Starting a new job is all types of feelings. I’d done some little jobs before but nothing this legitimate. I was nervous and excited. I was going to meet a lot of people who I thought would be intimidating given their experience. I would be going into a completely new work environment, that I hoped I would succeed in. There was a lot there.
On my first day, they brought me to a little cubicle office upstairs. I was sitting next to a person who had actually done the round table with me at my interview. He was hired just several months before this as a contractor to help with the Switch release of Stern Pinball Arcade, which was over a year ago by now. Sitting next to someone who was obviously very experienced—I remembered in the round table that he had been in the industry for a couple decades—but new was nice. Over the months, I would be able to ask him about little things that I wasn’t sure about, and as I became more experienced in the engine and the game, I would be able to answer any of his questions as well. It really helped me get used to the job right away having someone next to me.
As for my job though, I didn’t really have much to do right then. I set up my PC to have any programs that I needed like GIMP and a text editor, but other than that, I had to see what I would be working on. So I was in charge of shadowing my neighbor, which was actually really important, because he talked about some stuff that I would be working with in the engine heavily. While I didn’t fully process it because some of the stuff was pretty weird, it still planted little seedlings in my brain that would eventually grow.
I eventually was handed the hardest task that I would ever receive at the company. I was supposed to do some weird conversion on some video files using an exporting program that Farsight had developed. It was really weird. I still don’t remember what it was all about, which makes sense because even at the time I barely comprehended it. I eventually managed to get the desired result, and I was done with that. Now, I had someone else to shadow a bit.
At first, Farsight wasn’t really sure what I would be in charge of specifically, but my role in the company soon made sense. A guy who had been with the company for several years was calling it quits. He was in charge of updating Pinball Arcade for PS3, PS Vita, and the PS4. Because he was leaving, someone had to take on that responsibility, and that someone was me. I couldn’t just hop in right away though. I had to wait on this guy to write up some documentation that would allow me to work on all of his platforms. And I would go on to shadow him a bit to see what some of his workflow was like in regards to bug fixing Pinball Arcade and submitting patches to Sony.
It was all a lot to take in, but I was excited. I’m a huge Sony fanboy, so this would work out perfectly that I’d get to work on these three platforms. The only thing was that I didn’t know how much work had to be done.