Time for talent with André Krüger
Meet André Krüger, one of our talented QA Automation Engineers. Despite having the look of a true Viking, he is originally from South Africa. His colleagues would describe him as fun, eager to learn and a great friend! 💜 He is also trained in hypnosis. So there’s nothing more to really do right now but just to relax… relaxing deeper and deeper… and the more you relax the better you feel… and the better you feel the more you relax … 💆♂️
Tactile: Hi Andre, could you tell us a bit more about what you do at Tactile?
André: Of course! I am a QA Automation Engineer, what we get up to is top secret 😉 But really, our job is to write automation scripts which continually test our games to make sure we catch any bugs as early as possible. We work in close coordination with the QA team to ensure we have broad testing coverage of our games and are continually designing and creating new scrips, maintaining and updating older scripts, and finding new and innovative ways to improve our automation tests even further.
Tactile: What was your journey to becoming a QA Automation Engineer?
André: I started my journey as a Performance Analyst in the banking industry. It didn’t take long for us to realize the immense need for automated solutions in the software development lifecycle. My employer at the time was diversifying and had opened a new automation branch, and I volunteered to join as soon as I heard, since I was really interested and excited about the potential and power of automation. Fast forward a few years and now I am automating for one of the most awesome companies in the gaming industry!
Tactile: What do you like the most about the team you’re working with?
André: We have a very diverse team from all around the world and they are exceptionally talented and amazing to work with. I enjoy the workplace culture of our team so much, it’s really cool to work on games with a bunch of gamers! The dedication and commitment that the QA team has for the quality of our games inspires me everyday, and it is great to be a part of it!
Tactile: What is the most rewarding part of your job?
André: The thing I find most rewarding about automation is the problem solving. I love a challenge and with automation there is a new challenge on the table every day! Automation testing in gaming is a very young and a fast developing field – there is always something new to learn new ways to look at and implement solutions. It is most rewarding when you’ve been working hard at developing a solution for a complex automation scenario and witnessing it successfully running at the end of the day!
Tactile: For people who would like to start their career, what do you think are the most important qualities that every Game Designer should have?
André: I think the single most important attribute for success in anything is attitude. I believe the famous quote that belongs to Henry Ford reads “Whether you think you can or you can’t, either way, you are right.” A willingness to learn, to solve problems and to think outside the box with and an “I can” attitude – will go a very long way!
Tactile: When you’re not at work, you are …
André: When I’m not at work, you’ll most likely find me in the forest on my mountain bike. And if I can find some “jumps” to jump, even better! Other than that, my wife and I love traveling and exploring new places. And when we’re not doing that, we’re getting comfy at home, kicking it back and enjoying a good game, book, movie or TV show.
Time for talent with Jaime Perez
Meet Jaime Perez 👋 A web developer turned game programmer, currently working on our newest game, Makeover Match. We’ve asked him to share more about what he does at Tactile, what are the most rewarding parts of his work and what are his top tips for aspiring game programmers.
Tactile: Hi Jaime, could you tell us a bit more about what you do at Tactile?
Jaime: I would like to think that I transform ideas into reality by implementing features in our games that players can enjoy. Working closely with a multidisciplinary team of fellow game programmers, artists, testers, designers and producers, I am coding new systems that adhere to solid and clean principles, which can be reused in several of the games we have.
Tactile: What was your journey to becoming a Game Programmer?
Jaime: I guess the journey started by being a passionate gamer and programmer. For a long time these two things did not go hand in hand since I mainly worked in web development – which is how I started at Tactile, as a Backend developer. Thanks to the development talks we have periodically, I took the courage to evoke my desire to transition into a Game Programmer role and I received the support to pursue that dream.
Tactile: What do you like the most about the team you’re working with?
Jaime: There are plenty of things to mention, but one of them is the knowledge level of people around me. I feel that everyone has an area of expertise that I can rely on, and it makes me feel inspired and motivated to learn.
Tactile: What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Jaime: For me, it’s being able to create something from scratch. I find it both challenging and exiting to get into a kick-off meeting where a new feature design is presented. I can already then start thinking about how to create a system where players can interact, trying to come up with ideas on what is possible and what systems we already have (& we have a lot!) that can be used to support the new feature.
Tactile: For people who would like to start their career, what do you think are the most important qualities that every programmer should have?
Jaime: Being transparent and honest with what you know and what you don’t has helped me a lot. Not being afraid to ask questions or to ask for help when you need it is an opportunity to learn and improve, so that later on we can help back. Also being professional and communicating clearly the expectations and progress, so the team can prepare accordingly. Having the capacity of thinking out of the box and visualising how to solve problems, where often the simplest solutions are the ones that last the longest.
