About You
Tell us a little about yourself! What’s your role at Series, and what do you work on day-to-day?
I’m Brandon, and I’m an engineer here at Series. I started on the Pixelberry side, but I float around solving problems and assisting where needed. On a daily basis you’ll find me scanning our live server metrics to find and fix any issues that pop up, reviewing code, and developing new features in one of our systems or games.
How did you get into engineering, and what eventually brought you into games?
I remember it so vividly. I was playing Halo 3 back in 2007 with one of my friends, and I remember having a revelation like… I want to do this. I want to make computers do THIS. From that point it was just figuring out what it took and how to get there!
I was lucky and broke into the software space when the demand was high. I graduated and had a job within a few months. I actually started in enterprise applications. Games development has a smaller pool of available jobs compared to the totality of all the software development, so I opted for the easier barrier to entry. I honed my craft in web applications for about 10 years before I noticed an opportunity at Pixelberry that I decided to apply for.
How did you end up working on Choices?
I was working at an insurance company and I noticed an open position at Pixelberry for a software engineering role. I applied and got the offer. When I onboarded, I was placed on the Storyloom team. I helped out there for a while before being transferred to Choices shortly before Storyloom was canceled.
I was part of the Choices team that came over when Series purchased Pixelberry, and I’ve been here ever since.
Your Craft
What do you enjoy most about working on Choices?
I think I like being able to advocate for players the most. I love to play games myself, so I try to be as vocal as possible when the roads of business interests and player interests start diverging.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Every day is something different, but they follow a similar pattern when there aren’t any active issues needing addressed.
I hop on early in the morning, and while it’s quiet, I’ll check up on our Choices servers to make sure there aren’t any surprises. If I see anything out of the ordinary, I make sure to get it back in order before it affects our players. In addition, I might occasionally check our report system and some of the socials to make sure there aren’t any reports of outages or weird behavior. If I notice anything off, I’ll investigate and fix as necessary.
After that, I’ll scan for any code that needs reviewing or any messages that I haven’t seen yet to ensure I’m caught up on what everyone is doing. If I have some time remaining, I’ll focus on the highest priority task in my list.
By that time, it’s typically time for daily meetings/check-ins, so I’ll make my way through those, and cap them off with a quick bite to eat.
After that, I spend the rest of the afternoon focusing on my tasks. I’ll also help out if anyone needs it. This includes things like access requests, assisting our Player Support representatives in aiding our players, pair programming, and more code reviews.
Engineering is unpredictable though! All it takes is a bad deployment or unexpected bug and the entire day morphs into triage and fixing. Everything else gets sidelined pretty quickly!
What’s something about the engineering behind Choices that you think would surprise players?
Good question. I feel like our players are quite smart and resourceful, so I doubt I could surprise them too much, but something that is always surprising, even to the engineers, is just how complex a “simple” game like Choices is.
There are so many facets to engineering that are completely opaque to someone just playing the game. From client code to server code, infrastructure to integrations, purchases, and player support, we have to account for it all and ensure it’s working seamlessly.
No one notices software when it’s working properly. Everyone notices it when it’s even a little bit off.
Is there a feature, improvement, or project you’ve worked on for Choices that you’re especially proud of?
I think it’s a tie between a feature and an improvement.
For the feature, I directly implemented the feature that lets us set up discounted premium Choices. If you’ve ever seen our promotions where we have all premium choices in a book for X% off, I helped do that! I love that I had a hand in a feature that directly benefits the players.
The improvement was a full refactor of our VIP subscription maintenance logic. We’ve had our fair share of trouble getting that system to work perfectly (app store subscriptions can be a doozy!), but that refactor helped make things a little more reliable. We’re still working on ways to improve that system.
What’s a technical challenge you’ve worked on recently that you found especially interesting?
I’m currently working on something quite interesting, but I can’t really talk about it yet. Unfortunately, it would be completely invisible to our players if it did happen, so it’s not exciting from that perspective!
The good news is this could have visible effects on future efforts, so it’s definitely a long-game play. I hope everyone gets the chance to see what this means!
Building & Evolving Choices
Choices has been around for a long time. What’s it like working on and modernizing a game with that much history behind it?
