“Good software development is all about collaboration”
Moonshine is one of the founding members of Solarbots. Today, he talks about unexpected things that lie at the core of good software development and hints at an upcoming surprise for the community.
Years of experience in software development and team management have led moonshine aka David to finally being able to do what he always wanted to – not without informative detours, though. The developer whose love for games was re-ignited by the chance to work for Solarbots always wants to work in a position where his talents add most value to the overall project. Due to great communication skills and the ability to keep a cool head, it often lies within team leadership.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and the path to your involvement in Solarbots?
In my previous job, I met Miso, who I got to know quite well and we also just got along nicely. When he had the idea for Solarbots, he asked me if I wanted to join. It sounded like a fun challenge, but it was actually a hard choice to make. I had been working at this job for 7 years and had risen to a management position; also, I was the sole earner for my family. I had to think about my family, my kids. But I took the risk because I believed in the team and the vision and fortunately, it all paid off!
Did you receive formal training in software or game development, or are you self-taught?
When I was in school I always wanted to be a game developer. When I was in technical college, at the age of 15, I developed various little games with my seat neighbor: Text adventures, role-playing games, things with easy graphics, nothing too complicated, just for fun. And after technical college, I unfortunately stopped doing that. I started doing some mobile development in 2011 because that’s when I got my first android phone. I started playing around with java, and I also played around with AndEngine, the android 2D game engine. I made a moonlander-game, a type of game where you have to navigate your spaceship to land on rocks, and some sidescrolling jump-and-runs, but those were buggy, with horrible code. When I applied to jobs after university, I used those in my portfolio, though. In the mobile app development agency I ended up at, they initially were enthusiastic and said that I had the exact mix of competences that they were looking for. But they never ended up giving me the opportunity to really pursue game development.
It’s very interesting to hear how people end up doing the things they do. At the moment, there are more and more opportunities to study game design at universities and other specialized higher education institutions all over the world. This kind of education wasn’t always so accessible and wide-spread. Did that ever cross your mind, to go and study game development?
(Nods, then smiles.) Actually, my older sister studied game development, and now she is teaching it! She is the real game developer in our family. (Laughs.) After I graduated technical college, I had a bit of a hiatus in general, also I had to go do social service. Then when I enrolled at university, I must honestly say, I just picked the wrong subject. At least it was wrong for me. I picked (tele-)communication systems – which is where you learn all about signals and networks and all that stuff. It is not uninteresting per se, but not what I really wanted to do. So after I got my masters degree, I left.
Wow, but you made it to a masters degree, so you stuck around for quite a long while even though this wasn’t your passion.
Yeah, (shakes his head). I had just picked it because back then, it was one of the most sought-after professions with some of the best paying jobs. Originally, I wanted to become a music producer, a hip hop producer! I wanted to go to a music production school and multimedia school, but they didn't take me. I am a hobby-musician, not as good as the professionals in our team of course. I never really learned to play a musical instrument, which is one of the reasons I got rejected from my dream studies. Before Solarbots, I never had the chance to collaborate so much with musicians, and now that I do and that I can work and exchange ideas with professionals from the music world, it is extremely rewarding for me. So in so many ways, working for Solarbots was an amazing opportunity for a once in a lifetime pivot.
What are some of the differences in working for Solarbots and other projects you’ve worked on in the past?
I worked for a company that made PDF software, something similar to Acrobat Reader, where you can open and view PDFs, work with them, and so on. And I realized: This product does not make people happy. At best, if it works, they have no feelings at all. And if it doesn’t, they’re annoyed. With games it is completely different: You are only producing feelings – fear, happiness, triumph. It’s at the center of game development. The ultimate goal is to create an experience.
A preview of the “parallax background system” moonshine created last week for the upcoming game update. It allows the layering of scenes so that different layers move at different speeds in relation to the camera following the player.
Do people have misconceptions about software development? What’s the “what people think I do” versus “what I really do” meme situation here?