Tactile: When you’re not at work, you are …
Jaime: Most likely playing video games! But well, I also have other hobbies like playing bass guitar, and when possible, I also like to travel. And there are a couple of hobbies that I got into from colleagues at Tactile like D&D, playing board games or even Warhammer 40K, which if you asked me 5 years ago when I started at Tactile, I would have not imagined being interested in.
To tell immersive stories, you not only need the creative brains inventing and designing the narratives. What’s equally substantial are the architects bringing these stories to life – through tech! This is why we’d like to shed a light on our awesome Content Tools Team. They’re the unsung heroes responsible for optimizing story content flows and processes within all of our games. In this article, we’ll walk you through the contributions of this team–the internal and external team(s) structure, challenges, and examples of strategies and tools that allow us to create captivating and interactive gameplay.
Creative Tech Core
Known by various names–Creative Support or “Chris and Friends” (with Chris as the team lead)–our Content Tools Team forms the creative tech core of Lily’s Garden and other games in our portfolio. Their primary responsibility revolves around everything related to the game’s story, from crafting and fine-tuning the story workflows to addressing bugs and developing tools.
Their main focus is to ensure that storytelling within our games is not only engaging and fun, but also produced in the most efficient and seamless way possible, from both production and programming perspectives. One example of this is the MapActions tool, used by Cinematic Artists to author storylines and apply cinematics. It basically allows you to easily add and edit all the things that make a good cut-scene. It’s part of a larger tool called MapEditor, as most of the tools the team builds consist of several smaller tools, creating a modular building block system that increases simplicity and speed. As an example, in the below GIF, on the right, you see a mailbox crashing, some zooming in and out, and Lily’s verbal as well as non-verbal reaction to it happening – all easily and granularly adjustable with the tools that you see on the left.
The Tech
The Content Tools Team works within the Unity Engine, using C# for coding. This tech choice is key to maintaining a uniform and efficient game development process. They swear by consistent language, terminology, and Clean Code for effective communication, within the team and beyond. For instance, the terminology for storylines in Lily’s Garden is Story Arcs, whereas in Penny & Flo, they’re called Seasons – a seemingly minor detail that can mess with the game codes in unpredictable and problematic ways. Hence, uniformity and alignment are a big focus for the team.
Areas of Responsibility
Comprising a team of four, good collaboration between team members is the key to success. They work in rotations where they take turns addressing requests from other teams. This is how they make sure that requests from many different teams within Tactile working on the story are dealt with quickly and accordingly.
And then there’s technical debt, an inevitable part of software development where teams are constantly reiterating on programmed solutions and making sure the technological infrastructure is on a par with current standards. It’s a big challenge that the team faces regularly, but they meet it head-on, making sure it doesn’t hinder our games’ evolution. Proactive and diligent, they clean up the codebase, keeping it fresh.
To ensure fresh and clean code, team members participate in recurring refactoring workshops. Particularly new team members, coming with new perspectives and knowledge, are great to take on such refactoring tasks. The process is then for a (new) team member to take on an old feature and, put simply, update it and make it better. They make it better by going into deep focus mode for a period of time where they clean up the code, talk to relevant stakeholders and discuss improvement suggestions; is there anything that needs to be added? Removed? Improved? After having gathered all this information, they update the code and ultimately make sure it’s up to current industry standards.
The above image is an example of a recent update. On the left, we see the story flowchart tool that writers use to design and write the narrative. The Content Tools team did their magic and automated this process by building a tool that parses the diagram and inserts all the information directly into Unity. This creates the starting point for the Cinematic Artists to go ahead and fill in all the cinematic details like adding motions, facial expressions and items, as we can see down below. The highlighted area on the left image is the so-called “Dialogue Map Action” which was built by the Content Tools team to simplify the generation of visuals around a dialogue, like facial expressions and text. Thanks to the automation tool mentioned above, the text is filled in automatically and character expressions can be easily picked from a variety of options.
When they’re not juggling requests, the Content Tools programmers work on individual or joint projects. Collaboration isn’t just about tasks and projects, it’s also about having each other’s backs. With regular code reviews they ensure top-notch code quality, consistency, and adherence to the pre-agreed Tactile coding standards.
Story Content 🤝 Story Architecture
In this dynamic world of mobile game development, the Content Tools Team emerges as the story architects, weaving seamless story flows and tools and crafting captivating gameplay experiences. They’re vital contributors to the narrative architecture of our games that keep us engaged, enchanted, and coming back for more.