Tuesday 20 December 2011

Some Things That Went Wrong in our Flash Teams

Early on in term 1 I was speaking to another student several terms ahead about our classes. When we got to the topic of our production and team-management classes—the art and science of managing people and workflow to create quality products on time and under budget—he said "that stuff is all just common sense." He was dead wrong, of course, though I kept my opinion to myself since I was still in meet-and-greet mode.

The truth is that many people, maybe all of them, don't really know how to work well with others until they've been tested. They don't understand that their behaviors have sweeping effects on their peers, that poor attitudes and stubbornness are poison, and that ignoring the documentation or the stated purpose of a meeting is costing everyone on their team time, money, and patience. Dealing with others is harder than the most technical hard skill you can come up with because the targets are always moving. It shouldn't surprise anyone that being an effective team member is a skillset to be practiced and mastered, like any other.

I know a number of us GD23s know that now, though they may not have before our Flash projects this past term. At the outset of term two we had 6+ people interested in project and team management as potential careers. Now I think we're down to three, including myself. The common sense that is anything but scared them off.

Let's talk about some of those groups, the challenges they faced, and what I believe went wrong. First, though, I should point out that Marc and I, as class reps, sat down late last term and sorted out the groups around a strong technical core, then randomly assigned the rest. We then shuffled two people around because we didn't think they would work well together and ended with teams that, on the surface, looked very well balanced.

I should also point out that despite the problems in most teams, the games turned out pretty well.

Here's what happened.

Group 1 - This group had one member that was married to his/her ideas early on, creating division from the get-go. As time went on, this division caused bruised egos and hard feelings as the group continued to work. This problem member stopped producing and eventually stopped communicating with the team.

Group 2 - Group 2 also had a problem member that told everyone he/she wanted to work hard and improve their skillset, but then repeatedly failed to deliver. Attendance and not following instructions were serious issues that didn't improve with time.

Group 3 - With big plans and confidence, this team looked ready to succeed early on, but technical hurdles and a serious decline in engagement from most team members saw them scaling back again and again. At least one member of this group regularly made playing Skyrim for long periods of time a priority, which is obviously time that could have been better spent.

As you can see, a single team member with a bad attitude can have an enormous impact on the group, but there are also strong lessons about pre-production to take away from group 3, who were overconfident and let an impressive scope crush their spirits when the ideas couldn't pan out. In addition, ideas are cheap and everyone has them so you simply can't come to that initial brainstorming meeting stuck on one. Lose the ego, or be prepared for difficult times ahead.

To circle back to my original point, that project and team management is as complex and challenging as the thousands of people who are working in the game industry, each of those problems above could have been at least mitigated by a good project manager willing to lead a team through the "boring" stuff that is deadly important to the team's success. Careful scoping, building buy-in early, encouraging ideas, maintaining open communication, setting and maintaining deadlines and standards—these and many other  leadership-related tasks and qualities will ensure success over brilliant design or amazing art every time.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of the challenges our class went through during this challenging term. I can't wait to be one of the guys channeling all of the talent I am seeing towards a unified vision in just a few short months. :)

Thanks for stopping by.

Monday 19 December 2011

Term 2 Post Mortem

So, four months (1/3) down. Do I feel 33% smarter? Well, maybe not, but I know the time has been worth it.

As with any school, you have to take the good with the bad at VFS—a $32k annual price tag doesn't magically give the school better contacts in the industry with which to instruct future game designers—so we have a handful of absolute stand-out instructors who are passionate and who genuinely care about making everyone's time worth that tuition. We also have a small handful of instructors at the other end of the spectrum, but fortunately you can learn a great deal from someone even if they are just there to collect a paycheque.

Anyway, it's been good. Term 2 is feared far and wide as "the Flash term" for the Flash game that is the first full game-building experience in the program. As an assignment, it spans seven weeks and many more major challenges. First time managing a team? Better learn fast, son. Lazy or unreliable team members? Engage them, somehow. Can't code in Flash? Someone in your team had better learn.

And so on. I'll post about my game, Pistol Reef, in the next few days. For now I wanted to talk about what I did well, what I did poorly, and what I learned from what was a draining but rewarding term of Game Design.

