Plaidophile

So, the positives:

• There is so much I can teach to my coworkers, especially the one who graduated from DigiPen, like how palettes and tile memory work, and what things like "compositing" and "blitting" mean
• The constantly changing directions from on high for the game which needs to be done in a month is a great way to keep me on my toes
• It's great to have long conversations with the lead programmer based on debating the relative strengths and weaknesses of two different ways of doing something, being told to write a document to spell them out, then having him not even read it because it turned out we were on the same side already! Yay!
• It's really neat how the Nintendo DS graphics hardware is so similar in so many respects to the Commodore 64's VIC-II, to the extent that I get to explain how the VIC-II worked over and over and over, especially when it comes to very nifty tricks which could be used to push amazing stuff out of the C64 (and the DS by the same token) which really wouldn't take that long to program, and then getting to explain how it really wouldn't take me a week to program a simple text-rendering library
• I love how even though I'm the graphics lead, my coworkers are also trying to implement graphics stuff without any deep understanding of how tile-based graphics work; it takes a great amount of initiative to try doing stuff in a field you're unsuited to, especially when the reason you're doing that is so that you can prototype code which just happens to use it (instead of taking the easy approach and just prototyping it on a platform they're familiar with and then porting it later)