-meat eating ways?! I was worried because vegetarians face more hatred on a day to day basis than black people and LGBTQ combined! Luckily, even though he was a evil carnivore, he was totally cool about it though, and he said the burger place should have vege burgers for me. I ended up getting the Teriyaki burger while he got a salad.

We talked about our personal lives and the future of the company, which surprised me. Why would he tell me about the potential products if he didn’t think I wouldn’t do great? Maybe just to put it in my mind that these are the type of products they would be working on, and if I didn’t like it, I should take a hike? Regardless of the reason, the lunch was great. I got to learn a lot about him, and he really put me at ease. I felt like I’d be a perfect fit at the company, and he seemed to agree. I ended up rolling up my sleeves because of how sweaty I was, which made me lose that pristine, professional look I was going for, but that’s OK. I still looked fly. I asked him about what I was wearing, and he said it was perfect. He said if I had a tie on of any sorts, he would’ve made fun of me. Luckily, Full Sail taught me all about that though.

We walked back to Farsight, and the programmers were ready to go over my test and group interview me. Luckily, there weren’t many people there that day because a lot of them were at E3, so I didn’t have too much of an audience. Still, there were 6 programmers in the room and Bobby. Mike went over my test, and told me what I got wrong, which was two of the basic questions in the beginning. Then the rest of them asked me questions based on my resume. I talked a bit about my experience at Full Sail and myself. It was a bit awkward for everyone there and a bit for me as well. For me, it was awkward because I didn’t know who to look at when I was talking because there were so many people around me. I ended up looking at the desk a bit during those sections, but when I actually was addressed by someone, that awkward desk looking went away.

After this, Bobby took me to his office and said he would talk with the programmers to see how they felt about me. That way he could tell me if I had the job or not. I felt very positive about every single interview I had for Farsight leading up to this point, and I felt like I had the job in the bag. After a few minutes, he came back in and said I had the job. In the back of my mind, I thought of that SSE job, but I was still stoked. I said I had to talk with my girlfriend about some things, but I was very happy to have gotten my first offer! He said he would send it to me in the next week, and I could go over that.

I walked out of there with some extreme BDE, which shows you the problem with BDE. I told Cali I didn’t get the job, and she called bullshit. I went out to celebrate by seeing the beautiful nature around. I initially wanted to go mountain biking, but it would’ve been expensive as hell. So I took the free ninety-nine free route, and I went for a hike.

It really went to capture why Big Bear was such a beautiful place. After visiting the company, I started warming to the idea of working at Farsight. The place was beautiful, the people at Farsight were nice, and I’d be working on games. I didn’t get a degree in game development to work on simulation. I did it to work on video games.