Visiting FIEA

Todd Deery

Tom Carbon

Man its been a while since I updated the Tri-Something website, Almost two months now! Well in between the gap of time between updates FIEA's Todd Deery visited Jacksonville University and gave a speech to the students about the current situation in the video game industry, and what JU students would need to do in order to apply at FIEA. Tom Carbone (FIEA's technical director) then took center stage and gave some insight into the daily lives of programmers that are in the thick of things working for EA on the Madden series of games, focusing on how to design and write your code in order to provide maximum ease of use to producers and prevent problems when planning a non-exclusive game that will appear on a breadth of platforms.

At the end of FIEA's visit, Todd and I penciled in a date and time for the Tri-Something crew to visit FIEA during Jacksonville Universities spring break; when the time came my fiancée and I drove to Orlando and stepped into the campus, unfortunately I was the only one that made it out of the Tri-Something group. Todd met up with us and gave us the grand tour; I must have been a bit awestruck because I completely forgot to take some photos of the campus, luckily the FIEA website has great shots that I've linked to below..

Cohort RoomMocap Stage

After the tour we had the opportunity to sit in on team Drifters (A nickname I recognize them as seeing as the game they're working on is called "Drifters") speech on their current game updates. I won't go into too much detail but the full breakdown is available at the FIEA blog.

After the class ended I met up with the students working on Drifters and got into some tea-time conversation with them about life at FIEA, they were all enthusiastic about the experience, but lamented about the overall work load (they were all pulling 10am-10pm shifts everyday). Afterwards we headed for home, hopefully the next time I visit FIEA will be to attend class!