Recently, I was fortunate enough to be invited to an event in Santiago, Chile called Traweln.  Traweln is a gathering of entrepreneurs and investors from around the globe but all have some sort of connection to Latin America.  The event was organized by two outstanding and inspirational entrepreneurs, Wences Casares and Tiburcio de la Cárcova.

Several game developers were in attendance, and the organizers had the foresight to seat all of us together at the asado(barbecue).   It was a lively conversation with much discussion about development practices in North America vs. South America and the state of our respective markets.  I definitely learned a lot and hopefully made some new friends.

It’s springtime in South American so the weather was perfect and the venue was outstanding.  I snapped a few photos below.

The French built this castle and vineyard in the 1880s just south of Santiago.  Wences recently purchased the estate from the Chilean government. 

Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail, delivered the keynote:



Then we had an “asado” or barbecue.  200 lbs of meat were grilled up.  I was seated with founders/CEOs of South American game companies.  The estate spreads over 20 very lush acres.



The backdrop for the keynote address was incredible.

It’s the holiday season and you know what that means; Crazy shoppers, lots of traffic, holiday decor, and of course, giving to those in need. This year at Robot, we decided to give to children who won’t be receiving presents this holiday season by participating in The Salvation Army Angel Tree Program.

The Salvation Army Angel Tree Program provides assistance for needy children, as well as teens and senior citizens. The Salvation Army gives presents for the holidays, food vouchers, and family gifts as well. We thought this would be a great and easy way to help those who won’t be celebrating with gifts and abundant food.  Plus, the Salvation Army was out to help out 55,000 children, teens, and seniors in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and we wanted to do our part.

We set up our white angel tree in our café, and after long hours of decorating and adding our finishing touches (including a Terminator Robot Head as our tree topper), we were ready to hang our angels on the tree. These angels ranged in ages from 6 months to 14 years, asking for anything from a church dress, to sneakers, to CD players, and skates.  People picked off the angels from the tree, and went shopping for gifts. Once all the gifts were returned to me, I bagged them up and took them to the Salvation Army drop-off.

When I arrived at the drop-off, I was amazed to see the number of trucks lined up accepting bags of gifts. Some trucks were packed full, while others were quickly getting there. I was very impressed to see people giving so much to those in need. Here are the pictures of our angel tree with all the gifts before taken to be dropped off.

If you haven’t already noticed by the looks of our office, we (meaning Lizette and I) love to decorate. We thought for Christmas we should go all out on the new office. It started out with the angel tree, a few other small decorations, and some garland here and there. We decorated white garland with Christmas ornaments, bows, and other fun, glittery decor. Here’s what we ended up with.



Although it seemed like the office was decorated and ready to go for the holidays, we had one more great idea that turned into a much bigger project than anticipated. We began by taking the left over ornaments, and attaching them to fishing line and ornament hooks. Lizette started hanging the ornaments from the cable trays running throughout the office. 2 and a half days later, one hall was finished, and there were still two more to go.

We moved on to the next hallway, and then the last, and finally the whole office was finished. A total of 4 days and 500 ornaments later, we ended up with this.   Enjoy!

Joe Gillum sits directly across from me in the blue pod. He’s an easy-going guy and a talented designer, and he’s been my friend for over seven years. But what he said to me on that particular Monday morning sent a cold shiver down my spine.

“I reinstalled Eve this weekend.”

Robot’s designers are a quirky bunch. We’ve got an ex-Navy man, an ex-rock singer, and an ex-molecular biologist. We’ve all been working together for a long time and know each other’s temperments, quirks, and skills.

One of Joe’s best qualities is that he’s an excellent “fun farmer.”  He can find any game’s redeeming features and learn valuable design lessons in the process. He’s skilled at the soft sell; a casual mention of what he played over the weekend often gets other Robots purchasing a game they might never have bought on their own.

Joe’s not alone. Almost all of Robot's employees are evangelists for the games we love. Because we’re weak and peer pressure works all too well, our relentless promotion of those games infects those around us.

