Recruiters and Freelance Work

posted Aug 9, 2012, 1:56 PM by Mavrik Games

I realized today that it's been over a month since my last post. Things have gone sort of crazy for me in that time and a lot has been happening, so I haven't really had time to post what I've been up to. It all started a little over a month ago, around the time I finished writing the Scaleform Menu System tutorial. Shortly after, I was contacted by a recruiter from a game company about the tools I've written and provided on this site. He asked if I would be interested in applying for a position with their company writing tools for their engine. The position was in another state however, and being unable to relocate, I had to turn down the opportunity to interview with them.

Fortunately for me, they happened to have a studio in Utah where I live, but they didn't think that writing tools for their engine would really work out from a remote location. The studio in Utah was hiring for another position though, so the recruiter set up an interview with the Technical Director there. I've gone through two interviews now, and their biggest concern is my lack of "real-world" game studio experience (being none whatsoever :)). I think the only reason I've managed to make it this far at all is the fact that I do have a game released on the XBox Live Indie Games Marketplace. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I hope to soon! :)

Also, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by the founder of Blackfoot Studios. He had found my Scaleform Menu System tutorial and was trying to convert the existing frontend for their game Ground Branch from Flash8 and AS2 to Flash 10 and AS3. Every screen was also in one flash file that used "gotoAndPlay" calls with all of the ActionScript on the timeline (as is the convention with AS2) and he wanted to separate them out into their own swf files. He was having a little trouble getting everything to work, so he asked if I would be willing to work on it. In the process of working on his frontend, I actually found some issues with some of the things I had set up for my tutorial - namely, the custom cursor. It seems that on some machines, it wasn't working at all. After some thought and debugging, I realized that it was due to a concurrency issue - the image for the cursor wasn't finished loading by the time the menu screen tried to add it. I wrote some code to wait for the image to load and then add the cursor to the screen manually and this seems to have fixed it. I haven't updated the tutorial yet, but I will soon.

I also had to convert the ViewStack Scaleform component from AS2 to AS3, as Autodesk did not provide it for Scaleform 4. This was a lot more work than I expected it to be, and I still have a bug in there that I haven't quite been able to ferret out yet. Again, it seems to work fine on some machines but not on others (for the three I've tested it on anyway). So that's what's been going on and I apologize for neglecting this blog, but it has been an insanely busy month for me.

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