I've had some time to rest and think about AGDQ, and I would like to share my experience.
We weren't fully prepared when I arrived on Saturday, but due to the complex nature of this year's TAS Block we had scheduled a tech practice for that evening. So after driving for 7+ hours straight through blizzard conditions I arrived and immediately started working on stuff, including writing code and testing TASes on console. We had a number of unexpected problems that prevented us from testing everything that evening, despite staying up past midnight trying to get things working. We ended up giving up on that practice and planning to just get things ready throughout the week.
Very early in the week the dwangoAC left to visit family. He also ended up getting sick and becoming rather incapacitated, and put me in charge to make decisions. We still had a lot left to do, and every day that week I worked for anywhere between 5 and 8 hours trying to finish everything. I was accompanied by MediaMagnet who helped with stuff as much as he could, mostly keeping me sane (which I greatly appreciate). I spent only a small amount of time that week going site seeing, but by then I was extremely sleep deprived and I found myself unable to stay awake in the museums, basically feeling like a zombie on what should have been a pleasureful vacation. I had little time to enjoy the event, and most of that time was when I took a break to have a meal and got to watch the stream for a few minutes. There was a lot of work left to be done, and if I didn't do it it wasn't going to get done. dwangoAC agreed to let me completely run tech so that he could rest and focus on the commentary, and by the end of the week I was very comfortable with what we had to show and I felt ready to present, at least tech-wise.
dwangoAC didn't return until late in the week, but he was feeling better and ready to do stuff. This whole time I had assumed he had commentary under control and that we would be prepared for that. At this point we were well aware that we would be doing a Skype call, so I assumed he had someone prepared to be on the receiving end of that call, possibly with a short questionnaire or script we could use. Instead what I saw were several people being brought in on Friday night who barely knew the games, weren't knowledgeable about the tricks used in the specific TASes we would be showing, or just had no clue what was going on. We had no prepared commentary and only did one sort-of practice with most of the people who would be involved in the room for the first time. This was not a good place to be ~18 hours before we we were to go on stage. Then to make matters worse people were swapped out after that practice resulting in us being even more unprepared.
Considering all of that, the commentary went as expected: not great. Not awful, but I think it could have been a lot better. What bothers me is that we had the time and resources to coordinate people to help. We could have been looking for people to help before the event or even during the event. We could have been having them practice all week long like other runners do. But in the end we acquired people at the last minute, and the resulting commentary reflects that.
The skype call was also almost a problem as well. We had no prepared questions, and in the end decided to just "wing it". And then the person we picked to initially receive the call was nowhere to be found until ~15 minutes before we went on stage. While we were waiting for Lost Levels to finish I was rushing around trying to prepare someone else to take the call as a backup plan. It all worked out in the end, but it was rather stressful right up until the moment we went on.
At the beginning of 2016 I started working on
TASLink in an effort to make robust hardware that we could use at these live events to avoid annoying problems we have had every year, including parts breaking, or generally being unprepared for the event in terms of cables or visualization. I spent the better part of the year improving it and helping make it do everything we wanted. But then at the last minute it was decided we would use different hardware. We ended up having a number of the same problems we have had in the past, including parts breaking and having to fix them, and the hardware was largely untested and we had to work around annoying bugs that we didn't have time to fix in the week we were there. It hurt to have had put all that time and money into building solid hardware only to go to an event I cared about and not use it at the last minute.
And then at the end of this event I felt like the team was largely uncredited for all of the hard work we put in. As an example, take a look at the original version of the Ars Technica article, which mentions no one on the team except dwangoAC:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170115174952/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super-mario-64-and-portal-running-on-an-snes/
dwangoAC had talked to Kyle Orland earlier in the week, so I know he was prepared to write the article, but somehow everyone on the team except dwangoAC was left out of it. Of course the article was later revised to include more team member's names, but that didn't happen until 6 days later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170121011321/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/how-a-robot-got-super-mario-64-and-portal-running-on-an-snes/
By that point the majority of the readers had already seen the article and would not be looking at it again, so it feels like a waste to have had updated it except maybe for historical reasons.
Overall I did not enjoy myself at the event. It was all work and no play mixed with sleep deprivation. This past year has worn me down much further than is healthy, and I am exhausted because of it. I have decided I will no longer be working on hardware including TASLink, I have stepped away from the TASBot community, and I have no plans to help out at another GDQ event.
Looking back at the time I spent over the past year doing all of this, it wasn't worth it.
