Get to Know a Tools Developer

        1. So, who’s Byron Mayne? How about a quick intro. 

I am from a large city just outside of Toronto, Canada and moved to Montreal about 5 years ago to work in the game industry.  Ever since I was a small kid I enjoyed playing games. I loved strategy and open world and I can’t imagine how much time I sunk into playing Age of Empires or anything from the elder scrolls series. It was always my dream to work in the industry and I was lucky and determined enough to get my first job at a mobile game studio in February 2014. 

        2. What’s a simple way to explain your role as a tools and pipeline developer?

The analogy I often give to people when they ask me is this: Pretend you are building a house. The construction workers are putting together the walls using nails. Each worker is using the nearest stone to bash in the nail. Yeah this totally works, but is it really efficient? I come along and create a hammer which helps build the house with much less effort, and a much lower chance of losing a finger.

        3. Can you share some background on how you got started in the gaming industry, to get where you are today?

I was always interested in games. If the game I would play had a level editor, I would open it up and create my own. Warcraft 3 Editor, Hammer, GECK, Unreal; if it was available to me I would make terrible levels.

When it came to finishing highschool I knew where I wanted to go, but it was hard to convince my family about pursuing a job in the industry. It seemed to them to be a dream of someone who just liked to play games. There were a lot of unknowns and misconceptions about a career in the industry (hopefully this article helps to clarify some of them). So instead I took an engineering program, which I was not a fan of.  On the bright side, in the first year I had a C course where I learned to program for the first time. I fell in love with programming from that day on. After completion of the first year I dropped out, took a year off, made some burritos, and then enrolled in a game development program at Algonquin College.

I learned a wide range of concepts about game development while in the program. However I kept coming back to making small tools to help make our final project simpler to build. I loved taking what I made and then giving it to my team members to help make their lives easier. 

In my final year, I started to worry. At that time, the game industry was notoriously hard to get into. I was terrified of coming out of school and not having a job, so I worked on branding myself. I wrote a blog article on a gaming outlet, participated in a game jam, spoke at the local game developers conferences, and answered as many questions as I could on game development forums. I wanted to make sure when you googled ‘Byron Mayne’ you found me and what I had worked on. I made an effort to go to all the events, like IGDA or the  Dirty Rectangles, which is a local indie developer community in Ottawa, Ontario. I met some really cool people and made a lot of friends. I did all of this to help secure a future career in the game industry. 

All that being said, people in the industry came to know who I was and it helped me land my first job in a QA position at a local studio.

In 2015 is when my efforts paid off big time. I received an email from a game development studio that wanted some help building their VR workflows. They had found me on a Discord chat and saw that I started the Unity user group. This was my first role where I would be exclusively working on tools, and I was over the moon excited.

Between then and now I worked for a few other game studios working on mobile games. I was doing development for game play but it was not what I wanted. A recruiter reached out from EA asking if I was interested in a toolset developer roll and I was pumped! I took them up on the interview and the rest is history.

        4. What does your average day look like?

Everyday we have a standup where we describe what we’ve been working on and what our goals are for the day. Some days I can just put my headphones on and zone out programming, others I’m doing more project owner work: planning out future tasks, grooming the backlog of features and bugs, or talking to end users and getting feedback. I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people, and as an extrovert I love this. 

        5. What’s your favorite type of problem to solve?

I really enjoy trying to tackle new problems or low level concepts. I naturally want to rip a system apart to figure out how it works, and when I get to do that it’s exciting. Being a tools developer means touching a wide range of products so there’s always something new which keeps me inspired.

        6. How do you stay up-to-date on the latest tech developments?

Most of my work is done in C# so I’m reading a lot. Some forums I use are .Net Blog, Reddit, a few Discord servers, books, and slack channels.  I also have a ton of side projects where I tinker with new concepts. Most of them are half complete on my GitHub. I sometimes look at a new library and try to write my own, just so I fully understand what it’s doing. For example in the web world there is Redux, a predictable state container for JavaScript apps, and I wrote a C# version to better understand it. I’ve written my own programming language, json serializer, IL Weaver, Web Server, ect. Most of these are half completed projects, but it’s enough to learn the concept and move on. 

        7. Your position is focused on problem solving in a fast paced environment, what do you do to balance out work when you’re not at your desk?

I spend most of my work day building digital things and sometimes I find it nice to step away and build something real. Cooking, woodworking, diy electronics, are all things I find scratching that itch. I have been described as an aggressive walker and find there is nowhere I can’t go on foot or with my bike while in the city.