Last week I announced that I’m going to launch a new course – my first one where I’ll work with you in real time – on the Wwise Authoring API.
What I didn’t tell you is that if you put “I know how to use the Wwise Authoring API” on your resume, it’s not going to increase the statistical odds of you getting hired. I tell you that now because I assume that’s precisely why you’d be interested in the course.
You learn a skill that will “put you in a more advantageous position in the marketplace”, then people will hire you. Right?
Not exactly. Perhaps not at all.
Except – you can still get exactly what you’re looking for by signing up to the waiting list and joining the course once I open up the spots for purchase.
How? Let me explain with a story.
An Impossible Situation
Once upon a time, I walked into my job with a pretty well known game developer. They had an issue which seemed to be tremendous, nearly impossible to track down, and would take an unknown amount of potentially tremendous people hours to fix.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, platform settings in Wwise had been changed on a per-object basis.
So, an unknown number of sounds would now not play back as intended on an unknown number of platforms – in a project with probably hundreds of thousands of sounds.
It was entirely likely that the problem had been caught early and no tremendous damage had been done. But, there was also the chance that said assumption wasn’t true and there were plenty of hidden bugs nobody was aware of.
The team knew I love to program my way out of ridiculous problems – so I was asked if it were possible to fix this via some sort of created tool. And the good news is, it was 100% possible. I told them I didn’t know if it would take hours or days – but I imagined I could drum something up pretty swiftly assuming we had an exact set of rules the project needed to conform to.
Then, we’d let the robots do what they do best and be well on our merry way of content creation.
So, within 24 hours I had a tool built that took care of correctly matching up all platform settings and we were well on our merry way. The crisis was averted, the content creators were amazed and confused, I felt accomplished, and we were right back to work.
You might read this story and think “Wow look at you! You’re impressive and everyone knows to turn to you for programming problems! I want people to rely on me like that!”
Except that’s not what really happened at all, and I wasn’t hired to be a tools programmer.
The Real Story
Here’s the honest truth: most content creators and audio directors have no idea what the Wwise Authoring API is and how programming can easily help their team and personal careers.
But, when I tell you a crazy story about how platform settings were all off and what was playing back on Xbox wouldn’t play back right on Playstation – that makes your skin crawl.
If I then tell you that I can fix that problem with a few hours and a robot that I can direct – and I’m not selling you snake oil – it’s mesmerizing!
But that still doesn’t explain to you what this “programming” thing can actually do. It’s just an esoteric concept and I’m a weirdo that you like who wields mighty computer magic.
And that’s fine!
Because that’s what actually put me in the position to solve the platform settings problem in the first place. In every games job I’ve had – most of my audio coworkers have no idea what I’m doing when I start typing code, and they don’t care much either. But they do know that I am the wielder of “mighty computer magic”, that I use it for good, and that I’m happy to help and teach them at any time.
And that understanding and the stories behind it – not a “I know the Wwise Authoring API” bullet point on my resume – is what gets me work, paid well, and engenders great relationships with my teammates.
Wield the Magic
The best part is that I love teaching this stuff to people. I live for the first time people get that “OH WOW!” moment on their faces when they give a computer instructions for the first time and it works.
When content creators who think they can’t program do, it’s awesome.
Or, when you know enough programming “to be dangerous”, but not enough to know how to do what you want and you get stuck – I love getting you unstuck.
And, I’m going to do both of those things with you soon.
If you sign up for the waiting list for my new course – WAAPI Live – we’ll play with the Wwise Authoring API together and you can start wielding your own “mighty computer magic”.
You too can fix platform settings, or automatically build Wwise events, or colorize your whole project based on keywords, or generate soundbanks whenever you want on a schedule – or a myriad of other dreams that you have!
If you’re remotely interested, and know enough C# to understand what I mean when I say “classes”, “functions”, “if statements”, “for loops”, and you’ve used source control at least once in your life – you should sign up.
I’ll be taking less than 10 people onboard, and I’ll be doing it soon. Fair warning – this will be the most expensive product I’ve yet put out, because I’ll be working with you directly and we’ll have the opportunity to IM, video chat, etc.
If you’re curious – here’s the waiting list link for you again.
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