Like addicts no longer satisfied by gateway drugs, some of us have developed extreme tastes. How else to explain the internal Robot “Grognards” mailing list, where Rob Fermier and Mike McGlumphy discuss the latest obscure hex-based World War 2 wargame and Harter Ryan waxes enthusiastically about the 300 page manual included in the “Admiral’s Edition” of War in the Pacific? Where else could a game like Dwarf Fortress – a frighteningly deep and complex city builder that uses ASCII characters instead of graphics, like an old-school Roguelike – slowly make its way from Ian Fischer’s laptop onto a dozen other machines?

But firing up Eve again? That was just wrong - so very, very wrong.

We’d all gone down the Eve road years before. A bunch of us had played together when the game first launched in 2003. Many of us were veterans of Ultima Online and Everquest, excited by a fresh setting for an MMO. The game swept through the office like wildfire. For a couple of months, all anyone talked about were the best places to mine Kernite and how to survive in low-sec space.

Our herd of developers is easily led to the gaming trough, but we also have short attention spans. Ian Fischer, who had set up our original Eve corporation, played constantly. Whenever I’d log in, I’d immediately get a chat - “COME MINE, CORP NEEDS MEGACYTE.”  Since Ian’s my boss, Eve started to feel like a second job. I was ready to move on to the next game.

Eventually we all caught the World of Warcraft bug and everyone stopped playing Eve. But with our gang, it doesn’t take much to relight an old flame. Within a month of Joe’s casual mention of Eve, all the old players crawled out of the woodwork. I hopped back on first, enthusiastically discussing the new features with Joe every day at lunch. Before long, Mike Coker and Rob Fermier joined in. Then Ian confessed he’d never actually cancelled - in fact, he still had multiple active accounts with several high-end characters.

I don’t know how long this fresh bout of “Eve fever” will last. Ian’s already taking things to extremes; he wants to get all of us in a PvP gang some day at lunch and camp a warp gate. Mike Coker’s got a second account now. My poor pregnant wife is due next month, and we’ve got a game of our own to create – do I really have time to devote to an MMO?

Then again...

Just last week, Tim Deen and Jerome Jones were playing that free Battlefield Heroes game from EA. I’ve been in the mood for a shooter. And while I don’t like anime at all, that BlazBlue game sounds pretty cool. I could even get some tips from Justin Rouse, our resident fighting game expert.

At this very moment, Joe’s sitting right across the blue pod from me, working away. Time to show him a few screenshots from War in the Pacific.

- Dave "Learguy" Leary

The pictures of the finished Lego sign are really the star of this episode.  As such, I’ll do my best not to bore you with too many words.  Conveniently, as any of my fellow Robots can attest, I’m well known for my brevity:)

Anyhow, after two cautious drives into work, both halves of the sign made it to the office without issue.  They spent a couple of days on the table in the Biergarten.  They look somehow ominous in this picture.

The next task was to affix the French cleats to the wall.  I went to Lowe’s to buy some anchors.  My five year old son Tommy tagged along.

As we were walking into the store, he asked, “Daddy, what are you getting?”

“Some anchors for the Lego sign.”, I replied.  Anticipating the inevitable follow-up, I quickly said “Anchors are the metal pieces that will hold the sign onto the wall.”

Tommy heaved a dramatic sigh of relief, “Oh.  That’s good.  Otherwise the bad guys might steal it.”  Tommy’s in that perfect phase of innocence where everything is about good guys and bad guys.  It’s awesome.

I tried explaining...  “Well, I doubt the bad guys will break in to steal the Lego sign.  We have a lot of things that are more valuable in the office.”

In that way that kids do, Tommy completely ignored what I said and continued in his own world, “You should make sure it’s on the wall good so the bad guys don’t get it.”

The only available reply at this point was: “Yup, I’ll do that.  I definitely don’t want the bad guys to steal the sign.”

On we went in search of the perfect wall anchor.  To lend support in his own manner, Tommy dropped into the vaunted 'Spartan Defense' mode (complete with sound effects) somewhere in aisle 14.  He’s played way, way too much Halo Wars.

I guess I’ve lost the concise angle already.  Oh well.

Armed with the Anti-Evil Bad Guy Anchors, I went into work on the weekend to get the cleats attached to the wall.  Marcin, one of our programmers, came in to help.  The fam tagged along, too.  The boys had a blast playing Halo Wars together.  Here are some pics of the glorious French Cleats.  C’est magnifique!

At this point, the only thing left was to fully assemble the sign and finish filling in the letters.  Putting the sign together was quick.  And surprisingly painless.

Here are some pics of the group build we did to fill out the letters.  That was a lot of fun.  Much like my test runs of the ‘t’ and ‘o’ fill, we didn’t get enough density during the group build.  There were too many empty spaces for the look I wanted.  Harter Ryan (one of our executive producers) and I compacted things quite a bit during the final glue up.  A key thing was adding a lot of little pieces for visual interest.

By the time we finished gluing the sign, I think the total time I had put into the sign was roughly 85 hours.  At least 45 of those were gluing.  I’ll be happy to avoid super glue for a while.

Here are some pictures of the “big move” from table to wall.  The good luck continued; the move went without a hitch.  That’s Vijay and Nate (one of our concept artists) helping to carry the sign.  Crow is apparently supervising or something.

TA-EFFING-DA!  Here’s the final deal on the wall.

Here are some close-ups of the letters.  The minifig themes are:
• Star Wars for the ‘r’
• Indy for the first ‘o’
• Medieval for the ‘b’ (hey, we did do Age2 after all!)
• Pirates for the second ‘o’
• Batman for the ‘t’

And, here’s one final gratuitous shot of me and my boys, Andy and Tommy, standing in front of the sign.  Happy demeanors carefully hide our ruthless cage-fighting abilities.  Bad guys beware.

Woot.  The sign was a lot of work, but I think the end result was worth it.  The sign is pretty cool and was a blast to put together.  Well, save for the blisters.

dave

Before we dive into today’s scintillating and titillating discourse on the finer points of haphazard Lego sign construction, let’s look at a few more Robot logos that have popped up at, er, Robot.  You might recall that I foretold of 19 more logos back in the first blog.  Alas, only two more so far…

One on the drink machine.

And one more on the super secret back entrance to our office space.  Though, now that I look at this fine image, I realize that you’ll have to take my word for it on where it is.  Trust me.  It’s super secret and cool.  Mostly.

Enough bad jokes.  Back to the sign.

It was time to do some layout.  The big letters were scary, so I started laying out the ‘entertainment’ part of the logo.  That went quickly.  I made a few tweaks from the original layout, but nothing of note.

And then I noticed that I had more space in front of the letters than the back.  Turns out that I started the letters one stud to the right of where I should have.  Crap.  Well, at least I made that mistake now and won’t make it again (hah).  Using the ever-handy official Lego brick separator, it didn’t take more than 10 minutes to move everything over a stud.

Once that was done, I stepped back to marvel at my work.  How could I not?  I’d just placed at least 100 pieces.  Out of like 8000.  If that doesn’t scream ‘marvel break’, I don’t know what does.

Alas, a possible issue arose during said marvel break.  When I placed the letters, I was economical and used the fewest plates possible to cover the necessary studs.  But, that meant I had horizontal plates mixed with vertical plates and all kinds of plate sizes in action.  In some places, it looked a bit messy.  I was pretty sure I would want to fix it, but I left it alone hoping I would get over it.

Time for a big boy, the ‘r’.  This wasn’t as easy as I was hoping it would be.  I should have made a bigger printout of each letter.  I kept getting lost going back and forth between the Legos and the printout.  After several checks and re-checks, I got the black and blue parts of the ‘r’ done.

I did the other black and blue parts of the big letters over the next few days.  Here’s what those looked like.

Once the big outlines were done, I could finally do what I’d been waiting for; the full version of the ‘r’.  I hastily slapped together the white and red parts just to see how it would look.

You know, it looked pretty damn good.

I took a few days off.  An extended marvel break, if you will.  When I got back to it, I realized that I’d made a ton of layout gaffes on the letters.  Some were easily fixed, others weren’t.  Much time passed trying to fix them all.  I ended up fattening the vertical black sections of the big letters.  Not a big deal, but it looked better.  Plus, it helped hide a few errors.

Next, I did the sides.  That was the quickest segment on the whole sign.  No mistakes, either.  Woot.  Here’s a shot of the sides.  The missing plates at the bottom are where the two halves join up.  All of the plates along that intersection won’t be glued so that I can easily transport the sign to the office.

As I got ready to glue, I realized that I needed more plates.  I was short on bigger blue plates and had used too many tiny plates to cover big areas.  Yuck.

I was also stratospherically off on the number of white tiles I ordered.  I can’t even figure out how I screwed up the order that badly.  Plus, based on some comments from Vijay (one of our lead programmers), I decided that I did have to fix those initial letters, which meant that I needed different plates than I had.  I scavenged what I could from my kids, but it wasn’t enough.

Hello Pick a Brick Order #3.  Hopefully it’s the last one.  I threw in a few mountain pieces for my boys since I’d already pillaged their collections quite a bit.  And, I was pretty sure there would be more pillaging in the future...

While I waited for that order to show up, I started gluing what I could.  I started with the ‘entertainment’ letters again.  I finished pretty quickly, but something was off.  It took me a while to find it, but somehow the ‘r’ had grown a stud in width during the gluing process.  I must have pulled off too many pieces at one time and just gotten befuddled putting them back on.

Luckily, I didn’t glue the white plates.  They are really hard to pull off once the sides are on, so I wasn’t worried about them coming off or getting taken off.  Plus, not gluing them let me fix mistakes like the ‘r’ by pulling off a few white plates and doing that area over.  So, while I was an idiot for screwing up the ‘r’, at least I planned for it.

Insert 15 to 20 hours of gluing.  Here’s the sign as I’m crossing the halfway point on the red and white gluing.

Another 5 hours pass.  And I’m still gluing.

Here’s a collection of the mistakes I made during glue-up.  You can see the overly fat 'r' I mentioned earlier.  Hideous.

After some more gluing, here’s how the final ‘ot’ looked.  Brad (one of our lead artists) had a really cool idea to do the white letters raised up one level with the tiles on top.  I think that really makes things pop and sets up well for the final final phase...

It was pretty awesome when I affixed the final red plate to the interior of the ‘r’.  Woot.

Not done yet, though.  The final, final phase awaited.  The plan was to do a random fill of cool Lego pieces on top of the red plates to give the sign some character.

I quickly did that to the ‘t’ before I went to bed.  Here’s what that looked like.  It's not quite full enough; there are too many empty spaces.  But, you get the idea.

I was going to be super strict about not putting anything but red pieces in the fill.  Then I had the idea to theme each letter around a different collection of minifigs.  That’s much cooler, so screw the red restriction.  I bartered with my boys to get some of their dupe minifigs in exchange for a new Lego set.  Here’s the ‘t’ redone with a Batman theme.

With that, it was finally ready to go to the office.  The plan is to have everyone chip in and do the red fill pieces together.  Followed by more gluing, of course.

With the sign out of the Dining/Craft room, we took advantage and played a board game in there.  Tikal.  Great game; both my boys (5.5 and 8 years old) love it.

So, one more blog to go and then the creation shall be complete!

dave

Okay, so we’ve got some epic base plates.  As Wayne would say, “Excellent!”  Or Bill & Ted.  Or Mr. Burns.  Take your pick.

Anyhow, the base plates flexed too much when I picked them up.  Despite the prodigious amount of glue I’ll be using to permanently protect them from prying hands, I don’t want any Legos popping off as the panels get moved around during the rest of the construction.  I need to add some strength to the panels.

I also need to cover up the edges.  The edges of the sign are going to be covered in plates that wrap around for the full-on Lego effect.  2 stud plates weren’t noticeable enough, though.  6 stud plates were way too bulky.  So, I’m going to wrap the sides with 4 stud plates.

With the ¾” backer board and the ¾” French Cleats that will hold this sucker on the wall, the 4 stud plates aren’t quite wide enough, though.

What are French Cleats, you ask?  French Cleats are a classically simple way to attach something to wall using its own weight to help hold it on.  All you do is rip a board on a 45 degree angle and attach half of it to the object and the other half to the wall.  Assuming you attach them correctly, you end up with a ‘hook’ on the object that latches over the mating piece on the wall.  Take a look at the pics; it’ll make sense.

But, I digress.  I need something to cover that gap between the 4 stud plate and the wall.  Wood to the rescue!  I milled up a quick maple frame to support everything.  Here’s a super magnificent ‘action shot’ of me fitting the maple frame on.  If you look at the bottom corner, you can see how the plates will wrap around the edge.

Sanding, priming, and painting the frame took a lot longer than the milling, but that’s pretty much always the case with woodwork.

Anyhow, after a few more hours of work, here’s what the back looks like all put together with the frame, cleats, and support batten down the middle.  The batten serves to help keep things together, but it’ll also prevent any horizontal sliding of the sign once it’s on the wall since the French Cleats are on either side.

So, Phase 1 is now truly done.  I can begin attaching Legos now.  Well, I can begin tentatively attaching Legos.  I’m sure I’ll be repositioning them a lot once they’re down.

You know what, though?  It’s pretty damn hot in Texas during the summer.  My garage is way too hot to do the rest of the work, so I moved the whole shebang indoors. 

Where?  The Dining Room.  Like most folks, we never use that room.  I mean never freaking ever.

Well, that’s not exactly fair.  I think we did eat Christmas dinner in there once like 5 years ago.  And, my kids do use it all the time… for crafts and homework.  In fact, they even call it the Craft Room.  So, what better place to build a Lego sign?

Time to put some 700 white plates on top of the base plates.  The bulk of the white plates are going to be 6x10 plates.  That’s a nice mix between overall size and look, IMO. 

Here’s a shot that shows the basic running bond layout I’m using with the plates.

It was at this point that I looked through the vast array of Legos I ordered and realized that I forgot to order the white plates to fill in the running bond gaps.  Doh!  Time for Pick A Brick Order #2.  I wonder how many more are coming…

Putting the white plates on went fairly quick.  There were only a few cases where I had to persuade the plates to bridge the gaps between the base plates.  Apart from the order gaff, the only real downside involved some monster blisters I developed.  After pushing, sliding, and persuading the white plates, I had some really nice dime-sized blisters on my thumbs.  Double  Doh!

There’s the finished white plate layout.  Clearly the best dining room table ever made.  Alternatively, it could also be a wicked diorama for a Lego re-enactment of the Hoth battle from Empire.

Also, bonus shot of our new lab puppy, Solo.  Yes, I’m that much of a geek that we named our dog Solo.  At least I didn’t put him in a blue parka and set him on the table…

dave

We chucked our old ‘everyone has a small office’ layout when we started Robot. We wanted something more open and team-centric vs. everyone closeted off in a separate office. Now, everyone sits in a common area with 10 other folks. It’s been working pretty well. We’re definitely communicating more, which means the crazy things we’re doing with our games are going much faster. Of course, I now know more about my fellow Robots than I ever cared to. Everything has a price. :)

Anyhow, the pods are a shared space. Shared spaces can tend to be bland. We planned some cool themes to give each pod a strong identity. Grandiose designs for dinosaur jungles and comic book havens were hatched. One of the pods was even going to have a Lego theme. How cool would that have been?

Why the past tense? Unfortunately, real life intervened. Starting a company is hard. And long. And expensive. Things just got in the way. We tabled the full-on themes for a while. Well, except for our German Biergarten cafe. Some things just refuse to be ignored.

I still wanted to find a way to do something with Legos given how many Legomaniacs we’ve got on staff.  Ever since I saw this awesome Google sign, I had really wanted to make one for Robot.  Thankfully, the topic of cool stuff to put on the walls came up.  I told Patrick Hudson, one of our VPs, of my willingness to slaughter innocent babies for the chance to build one.

Sans any actual baby-cide, I started planning out the Robot Lego sign.  Here’s the gridded-out Robot logo.  We need something pretty thin, so most of the sign is going to be made out of plates rather than bricks.

The wall we are putting it on is big and empty, so we’ve decided to make a massive sign.  We originally picked 4 by 8 feet due to convenience, but that’s a really odd Lego dimension.  45” by 90” is much more ‘Lego friendly’.

In terms of color, the official Robot logo is on a black background.  We seem to have a lot of those already, though.  We have this cool sign on the building.  We have another one in our lobby.  And one day, this door mat showed up.  At this rate, 19 more black Robot logos will show up next week.  We needed some other color, so we went with the white version.

The final bit of the plan was to glue 18 of the big 15” by 15” grey Lego base plates on some backer boards and then glue the pieces on top of those.  Simple enough.  With that decided, I spent a bit of time counting up the Legos we’d need.  Eventually, counting gave way to educated guessing since I know we’ll change a few things anyway.

All told, it’s roughly ~7600 pieces.  The Lego website definitely is not optimized for such a large order, but the nice woman on the phone said that was the best way to do it.  Oh well.  Apart from the base plates and the white plates to cover those up, there really wasn’t anything too outrageously expensive.  Well, at least not outrageous in the context of 7600 pieces anyway.

The Legos took a while to show up.  I was pretty excited by the time they arrived.  I’m reminded of that old Tim Allen joke about him being so excited for a package to arrive that he humps the UPS guy’s leg while the dog takes the box...  Good thing they arrived whilst I was at work.

Here’s what 7500 Legos look like.  There was that inevitable “Holy Crap” moment when I saw that they didn’t sort them by color.  I’m still sorting out all those tiny pieces. :)  But at least there are plenty of vivid, easily discernible colors.  My oldest boy got the latest Lego Death Star from Santa this past holiday.  That thing is bad ass.  But, let me tell you, it takes a *long* time to sort through approximately one billion bags of grey Legos.

On to the assembly…

You know what?  It’s pretty darn hard to glue Legos to wood.  Looking around on the Internet, there really isn’t a lot of easy “Just go buy XYZ, it works great” advice, either.  It took three different glues, but I finally found one that works really well.  Unfortunately, it’s a variant of contact cement, so once the base plates touch the wood, they’re stuck there forever.  And lining up 18 base plates is finicky business.  Suck.

Change in plans.  Each base plate is now getting mounted on its own backer board.  That way, I can individually square those up and then glue those on a second backer board.  That will actually help since I can’t really make the sign out of one piece anyway since I have to truck it into work without it falling apart.  I’ll make the sign in two pieces.  A fine plan.

It wasn’t too bad squaring up the base plates.  Each needed a couple of custom cuts, but that was done in a couple of hours.

I’ve always been stupid about making things overly strong.  I build a decent amount of furniture, too.  I’ve always had the rule that my stuff needs to withstand me jumping on it when it’s done.  As the years have worn on, my belly’s gotten bigger and the furniture’s gotten a smidge more refined.  I’ve had to modify my rule at times.  This desk I made for my wife got only a quick ‘butt swipe sitting’ rather than a full-on gorilla jump.

I don’t think I’ll jump on our sign when it’s done.  I don’t want it to fall off the wall, though.  So, I’ve got splines in between all of the individual base plate boards.  And the backers interleave.  As does the outside frame.  And the white Lego plates are going to be aligned to cover all the gaps.  That oughtta do it. :)

Those splines made the last big glue-up harder than it should have been.  98 degree, Texas heat makes wood glue dry *awfully* fast...  A few choice words might have been issued in the name of “fun” while I was getting those things to fit.  I’m pretty sure my wife regrets offering to help me glue those up, but thankfully, she’s pretty understanding. :)

And, here we are.  We have two ‘epic’ base plates that will form the back of the sign.  Seems like they should be purple, though…