(Thinks, looks around his workplace in the garage/basement of his house, then laughs.) What people expect that I do is that I sit in my basement and stare at the monitor all day – okay, that’s not entirely untrue. But then again: It is not as lonely as this image suggests. Software development is so much more collaboration than many people expect. It’s actually working together with people all the time. People such as artists, other developers, music composers, and the community at large. We are building something together, and everyone has different ideas about it. The collaboration makes the product. Good software development is not about good software but about collaborating with people. Let me put it this way: A bad developer plus good collaboration is much better than the other way round.
Also, it’s not so much writing code. It’s not sitting in front of your computer and wiggling your fingers. Most of the time you’re thinking. It's 90 percent thinking and 10 percent writing, and that’s why it has to be so collaborative – the more minds, the better. The challenge is almost never the writing of the code, it’s the finding of a solution to a complex problem. Building a house is not just laying bricks or wood. You have to know about how life goes into a room, where best to put windows, how the weather influences the material, should the door open to the inside or the outside … similar deliberations happen in software development.
What are you working on this week? Can you explain some of the details/challenges that you’re facing?
At the moment, I’m working on a bot accessory system: Bot’s will have body parts that can be replaced and changed. You will be able to put on visual and functional objects. This is an interesting challenge, because our bots are hand-drawn and attaching things to our bots is not as easy as copy-paste. I have to play with positioning and tracking markers in order to allow for the accessories to move in unison with the original drawing. At the moment, I’m experimenting with the setup and trying to make it work for the majority of the bots. For some bots with challenging or special animations, the question will be how to include the accessories in the animation or make a compromise, so that it’s all there and moving but still looking good. Bot parts and body crafting is very much in the future of Solarbots, and I can also say: There is a small community surprise at the end of this year!
Awesome, I can’t wait to see what it’s all about! Now that we’re already talking about the future: What 2023 Solarbots development are you most looking forward to, personally?
The thing I’m personally looking forward to is player housing. Players will be able to have a house and adding things to it. We are also preparing a tool which will allow players to make their own furniture and exchange it with other players. I am excited about this because I did 7 years of library development in my last job. Now I’m making a library from which people can create their own furniture – with logic, like for example, being able to turn lights off and on on a self-made lamp. And it’s a new adventure for me because I’m creating this library for the end user and not a team of developers.
And the other big thing I am excited about is another type of development: team development! At Solarbots, we started as quite a small team for what we set out to do. In social theory, it is said that a team’s main phases are forming, storming, norming and performing. It’s crazy to see that our team has gone through all of these stages in such a small time and is already at the performing benchmark. So now that we are here, in the performing phase, we are also looking to expand and improve. We’re pushing forward fast, creating our own collaboration techniques and workflows, and I can already see that we are going to grow and expand at all ends – development, artistry, communications and marketing, community management … and I’m really down for the journey!
An example of one of the crypto stamps issued by the Austrian Postal Service in 2019. The analog post stamp’s digital counterpart is stored on the blockchain – it was the first of its kind worldwide.
What’s the first NFT you ever owned?
That’s a good question, I’ve been asked that before but just now I realized that I’ve always given the wrong anster. (Takes something from the shelf close to his desk and holds it into the camera.) It’s actually a crypto post stamp from the Austrian Postal Service. They made a project where you get a post stamp and its crypto counterpart. I framed it and put it on my shelf and I just saw it there when you asked. I wasn’t much into Crypto or NFTs at the beginning, I just bought this then just as a funny gimmick. It looks cool, it’s a rainbow unicorn. But it does symbolize what I like about some NFTs, which is how the virtual and other worlds can come together, bridging the blockchain world with the outside world. This is what I find fascinating and innovative.
And, last but not least, the question that I just have to ask all of our teammates: Lacrean Empire, Illskagaard or Arboria? Why?
Illskagaard. Of course. They’re the only honorable workers out there! The Lacrean Empire … they are religious fanatics. Arboria, okay, they are cool, but they are plant-loving meat eaters living in plastic houses … like, what? No. Listen: Illskagaard conquered the northern permafrost by using technology and hard, brave work. That’s something I admire.