Dennis Daniel

So a typical day is basically: get in. If I've not got a phone call saying something's broken before I get in, go through tickets, make sure anything that's a blocker or critical gets completed. Get that done first. Just making sure the other guys in my team have things to do and basically making sure they're doing a good job.

Day to day, I get in, check to see if anything's alerting, and then go through the calendar, what's coming up for the day. Sometimes I'll have a call with Hassan to kind of sync up with what's going on in Europe. I still do quite a bit of the network engineering, so running maintenance on our Perforce servers and that kind of stuff as well.

You said alerting. What kind of alerts are we talking about?

Usually it's disk full alerts. The amount of data that we consume is just ridiculous. And so we're constantly adding storage to servers because it just grows so quickly.

Here in L.A., we're pretty much downstream from everybody else, because Germany pretty much starts off the day and they get a full work day, and then the U.K., and they're almost done with their day, and Austin's pretty much in the middle of their day. So we try to pick up on a lot of the tasks that they've already started or they need us to do, and then we kind of close out the evening. So sometimes some of our work comes down as we're trying to reorganize and reorient for Germany to pick up the next day. So we're helping the artist teams and the engineering teams basically be ready to hand off all their materials and the projects they're working on to Germany and start the day over. And what people don't understand is that CIG is a 24-hour outfit. I mean, everybody in this room is pretty much on call 24-7. So if something happens, if it's something we can do remote, we do it from there. And if not, then we have to drive into the office and do it. And then outside of that, the one unique group that we house here is pretty much GVP and the narrative and, like this show. So we try to give Jared additional support if he needs it, and also the GVP team that runs a lot of the other content that's coming up. So a lot of times, what these guys need finished up, we try to finish it for them for the next day.

I think that one of the biggest things for me is the amount of support, the amount of infrastructure, the amount of work that this IT team does with the small number of people and the size of this company. To me, that's probably one of the biggest achievements. There's a lot of little things that we could talk about, but we run on a really thin crew, and that's because we have very experienced people. I'm talking about a culmination of a lot of different experience, not just game companies, but from all over the place. And so it means that we can work so well together. What do they say? You start something and the other person just picks it up like they could read your mind or whatever. We're constantly doing things, making process and policy so that users are able to support themselves when possible. If they can't, they come to us, and then we can be quick about it and solve a problem. So I think, to me, that's a big deal.

Well, for me, my most memorable experience was in Australia, at PAX Australia, because it was when I really grokked the scope of what we're doing. I mean, I had worked with Chris back in the Origin days on Wing Commander, and I've been in the game industry a long time. So I'm not a stranger to there being fans of a game. But when I got to the Australia venue, they said, okay, well, here's your team of volunteers that are going to help you set up. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? It's like, well, these are backers that have volunteered to help with the operations of setting up and whatnot. And I was like, what do you... I mean, they've already bought the game and they're volunteering their time and energy and everything. And they're like, yeah. And the enthusiasm that they put in, I've worked in places where paid employees didn't have the amount of enthusiasm that they had. And just the scope of it, that this is a game that people... it's not just a game to them. And every event we go to, there's volunteers and even just backers that come up and say, this is going to be an awesome thing. And then also the amount of openness that we have, since we are crowdfunded. We are very open with all of our development, and that was a big change for me, because traditionally in the game industry, you may be working on a game for two years and nobody's heard of it because the company hasn't even announced that they're working on it yet, and they want to have a big splash at the Christmas sale time of here's this game that we've been working on. Whereas here, we're just open to everything. Having backers come on studio tours, it's just all these things that were never a factor in my career previously. It's just awe-inspiring sometimes.

For me, my most exciting day was... basically, I was a backer of the game. I heard of the game, I immediately backed because the idea was just phenomenal. And I knew Chris from back in the early days when he made Wing Commander, as a fan, not as a person. And I put my resume in and I was like, there's almost no way that I'm going to get picked out of, I'm sure, hundreds of people that are applying for it. And I got a phone call from John Erskine and we had a great talk, and I was like, wow, he's really interested. And he said, well, I want you to talk to our new technical guy, Mike Jones. I'm like, oh yeah, I saw Mike Jones on the show. And so he set up the call for the next day. And we started off with a little bit of a technical talk about my experience at Carl's Jr. headquarters and stuff like that. But within three minutes, I knew Mike Jones was all in on the project, because we left all the technical stuff behind and we just started talking about how passionate we are for what this vision was and what we could do to make it. And I was expecting a little bit more corporate, organized talk, but what really fired me up was Mike's passion for the game. And I was like, oh my God, he's just like me. He's a total fan. And his passion is so powerful that this guy is going to make this game happen regardless. And I got just so fired up, and I hoped I made it through the process. It was a long process because there was a lot going on. LA was just kind of getting up and running. Mike had only been there for about three or four months, and he was reshaping the IT department to try to expand it. And he called me up and said that I was hired, and it just blew my mind. To go from somebody who was so excited about a project, and then find somebody who was that passionate and dedicated to the dream of the game that we're making running the entire technical part, and that he wanted me along for the ride. At that point I said, regardless, I give you a solemn promise that I'm going to work here and give my all until this game is finished. That's what we're doing to this day, five years later. And we're going to keep going until we're done. So that's why I'm here.