Who’s the man behind the show, who’s the guy?
I’m gonna tell you who’s the guy.
It’s Kris Jet!

Kris Jet is
The managing director of Tumbleweed Interactive. He is also a man of many hats, in charge of level design on Umami, he has his fingers in motion all the time, be it working on budgets or level tools. Lately we’ve interviewed him here on the blog about how Umami’s doing, but today we’re going to talk about him, not with him.

What one soon realizes about Kris, is that he cares about knowing and understanding things. He’s keen on reading books and gaining knowledge and  new point of views. This makes him a great resource during game design and coffee-machine discussions about all things general and interesting.

Deck of Cards

You can also find him with a pack of cards sticking out of his back pocket. So, what could this odd obsession with cards really be?

What makes a grown man collect cards and turn to obscure language about obscure rules and counter-rules and counter-counter-rules, stats, planes and wizardry?

Kris Jet, knows the answer, and the answer is Magic! He even held an introductionary evening for those in the office who have never ever “tapped that a…. land”.

For those who do not know, Magic the gathering, is a card game which is actually quite fun even if it initially seems like a random collection of game altering rules (someone might strongly disagree with the blog-writing person about that last statement

Simplify

When it comes to computer games, he has some strong opinions. Especially when it comes to input. Some weeks ago, we had a lengthy discussion about this console generation’s controllers and buttons. He was in the less is more camp, trying to put the point across that many developers get lazy about user interfaces and resorts to overusing the dependency of button input.

In the other camp, was a gamer who is a big fan of complex games like battlefield, etc, where he really wanted to have quick access to many functions in order to operate more effectively.

So over to something completely different

Last Friday, it was Day of the Tentacle

It was a Friday morning. Everything was perfectly normal. We came in, read the news,  browsed the web for game industry shenanigans, looked at our source code and scratched our head, cause we hadn’t yet gotten our precious cup of coffee.

Morning rituals, they exist for a reason. The coffee machine was handled with the effectiveness and precision you’d expect to see at a game development company. Water, clean and cold, fill up; pour into machine, filter inserted, spoons measured and coffee added. Machine ready set, go!

But something went wrong. Horribly wrong. At the end of the day every coffee drinker in the house felt so tired and out of touch, it had to be something we all had in common. Yes, dear Watson, we also figured that what all coffee drinkers had in common, was in fact coffee-drinking.

So, what was the deal?
Somehow, someone , had managed to buy decaff instead of real coffee. And as every gamer should know, decaff makes you tired, even so tired you’ll fall asleep! (if you do not know this, you are either too young, too old, or too lame, either way, go get a copy of the legendary game “Day of the Tentacle” and prepare to be amazed)

So yeah, today, we’ve fixed this. We’re back again in normal production state. going forward in rock solid pace.