Plan for Clark Fagot

So much rememory (TM) going on these last few days it has gotten me looking back and thinking about how I ended up as an indie. So I thought I'd get out of character for the moment and share my experiences with others (but just this once).

What a lot of people probably don't know is that I've known Jeff for longer than pretty much anyone on this site. When I was in junior high, a couple of friends and myself began to play around with programming games in Basic and assembly language on the Apple II and C64. These two friends were Chris Cole (who later worked at Dynamix and eventually developed Chain Reaction) and Paul Bowman (who later worked for years at Dynamix and now works at Sony Bend). We used to wander into the game store that Jeff owned at the time and was staffed by, among others, Damon Slye, who later co-founded Dynamix with Jeff. The two of them looked at us through the corner of their eyes when they saw us -- they called us the "hoodlums" and thought we were trying to shoplift. :)

At the time Damon was putting the finishing touches on his first game "Stellar 7" on the Apple II (the original, not the follow-up produced years later at Dynamix which, although a decent game in it's own right, just didn't have the same charm IMO). When Jeff and Damon found out that we were aspiring programmers with some talent we all made quick friends. We would all come in and show Jeff what we had produced and he would give us comments. See, even before he had experience Jeff had an eye for what he liked and was quick to let his opinion be known (still one of his best traits). Unfortunately, the first advice Jeff ever game me was, in retrospect, bad advice. He looked at the Scramble clone I was developing and just didn't think it would be a hit. So he suggested I start over on something else. I did that, but probably should have finished what I started because it was close to my heart and I would have finished it whereas the RPG I started working on was too big and, as a result, pretty soon I started to focus more on school rather than programming. After that, I maintained contact with Jeff and Damon but never really seriously considered game development until years later.

I went to the University of Oregon and majored in Math and Computer Science. One day I took a course in Artificial Intelligence and it really hit me as interesting. The instructor suggested that if I wanted to pursue that, I should take some Psychology. I one upped her and entered a doctoral program in Psychology at the University of San Diego, California. I thoroughly enjoyed myself in graduate school, and even excelled, but 8 years later (5 years of grad school and a few years of post-docs) I started to have doubts that I really wanted to be a research psychologist all my life. I started to talk to Chris about it (he was at Dynamix at the time) and he started talking to Jeff and pretty soon they brought me back into the fold.

I started working at Dynamix in 1997 having not programmed seriously in over 10 years (I wrote Pascal programs to control psychology experiments, but they were minor projects). Even though an entry level programmer at the time, I quickly became the 3space expert, partly due to the fact that 3d math comes easy to me, but also because 3space had been written by one person and abandoned, and it fell upon me to get the library working again (and eventually re-write it). Working on Starsiege, Tribes I & II, and Trophy Hunting 4 & 5 I worked my way up the ranks at Dynamix until one day in 2001 it was closed down.

That's the day I became an Indie. I never viewed that day as a closing down of an opportunity. Rather, I figured I could do anything I wanted from that point. I could go back to Psychology, I could go into Math -- which if I were to be an academic again would make the most sense --, I could go get a job somewhere else in the industry, or I could be my own master and try to build something with the guys that I had worked with at Dynamix and trusted.

The idea of working at another game company just didn't appeal to me. At Dynamix I had always enjoyed my job, but I was also frustrated by how hard it was to be part of the decision process -- in terms of tech development, design, and simply company direction, it all came from above and I never felt master of my own destiny, just a cog in the machine.

Academia has always held a place in my heart. Both my parents were academics and I always assumed I'd do the same. But I also got a view into academic life growing up that others probably don't get. It doesn't help to have a job with total freedom and security if you aren't interested in what you are doing. Some of the people in the department my folks worked in seemed, from my perspective, to be trapped in a cushy job that was no fun for them. I had discovered that psychology didn't do it for me deep down (I enjoyed the day to day tasks, the interaction with colleagues, and find the topic incredibly interesting to this day, but it just didn't do it for me in the end). I could see going back to math, but in my late 30's I'm not sure that opportunity is still there.

So the ultimate dream job for me is really being an Indie game developer. You get all the freedom of academia and a subject matter that is eternally and inherently interesting. The only thing it lacks is security, and BraveTree is always creeping ever closer to that milestone. I hold no illusions that we don't have a long way to go, but we can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel.