How game development gave me a head start in my DevRel career

Bradston Henry: Welcome everybody to How Game Development gave me a headstart in my DevRel career. I got about 15 minutes, so I'm going to try to share a lot of really cool things with you guys. Oh, it looks like I'm not ready to start. I think I need to put in my code here. Up, down, down left, right, left, right, AB. There we go. Start. There we go.

Welcome everybody. My name is Bradston Henry. I am a developer advocate at IBM. And as you might guess, I'm a little bit extra. I have a lot of energy. I love video games. I've loved grading video games, and I'm hoping today with this talk that I shared with you, my story that I can share a little bit about how game development has really inspired my DevRel journey, as well as how it's shown me some things that has helped me along the way.

So just a little bit about myself.

So like I said, I'm a developer advocate. At IBM, I have about eight to nine years of experience in development, in game development as my primary role and also in just standard just development with mobile applications, front end and backend. So I have a lot of experience in the industry. It's been great throughout the years. I also currently live in Baton Rouge, not Baton Rouge. Oh no, I live in Durham, North Carolina. I used to live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but now I live in Durham, North Carolina, the great state of North Carolina. So it's been an adventure.

I've loved being here. And as some of you may know from, if you looked at kind of the abstract of this talk that I've only been in DevRel for about six to nine months. I just hit I think eight, nine months like yesterday or a few days ago.

So this is still all new to me, but so much that I've done in my career and so much I've done in game development has really helped me to have a head start and I want to share a little bit of that. So let's start with Mylo or my story. So you guys get an idea of who I am, what I'm about, and where it all started. Well, it started way back in the day with little Brads throwing it up as a four or 5-year-old kid who was in love with Bernstein bears for whatever reason, but also in love with video games. I've always been a little bit extra.

I've always had a lot of creative energy and I've always loved what I loved, and I've always loved what other people loved. If I feel energy coming from somebody else, I feel like that's been something I've wanted to learn about.

So for me, this started early for me from four years old to, I guess I'm 33 now. I've been in the creative world, just living life to the full. So just a little bit more about me. When I was 17 years old, I took one of the craziest adventures of my life. I got an opportunity to learn how to fly a plane, and I actually flew a plane by myself at an airline in Atlanta, and I flew it. It was an adventure, and who knew that I would do that in my life?

You could ask my parents, maybe they knew because I was a little, I'm a little bit adventurous. So I've always been doing things that have kind of pushed me and pushed my limits. And that led to me being in college one day becoming a B-boy or a break dancer. This is actually a picture of me and my crew.

Yes, my crew textiles. We actually performed for Jerry Springer coming to our college and he was sharing about his story and we got to perform for him. It was really cool. And going on with that.

I used to compete in break dancing. I used to go to events, what we used to call jams and battle. I used to just be in there dancing, spin in my head, just living it to the full. I've always loved music, I've loved creativity, I've loved everything that I do. And I graduated eventually from the illustrious Georgia Institute of Technology. And with that, I brought all that creativity to the next stage of my life. I became a mechanical engineer. That's what I went to school for.

But it actually ended up that engineering wasn't for me, and I stumbled into the world of game development. So this is the next stage in my life when I became a game developer and I started really, really investing in everything that is game development.

So just showing you a few little things that I made along the way. I've made a few different games on mobile for the PC and in different ways. You can see here a picture of me at the Game Developer Conference in GDC in San Francisco with I would say my main partner in crime, Kyle Smith. Shout out to Kyle Smith. He's been with me helping me work on games. He's a visual designer.

He's also a programmer. He probably doesn't want me to say he's a programmer. He doesn't want anybody thinking that. But we've worked together. We made a lot of games and a lot of what we've done together, what I've done on my own, the things that I've learned has really taught me a lot. And when I started my career here and Dev Rel, I didn't know how much I would be ready for what I was doing.

So let's do something really cool. We're going to co-op this next stage of this talk.

Alright, we're going to co-op play together. What I'm going to try to do, my goal in this game is to give you my game dev knowledge gems. Okay? So I'm Player one Ston, and you're Player two, my Devra family. And my goal throughout this talk is that by the end, you will have all of the game dev knowledge gems you need to take your DevRel career to next level. So let's start with the first gem that I want to drop on you guys, which is the Player First mentality. One thing that I learned really, really early in my game development career is that it wasn't just about having a great game or a game with the best features or the best gameplay or the best looking game. It was about making a game that was focused on the player, focused on what the player desired, and helping them to find the thing that they had fun with that they really enjoyed.

I share a few pictures here of what I think is one of the companies in the game development industry who's set the standard for that, which is Nintendo Super Mario, CC four, super Metro, legend of Zelda, breath of the Wild Games that have set the pace for the industry. But always when you talk to Nintendo to developers to what they do, they always think about Player first. The way that they say it is gameplay first. And for them, gameplay first means what is the focus that the player wants? They want to play the game. They want to have fun, they really want to enjoy it. They concepts the world, the images, the visuals, everything will come. But first we have to start with the gameplay for the player first.

So how do I take that into Rel? From my experience in game development, making games, having that mentality is that it's all about the developer first.

I work at a great company, IBM, I don't know if you can see my shirt, IBM, but we have great products like Red Hat OpenShift, and we have our IBM Cloud with so much capabilities. But I want to make sure whenever I talk about these things that we share with the developers, these tools, these things that can make their jobs and their lives easier, I don't want to just talk about the features. I want to talk about how this will really make an impact on the developer. I was a developer once, and I think it's really important that when we are engaging with our community, engaging with developers as we live out our career in Dev Re, if it's a tech evangelist to a dev advocate, we really need to think about the developer first. So the way I think about it, the Player First mentality, so we're doing well, you guys have a game dev knowledge gem.

Got a few more to go.

I got a little bit more time. So let's see if I can do this. Let's see if I can do this. So the next gem that I want to share with you guys is learning should engage. So in game development, it's really interesting because sometimes it's hard to imagine that fundamentally gaming is learning. Of course, you're playing games, you're playing solitaire, you're playing Call of Duty, you're playing whatever game it is. But at the end of the day, in order to play the game, you need to know the rules. You need to know how it works.

And one thing that's really important in game development is to really focus on engaging people as they learn about your game. So I put two games up here, one that does it pretty well, full Life bar, and one that I has some things to work on.

The first is Plants versus Zombie. A great game made by PopCap games. And what they really did is to really make their learning of their game just immersive. You play the game, you understand the game, it takes its time and you slowly get immersed in the game and it makes you want to play more and more and more. And it's such a great game. I've loved it.

I've played hours and hours of it. And then there's another game that I've liked and me and my friends have really tried to really get into it. It's called Monster Hunter World. And one of those things is that it doesn't give you everything that you need to get started, and then it gives you a text box of what you need and this and that, and you got to go through a thousand tutorials and all this text, and it kind of drains the energy from you.

And what I'm trying to say through that, and what I've learned from game development is that when you're creating content for developers, when you're creating content for your community, think about how you can engage through your learning. Think about how you can engage through that blog post, that video, that podcast, going back to that player first mentality. Think more about what would help the developer learn and have fun. Because sometimes if you learn in a very dry and kind of way, you can kind of turn away people from digging deeper into the technologies that you represent.

And I think it's important for us as people in the DevRel career to really put our heart into what we're doing and teach people that they can learn and be engaged at the same time. Boom. Gem number two. You guys now have it. We're almost there.

We got one more gem. I got a few more minutes of your time and I want to share it with you and I want to make sure we get it. So let's talk about authenticity.

Authenticity is everything. And I really mean this in the game development world. It really shows through how you make your product, number one, and also how you present it, how you put it out in the wild. One thing that I've learned is that when I put my heart into a game and I put everything in and I'm authentic, it really can resonate. There's two different stories I want to share here and really quickly is one is No Man's Sky and Apex Legends, no Man's Sky. It's a great game, awesome game, incredibly made. But one thing that really happened throughout the process of No Man's Sky before it was released is that they really, I guess you could say oversold, but under-delivered, they almost made it seem like their game was perfect and people kind of heard it and believed it.

And one of the most incredible things happened that before the game even released, 10 million people had bought the game.

And on day one of the game on Steam, which is only one platform that they released on, they had 200,000, 200,000 different players join on one day. But the next few days, the player base fell off almost down to 9,000 people. Now they're struggling to keep their player base, but there's another game, apex Legends, where the community of that, the developers and everybody who's there is so authentic about how their game is doing. And though they didn't start at 212, they grew and they grew and they grew because they shared about their troubles in development. They shared about the issues they're having, the things that made their game great, and things that made their game struggle, and they were honest and authentic. And as we work in DevRel and the things that we do, we just have to remember that we need to be authentic.

Not just authentic about our products that we represent and the tools that we share with developers, but with ourselves. It's important that people know us for who we are.

Guess what? I'm a little bit crazy, and I hope that kind of comes through what I do, but not crazy, in a bad way, in a good way. And my energy is always there. And I want you guys to feel that. And I think that when you are authentic, no matter who you are, what it is, you can really have an impact on developers and those people who engage with your tools. So I think we did it all three gems. You guys are now game dev ready and ready to take your DevRel career to the next level. Just remember the first gym, the Player First mentality.

Always think about the developer first. Second, remember that learning should engage.

Engage the developers, engage your community. Make them enjoy the times that they sit in your blogs, in your webinars, or read your blogs or anything else. And finally, authenticity is everything not only for your product to be represented, fair out there in the world, but also for you for your own mental health. It's not good to be not you. And also it's good for people to know you as you are. So I just want to thank you guys for playing this game with me.

Thank you for checking out this talk. I really appreciate it. My name is Brass and Henry, I'm a developer advocate at I ibm. You can follow me on Twitter at Brads and Deaf. Please do on YouTube or on LinkedIn. Feel free to hit me up and message me at any time. I'm always open to talk about my game dev journey or anything else. And oh, I just want to share this one really cool thing that happened today, December 1st at 11:00 AM on YouTube, I'll be sharing something that's really cool using my game dev experience and what I do in my day Day-to-Day with Red Hat OpenShift, and a cool webinar series that I'll be doing on YouTube with IBM developers.

So check that out. But thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much.