What happens when a big monkey makes two (figuratively) small monkeys create “something cool”? The answer to that question is not clear to this day when I look back at the beginning of the Borderlands Science Project.
But let me start from the beginning. It was a hot summer day somewhere in the fall with precipitation that felt like winter and that was exactly the moment you realize that spring is just a few days away. In other words, I have no idea when it happened. It was probably a day meeting, or midnight email, that mysteriously stated that “I have an amazing project that I can’t tell you about yet, but you guys will be as excited as I am“. (Yeah, our big monkey is full of mystery!) A few days (or maybe weeks, or even months) later, we were told that we successfully signed an NDA with “you-know-who” (who knew, right?!) and we are expected to work on “something cool” with Gearbox… the Gearbox… the video game company who created the Borderlands Series. Thanks to Wikipedia, in just 13 minutes I was their greatest fan of all time.
The pitch was pretty simple. Remember Phylo – a citizen science game about multiple sequence alignment (how could you not…)? Remember Borderlands? What if those two have a beautiful baby with the face of an arcade booth hidden somewhere in the game that gives you a boost of happiness, game mods, and enough science immersion to tell your mom that you had the equivalent of a master’s degree in BioInformatics (leaderboard can prove it!)!
But if we get serious for a second – that’s all the details Roman and I got at the very beginning. (Remember two monkeys? That’s us!) Given Roman’s complicated relationships with computers, we split work in half: the theoretical part goes to Roman, and the technical part goes to me. And the third half – politics and advisory – goes to Jerome. You figure out the math on your own. And by the way, the game release must be in April 2020. What can go wrong?
To say the least, the end of 2019 for us was exciting, stressful, intriguing, and overwhelming at the same time. Swamped with work, we were working day and night, work chat was silent just for few hours a day because, you know, sleep and other unnecessary stuff.
We started having weekly meetings with the Gearbox development team. I vividly remember the very first meeting where Jerome introduced our team and mentioned that “Alex is learning french” so having 10 people arguing at the same time in Quebec french will be an easy thing. I’m pretty sure they never talked about the topic I mastered a lot – the weather. Not cool, Jerome!
At the beginning of 2020, we reached a very interesting moment: we realized that we have developed just enough to support the Borderlands Science launch. Or, to be precise, we may have. For months, the project’s motto was “Make sure everything for the game works fine – we will figure out the rest later”. Thus, no one except for the science team was interested in a complete pipeline (full data cycle from the original scientific dataset to a player’s solution). Sometimes I had a feeling that one of us was not interested in building a complete automated solution as well and instead preferred to test puzzles by mesmerizing them on the big screen with a huge cup of coffee or beer (depending on the time of the day). As legend goes, one monkey still looks absently at his screen once in a while…
Meanwhile, the world was rapidly getting crazier day by day and we got invited to the Gearbox Studio in Quebec City to playtest the actual game and to have lunch with the team.
While most of the meetings were in french – I produced on multiple occasions my expert-level french phrases “Comment ça va?” and “Il fait beau!”. To be honest, the weather was awful but thanks for not destroying the moment.
Overall, it was a great day. It was around that day when we decided that we must work remotely. But it will be temporary, won’t it?
Launch Day. Ten happy celebrating emojis jumping on the screen defining our wild excitement from all the work that has been done. The new norm in the new world.
Somewhat in the morning, I rushed (read as “left the area of the bed”) to my old PC to install Borderlands 3. Who knew that games nowadays are insanely large (yes, I still live in the 90s) and do not download instantly? Anyways, no one, even my internet provider, can spoil our emoji celebration in the work chat! It took me just a few seconds to find a YouTube stream playing Borderlands Science live! It took me half a day to realize I spent half a day on YouTube. Good times!
We celebrated our great success by sending a flock of jumpy emojis. The boldest of us have used GIFs of dancing Brad Pitt. I feel no comment is needed. We were happy. Yeh.
Committed, I was attempting to reach the point in Borderlands 3 where the BLS arcade booth is. Ashamed with my “phew phew” abilities, I spent a few days “familiarizing” myself with the big guy madly in love with his speakers. Not the most polite guy I should say. In short, if they give you an award for the number of times you get killed – I would be in the top ten for sure. Nevertheless, I found the booth. Now I do science!
To make it short – it was cool until it wasn’t, but even then we made it cool again so it all worked out.
Ah, I almost forgot about those two monkeys! I guess despite all the challenges, they evolved, learned tons of new exciting stuff, got many real experiences, and found a lot of new friends. So, what do you think happens when a big monkey makes multiple (figuratively) small monkeys create “something cool”? Borderlands Science. To be continued.