What I Did Well
* I prioritized my assignments well, put the effort where it was required, and zeroed in on what I could ignore early on. For example, I was able to avoid learning much of anything about Maya, recognizing that my only Maya assignment actually made extensive use of Photoshop. I will want to make up the time with Maya later, but during the term this provided me with upwards of 15 hours in-class that I could use for more pressing and relevant assignments. This also saved me an enormous amount of frustration that I will touch on later when I talk about learning styles in an upcoming post.

* I embraced the project manager role at every opportunity, and the feedback from my peers and instructors was very encouraging. I dealt with issues by using different management styles with different people, and the results were mostly very good.

* I made strong relationships with many of my peers and instructors.

What I Did Poorly
* I snapped on another student during a group meeting a couple of weeks ago, cowing him into silence with volume and tone. He deserved it, but it was highly unprofessional for me to lose my cool. There are thankfully only a few behaviors that will trigger this reaction in me—obtuseness and disrespect being right up there—but outbursts like that can get me into a lot of trouble, and they are never welcome in the workplace.

* I allowed myself to get run down, and the resulting cold sapped a lot of energy out of me for days. This had unfortunate sweeping effects across all assignments and relationships. What suffered most was my UDK Deathmatch assignment, which I liked, but the result was downright sloppy when set next to my previous UDK assignment. I expect my grade will still be good, but I will lose marks on polish.

What's my plan for Term 3?
* Continue to prioritize well, but be sure that my health is at the top of that list. When I am stressed and swamped I am all too willing to let my diet and sleep take the hit. The resulting colds are productivity and attitude killers.

* Be completely aware of my temper and manage both my expectations and the expectations of my peers. Realize that many people will not be as focused or as driven as I am. Setting up those clear expectations early is good for everyone involved, but it makes an especially huge difference in my ability to react and roll with the punches.

* Spend more time and energy connecting with students outside of my class. I have solid relationships with many instructors, and close friends in my own GD23 class, but it's so easy for me to ignore the 22s, 24s, and the many fine people in other classes. A surefire way to meet people is to host a game-related event at the school, so maybe I'll start with one of those early in T3.

Anyway, that's enough for now. Tune in next time for frank discussions of my classmates and the drama emerging from the formation of two final project teams (including my own) almost a full term early.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Presentation Skillz

This far into the year (almost 1/3 complete), we have done a LOT of formal presentations. Most of these are game concept presentations where we have a limited time—usually between one and six minutes—to explain and sell an original concept to the audience. Our audience is often our fellow classmates, but several times so far I've looked out over a selection of faces from the local gaming industry, from other GD classes, and instructors from all over campus.

Anyone familiar with pitching a script for a screenplay will understand the core of the experience. You have some key points you should hit, and above all you want to speak naturally and connect with the audience. These two goals are often linked. We have all seen presentations where the presenters are over-rehearsed, and it is very difficult to sell humour or be spontaneous if you are reading from a script in your mind. Public speaking is strangely nerve-wracking which usually magnifies any problems a person might have with presenting.

Anyway, it's been good. I established pretty quickly that I am comfortable presenting (sort of true), and I am still hearing from the other students that "I should be the guy to talk." As I predicted, this is levelling out as time goes on because the things I am good at—speaking clearly and naturally—are becoming more and more attainable by the other students through constant practice. The things I struggle with—general nervousness and making the same motions with my hands—are still very much a part of my presentations.

I look forward to presentations because it gives me a forum to talk about something that I'm proud of. I take every game concept assignment (and we have completed maybe a dozen of them since August) very seriously because I know it won't be long before I am convincing a roomful of people that my game is worth their time, attention, and money.

Thursday 17 November 2011

UDK is Now my Acquiantance

It's been a week again already, and class is just minutes way so I'll need to keep this

We've been introduced to some new software again this term, which is no surprise. Being brand new to UDK and heading for the Level Design stream, I decided to spend some serious time with it over the weekend as I prepared for our first "architectural" level. The tutorials at 3DBuzz.com are pretty good, and I spent a LOT of time on that first level, but it turned out great. Have a look.