The pressure is real. Choices has an amazing history, and I’m lucky to have worked alongside the people that created it. Our players deserve to keep the experience they love, but at the same time, we have to continually update our technology to ensure everything stays secure and compliant. It can be nerve-wracking to make changes because you never know when you could accidentally impact something, or someone, you didn’t mean to.
It’s also extremely rewarding. I don’t take it for granted that I get to work every day to keep this game alive so that our players can continue to enjoy our stories both old and new.
When you’re building something new, how do you balance improving the technology with making sure the player experience stays familiar and reliable?
I touched on it in my previous answer, but keeping the experience consistent and reliable is top of mind during any change we make. Change can be jarring, and it can take a familiar, comfortable thing and make it something cold and strange.
As engineers, we playtest every change we make, and we have an amazing team of QA testers that do the same. We’ve also been pouring more effort into automating our tests just to add another layer of redundancy on top of our changes to ensure we keep the experience that everyone likes just the way it is.
Games & Inspiration
What kinds of games, technology, or other things inspire you as an engineer?
It’s hard for me NOT to get inspired by just about everything around me. I’ll play a game like Old School Runescape and get inspired to make a grind-heavy RPG. I’ll watch a movie and get inspired by the plot to make an interesting narrative hook for a story game. Even when I’m out walking around, the trees, clouds, and rivers all inspire me to put that natural beauty in an adventure game.
Is there a game or app you think does something technically really well?
Maybe out of left field, but I think I would call out something like V Rising as having an insanely polished feel. The amount of entities in the world, the lack of loading screens, the smooth animations, the shade system, etc. are all amazing technical feats. Incredible work from the folks at Stunlock Studios.
What’s one lesson you’ve learned in your career that has stuck with you?
When I was working my first job to help pay for school, my boss told me something I still think back to: “There’s nothing you can break that can’t be fixed.”
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everything, but it has helped me look at a lot of what I do with a different perspective. Instead of being paralyzed by the fear of failure or breaking something, I can move forward quickly and confidently with the worst case scenario being a lesson learned.
I don’t think my old boss even remembers me, but it’s funny how one little sentence spoken in passing can have such a huge impact on someone. It has also taught me to be careful about choosing my words!
What advice would you give someone interested in becoming a game engineer?
This one is tough, especially with the current market conditions. I would say to try it in your free time. If you already have some programming experience, use that to make something simple. If you don’t have any experience, try to find some free classes online. There is a TON to learn about what it takes to go from nothing to a playable game, and you’ll have a portfolio piece to bring with you to interviews.
If you can afford the luxury of making your own games, do it! Make games that you want to play. Those are the games that are going to turn out the best, and they are going to be the games I want to play as well!
Choices Favorites
Do you have a favorite Choices book, character, or feature?
I absolutely love the way Blades is set up with the RPG elements. It’s impressive what we were able to do with that system.
Is there a feature in Choices you appreciate differently now that you know what’s happening behind the scenes?
Yeah there are a few of them, but the core of how Choices works definitely shocked me when I dug into the internals. It harkens back to my “simple” comment, but Choices is a lot more complex under the hood than it seems from the surface.
Lightning Round
Coffee or tea? Neither! Soda!
Early bird or night owl? Super night owl!
Favorite game? Terraria
Favorite Choices book? Blades!
Favorite programming language? Odin
Tabs or spaces? (I feel like we have to 😂) Spaces
Favorite movie or TV show? Fifth Element
Current obsession? Rice bowls
Dream vacation? Hawaii
One word your teammates would use to describe you? Helpful
Closing
What’s one thing you hope Choices players take away from the work you and the engineering team do?
I don’t know how to say this without sounding preachy, cliche, or condescending, but we truly do care about our players. Tech can be tough, and sometimes we move slowly (and sometimes even break things!), but at the core of everything we do, we ask ourselves, “Is this something our players will love?”
We love this game, and we hope you do too. For as long as we’re able to, we’re going to continue to keep this game going strong. We’re out there keeping the gears turning behind the beautiful art and stories – where the code lives. ♥️
(Brandon loves to cook! Above are picture of a delicious looking roast and a salmon they cooked and plated)