My Talent Stack

Updated 26 June 2021.

Robotics Tech

  • Electrical and Controls Prototyping: solid.  I’ve been a professional controls prototyper, and it comes in handy in my present builder role when the engineers bring out a new design and we’re expected to find everything they screwed up.  Which is part of prototyping, not an indictment of their skills. 
  • Electrical and HVAC Troubleshooting: solid.  I was trained as an HVAC service tech before I went back for robotics, and when I was in HVAC school I was the Zen Master of rooftop units. 
  • Electrical Assembly: solid.  I build electrical control systems for a living, have done so for the better part of a decade. 
  • G-Code: decent.  I can do G-code by hand, and I’m decent with AutoCAD and a couple of related programs that can output instructions to CNC machines.
  • Machining: passable.  I can run a mill by hand, but I’m no master of the craft.  Given the choice I’ll let an actual professional handle it or run it through a CNC mill instead. 
  • Mechanical Assembly: acceptable.  I can build a fairly complex piece of machinery from prints if I have all the parts and a decent toolbox. 
  • Mechanical Troubleshooting: passable.  Not an expert, and you certainly don’t want me working on your car, but if there’s a mechanical issue I can usually figure it out. 
  • PLC Code: solid, but rusty.  I can do both Allen-Bradley and Siemens. 
  • Welding: passable, but rusty. 

Game Design

I was originally going to split this part into general game design and video game design, but there’s so much overlap to make it pointless.  I also separated out the coding into its own section, rendering the video game design section that much more superfluous. 

I have forty years of experience as a tabletop game master in a pile of games.  Go figure that translates into a lot of design experience. 

  • 3D Art: almost passable.  I’m taking classes, but I need a lot of practice.  Right now I’m making passable “LOD A” placeholder models, but that’s about it. 
  • Asset Design: solid.  Being a prototyper and having spent so much time as a GM lets me put together a complete design for an asset pretty quickly with an almost CDO level of detail.  Then I convert it into a checklist, which ends up on Trello.  If it wasn’t mostly me working on this stuff, I’d convert it into Kanban cards after that. 
  • Character Design: solid.  You know that GM who gives all of his town NPCs full backstories and character sheets, then designs a relationship network to see how they would interact with each other?  Yeah, that’s me. 
  • Horror Writing/Design: apparently excellent.  It would appear I’m in the same boat as David Drake.  In the foreword to one of his Hammer’s Slammers compilations, he was described as being mistaken for a military science fiction writer when he’s actually a horror writer who happens to set his horror stories in a science fiction universe.  My games have been described by multiple players as “X horror.”  Outside of Call of Cthulhu, I don’t consciously run horror.  I run medieval fantasy, science fiction, etc.  But because I shoot for a memorable player experience, I don’t just throw waves of cannon-fodder at the players punctuated by occasional boss fights and trips back to town to sell their stolen goods.  There’s also the simple fact that I’m dead inside and apparently the only things that give me any kind of emotional response are pure pants-fouling terror to most people.   
  • Level Design: solid.  I’ve been a tabletop Gamemaster for forty years.  In that time I’ve probably designed several large cities worth of game levels. 
  • Quest/Scenario Design: above average.  I design sessions like a TV episode with multiple intersecting plots and multi-session arcs.  Which, oddly enough, is actually a problem in modern tabletop gaming.  Back when playing RPGs was purely the domain of nerds and could get you sentenced to Jesus Camp after your parents burned your books, it was much more about the story and character development.  Ever since it went mainstream tabletop RPGs are largely just Diablo with dice.  Quests and scenarios get boiled down to “shut up with the backstory.  Who do I have to kill or what do I have to steal, and what do I get in exchange?”  And character development?  Yeah…  “I gained a level.  What are my stat increases?”  As a result, when I run a game the reaction is either an incredible amount of player buy-in or utter boredom because “less talk.  More kill.” 
  • Unity: decent.  I’ve been playing with it for a few years now and have some demos up over at Devil Monkey Games. 
  • World Design: solid.  I’ve designed entire planets including their plate tectonics.  Plus the nation states, cultures and subcultures, technology base, you name it. 

Code

Note that I’m leaving the pure industrial code over in Robotics Tech.  Being able to program a PLC or CNC mill has no application outside of a machine shop.  I know HTML might be pushing it a bit calling it “coding,” but I don’t know where else to put it and it is related to WordPress development.   

  • C#: decent.  I’ve taken some classes and made several working projects, including three and a half working video game demos you can play at the Devil Monkey Games site. 
  • Java: acceptable.  I’ve taken some classes and made a few projects, but I need more practice.  Since I need C# for Unity, Java is on the back burner.  But since it’s yet another C derivative (like C#, VB, and Python), there’s a lot of similarity.  The main difference is in syntax. 
  • HTML & CSS: solid.  I’ve been designing websites as a hobby and professionally since the mid ‘90s. 
  • Python: acceptable.  I use Python for quick and dirty code projects like my bare-bones GURPS subsector generator.  It’s basically a random number generator attached to some tables that generate stars and other stellar-scale objects (most of which are “empty space”) at every point in a cube of X size, so it doesn’t need the stricter standards of something like Java or C#.  Which is nice because it means basic tools like that are quick and easy to slap together. 
  • Visual Basic: acceptable.  It’s really just a looser version of C#.  I could use practice, but don’t really see the point.  If someone needs an application, I’m coding it in C# and sending an exe, and I need C# for Unity. 
  • WordPress Development: acceptable.  I’m currently maintaining three commercial WordPress websites and this one, plus another two commercial ones in the works.  My clients like my work, so I’d say I’m doing something right. 

Other

Other skills I possess that don’t really fit anywhere else. 

  • Cooking: Acceptable.  I learned the basics at a very young age and ran with it.  It turned out to be pretty useful when I was either living alone or with roommates who think “cooking” means “open a can and dump it in a pan.”  I’ve come up with some decent recipes on my own too.  You can find them scattered throughout my site. 
  • Project Management: maybe passable.  By necessity I’m a project manager at Devil Monkey Games and Murphy Technical Services.  I use a modified Agile setup tweaked for the specifics of how I run things in what are essentially glorified sole proprietorships.  Obviously there are no daily standups or weekly sit-down meetings because they’d just amount to me talking to myself and we all know I do plenty of that already. 
  • Writing: above average.  My technical writing skills (spelling, grammar, etc.) are well above average – look at the average Facebook post or tweet and tell me otherwise.  I’ve been told I write well overall, and that I have a specific talent for writing so laypeople can understand what I’m talking about.  According to the MS Word readability tool, I mostly write at a 7th to 10th grade level.  This is deliberate – I try not to be a pretentious jackass, and if I’m bothering to write something I would like people to understand what I’m talking about.  It’s the same trick Obama used when doing speeches.