Hanging Out With the Cool Kids

At heart, Tableau people are vizgeeks who get jazzed about telling stories with beautiful graphs. But the folks at High Moon Studios are game developers, and they’re cool. High Moon developed the Bourne Conspiracy game, and they’re working on a new top-secret game.

Game developers have to be smart as well as cool. Sean Houghton, the Technical Director of High Moon Studios, used Tableau to analyze consumption of the new game’s memory budget. He blogged it in Mungo Smash.

My favorite part of Sean’s analysis is the chart that shows that the Elevator Shaft consumes more memory than the Boiler Room. That’s somehow more exciting than finding that the East Region tends to be less profitable than West when selling new products. And I also learned that Weapons aren’t the big memory hogs—Characters are. That introduces an odd bit of data in the ongoing debate on the social utility of violent video games. Maybe they’re really character development games, and the characters just happen to have weapons.

Sean’s data analysis should be useful to any software developers who have to watch memory closely. And his post made us feel pretty good too: High Moon likes us.