Beta 2 Game Dev Saga - Processes and challenges of a Brazilian Game Development Studio

6) Learning and Progressing

“Hello, this is Lucas, I’m 21 years old and I invite you to the total chaos of my developer life”, says Lucas Avila, our Junior Developer.

We all know working is tough and challenging, right?

But go some years back and try to remember your first full-time job. How much trouble have you faced? How was your adaptation?

Different from all articles so far, this one I’m starting with this intro provided by our Junior Developer, Lucas. He started at Beta 2 Games when he was 19, as an intern.

We’ve known each other for quite some years now. I was his ESL teacher and he had always been that kid who knew how to use electronic devices. (Yeah, I’m already that old).

“The first time I coded was on 8th grade. There was this science fair at school at the end of the year.

“It was always a different theme, and that time it was board games.

“I innocently raised my hand and asked our teacher if I could do a video game instead.

“She looked at me and said, ‘if you can do it, go on then’, so, yeah, ‘we’ did that.”

He quoted “we”, because, spoiler alert, he was the only one in the group who actually got some work done.

“I didn’t know anything about coding at the time. In fact, I knew a bit of HTML and CSS, but nothing exactly useful.

“So I went with what any warm blooded creature would do: RPG Maker.

“Oh, and Java.

“Thus, I created some kind of demake from Skyrim, my favorite game at the time.

“It was a lot of work. Gladly there were many tutorials on YouTube, even in Portuguese. Also, RPG Maker was great for making the assets.”

It sure was a lot for a 13-year-old boy. I believe you must have passion for games to endure it (to say the least).

“My love for games started at 4, when I got my first video game.”

It was an old NES his father kept for all those years.

“But, you know, it is a canon trope for the story of my generation of gamers to have had a Minecraft channel.

“And it was nice, I also had to learn a lot of those video/photo editor apps and softwares.

“In 2017, I found this course from Gustavo Guanabara ‘Learn Python’. He was the second-best teacher I ever had.”

I had to ask who was the first one.

“Why, John Peter Ayres, of course.”

John was a workmate and a friend who has passed in 2020. It was shortly before the international health crisis.

“The pandemic caught me in my last high school year. So, I went back at streaming games. I thought I could be useful to someone who wanted to enjoy their time locked at home.

“I was one of those teens who didn’t have any kind of graduation party after high school, you know? And for some months, we didn’t even have classes.

“Needless to say, this world crisis extended more than we expected, and I couldn’t help feeling useless, so I quit that too.

“One day you and I were talking, and you told me Beta 2 Games had an internship opening.

“And here I am. Not an intern anymore, though.”

We already have a new intern. You’ll hear from him soon.

For a 19-year-old boy with the expectation of having his first job during the pandemic, I guess Lucas went pretty well, in fact, but I’ll let him tell his story.

“The Boss gave me this task of developing this game by myself.

“But hold it, it wasn’t from scratch. I mean, there was a GDD and it was perfectly doable as a one-person job.

“He gave me one month, and I said to myself ‘this is my chance, I cannot fail’ and stablished the goal of making it in one week.

“And so I did it. Took a couple of overnights studying, you know, everything…

“I mean, I didn’t know anything about unity, so I started literally with ‘how_to_start_a_game_project_on_unity.avi’, you know?

“Then I went with 'first object', 'UI'…"

Lucas has always been the “challenge me” kind of person. If there’s a problem in front of him, we say “here it is, my boy, solve it”.

“I have never learned so much in my life in such short time. Especially because most of the time it is, like, I need to learn this today to implement it yesterday.

“So, after that test-project, The Boss gave me a project started by Gabriel.”

Gabriel is our Lead Developer.

“It was very interesting having to deal with another person’s job, especially from him, who has been a pro for a long time now.

“After that, I was hired full-time, and I joined the Mythos project along with Vanessa.

“And we were the ‘Mythos Duo’ for basically all my time at Beta 2 Games.”

Vanessa told me her side of the story as overseeing the interns, along with the challenges of being a woman in coding here, check it out.

“Before going to Vanessa, I need to say Mythos was the project that made me marry Unity, and soon after want a divorce. Unity Animator, you suck.

“Ok. Vanessa. She is great! We have the same kind of sense of humor, like, when we have to change the channel in our discord server, we usually joke like, ‘let me hold the elevator door for you’ (because the channels are up or down the screen)

“We are always fooling around, became friends.

“Regarding work, man, she taught me so much, especially how to be a professional developer, like, how to write a code anyone would glance at and get it.

“Also, the other way around, how to see a code and know what’s happening.

“And I’m glad we are working together on—“

Sorry, this one is NDA lol.

“Also, it was on NDA I came across my biggest challenge so far: a freaking rope.

“I was talking to my girlfriend these days about my job and what it means to develop a game.

“I told her that in games we don’t need to make something act perfectly real in a game. We have to make it look good enough for that specific game.

“I mean, on this one, this rope needs to hang and move along air resistance the way it works for this game, you know. I don’t need to make it replicate exactly all the movements a rope would do when hung on open air. If it were the case, it wouldn’t work for this cartoon-ish project.

“Yet, it can’t look like as if it were bugged either.”

I have never thought about “making it good enough for a game”, but not in a bad way. He gave the example of those cowboy movies where most of the city is just the facade. It works for the movie, and they’re not functional buildings.

“But surely what I most liked to do so far is everything that is visual. All the movements in Mythos, the skills of each character, the lighting…

“About that, usually developers develop, and the other guys would implement, like level designers and all, but here we also make the implementation. I know is more work, but I think it is cool. I feel I’m doing something more concrete.

“But there are times it hurts, I mean, once I made a system so that the character would only get out of the ladder on Mythos when he touched the ground.

“I took me a long time. Then The Boss said ‘I need the player to be able to get off the ladder anytime he wants. It hurt. A lot. lol.

“But The Boss never imposes anything. I also told him once ‘sometimes I feel you are a workmate, not my boss, because you always ask for things, like, too carefully.’”

I asked, then, how it was with other colleagues, when they need something done.

“I feel here no one will ever be rude or demand anything, you know? Nobody has ever crossed the line of respect. Never.

“It is really a place that understands what it is to work as a team.

“And I consider myself a good team player. I can’t see myself in a boss role, because I like to be a gear in the clock.

“So, I know that for a few people there was some trouble adapting to teamwork, but it was smooth for me.”

To wrap it up, I asked him about a game he would like to make.

“I think there’s something in the soccer games that is missing.

“I know it would probably not make any money, and it would be probably a flop, but I would like to make a soccer game totally focused on career mode.

“No gatcha, no casino for kids, no cards, no handicap.”

And that's it! Thanks for reading so far and, while you are still here, tell us:

How was it for you on your first days on your first job?

Pedro Porciúncula - Head of Marketing and Narrative Designer