Interesting thing happened last week. One of the project managers from Softimage emailed me out of the blue asking me if I would be interested in participating in an interview as part of the product planning research. More specifically, the product planning group was “interviewing artists and animators, trying to understand them and their work better as part of [their] product planning. [They were] especially interested in talking to people with an animation background in the games industry, and would very much like to hear about [my] experiences and perspective.” To my surprise, one of the reasons he wanted to interview me was because he had read my blog entries about the game industry and found them very interesting. I’m glad somebody out there does. :)
This afternoon, I had a conference call with the product planning group and had a great time talking to them about my past and present work in games. We talked a great deal about my day-to-day process, specific techniques that I employ in my work, and my approach to animation in general. They asked me about my experiences with various stages of 3D animation production, motion capture, and scripting and tool development.
They also asked me about my previous projects and what my roles were on those. The group really did their research, because not only did they quote information about those games from my website, they remembered which companies I did them for and the approximate timeframes for those projects. They even asked me about my experience with the closure of Dynamix (that was a fun trip down memory lane).
One thing that piqued my attention was their interest in the indie game developer scene. Based on the content of my blog and website, they followed the links and learned a good deal more about the GarageGames community and my involvement there. We talked about how the Torque Game Engine benefits and enables indie developers, about my views on the differences between indie developers and “big budget” studios, and about how production tools like XSI and Maya are perceived and used in those respective environments.
The conversation lasted a little over an hour, and it sounded like they were happy with the information the got from me. I was actually quite pleased with the call as well, because it felt like the product planning group at Softimage was really going to great lengths to learn about one of its target markets. I think it’s a smart move on Softimage’s part. You have to understand the market in order to develop and release a product that suits it well.
Much like the usability testing I did at Microsoft last month, this interview with Softimage made me feel like I was making a positive contribution to the development of a future product for people like myself. It looks like all of this rambling isn’t just a lame attempt at exercising my First Amendment rights. People actually read and pay attention to my blog. How cool is that?
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