Disney Interactive

I really hate blogs that apologize for the gap in updates, but eight months seems pretty extreme to me.

It's too bad, too, because I've really gone through a lot of growth since I accepted a position as an Associate Software Engineer at Disney Interactive in Salt Lake. I feel like there's quite a few life lessons that will never be properly expressed because I didn't write them down as I learned them.

However, since I've last wrote I've acquired a job, helped ship a AAA game, and even taken ownership of a feature in that game. My position primarily has to do with managing testers and equipment for Disney Infinity 3.0 in a multiplayer environment across 5 different consoles, but I've carved out a role in multiplayer feature development. I worked on the matchmaking feature and helped develop the flow and many of the levels for the release.

Disney is an incredible company to work for, and the studio culture here at Avalanche in Salt Lake is some of the best I've heard of in the industry. My boss, Matt Dawson, is incredibly supportive of my aspirations to become a producer not just in workload but also in title, and regularly talks me up to the other directors as well as allows me the freedom to do whatever I see necessary to make the multiplayer in Infinity 3.0 great.

I feel like I'm using my full talent of applying myself where work seems to be needed, and it's come up "multiplayer production". I'm extremely happy and consider myself pretty well qualified--my graduate thesis was a multiplayer-only game, anyway. There seems to be a lack of attention to multiplayer in the studio, which is where I hope to come in and create a new position for myself that will be obvious once it grabs the attention of studio higher-ups.