It's just a couple of large rooms, but I have just shy of 500 static meshes in there, many of which are in the ceilings as pipes and wires, or disguising the frankly ugly and unnaturally sharp architecture you get when you apply materials to the bare walls.

Anyway, I have a lot yet to learn, especially when it comes to the lighting, sound, and fluid actors (like water). You can't see it in the screens, but there is a layer of water under the grates. I would have liked to have had a very subtle dripping sound, but I didn't have access to that.

Anyway, class time. Let me know what you think! Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday 10 November 2011

Progress Made

Time keeps on tripping. :)

Let's talk about grades. My average is sitting around the 94% mark, even with a disappointing showing in Visual Design Principals (if you're coming into the program, spend five hours with Photoshop and some online tutorials and you'll be fine). I suspect I'm in the top 10th percentile in my class. Having said that, I would be surprised if many of my classmates are not sitting above an 80%.

Good grades like those are easy to come by in the first term of the program. Really good grades—honors are 90%+—are pretty hard to hold on to as an average, and it will only get harder as our instructors expect more from us and the technology keeps expanding. So far this term we have ProTools, UDK, Flash, and Maya on our plates. I'm gotten pretty comfortable with UDK, but the others are still relative strangers to me. Hopefully I can change that over the next few weeks.

Grades are not the point of the program, but I want to market myself as an honors student and I have no doubt it will provide a small edge over the many people competing for those same jobs, assuming my portfolio stands up. I'm still waiting on a few grades from last term, and I am especially anxious to learn how my board game stacked up. I'll post about it when I can.

The Flash project keeps rolling, and while there are still some questions to be answered, everyone is doing their part and the talents are fitting together pretty well. Most encouraging of all, I can see a bit of excitement from my group members as Pistol Reef comes together. I love to see the art assets being pushed around by the code, and with hand-drawn vector art our game is going to have that very strong Castle Crashers look I was hoping for. We worked on some sound mixing today, and I layered a shotgun blast over a water balloon releasing air under the surface of a pail full of water. The result is a pretty convincing bit of foley, and it should make for a perfect "super claw cannon" sound effect for our game.

We have a big week coming up, with a half dozen assignments due alongside our first Flash milestone, so my long weekend will consist of 18 or more hours of homework at the school. It's just how it goes. I'm looking forward to seeing my finished UDK map and hand-drawn character sprite when I'm done on Sunday, though.

Anyway, that about covers it for now. Have great weekends, all.

Sunday 6 November 2011

Ritual Defeat in SF4 and (more) Lessons from Term 1

First, I was absolutely destroyed, for the third time now, by GD23 Andy in yet another poor SF4 showing. It was the finals this time, and it was during our party thrown for the new GD class (GD24). I even thought I had counter-picked my opponent's Blanka with a surprise switch from Sakura to Honda. Big mistake. At some point since I last played him, Honda was hard nerfed, and the priority battles he used to win uncontested now trade in very painful ways. I was dizzied in my first round before I knew what was happening.

It would have been humiliating if I wasn't so used to it by now. ;)

Good party, though! Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I enjoyed running it, and I managed to meet a few people that I didn't know before. A good deal of the burden of running the show was lifted from me thanks to fellow 23s Sean, Dave, and Ian. Thanks guys!

Anyway, back to the serious business of learning to design, create, and manage games. This is a couple of weeks overdue, but I have a short list of pointers for anyone entering the school behind me.

1. Excel in every way you can, but strike a balance.

I've written at length about managing your time and focusing on the important tasks. Do that. Assuming you are like me, you have to balance your desire to be awesome with the abilities of your instructors and peers to reward you for it. I believe the extra hours I spent in Sketchup and Powerpoint and Photoshop and writing my guts out in Word have established me as one of the hardest-working students here, but I stressed myself out and my grades in some cases are only marginally better than the people here who are opting for the path of least resistance.

2. Double-check that every assignment has been submitted to Moodle by downloading it in a separate window, ideally on a separate machine, and then check it a third time later.

3. If you can't be on time, come to school early. There is a short list of people in my class that are habitually late. I'm not convinced I can rely on them to deliver, and that will affect my choices for teammates as time wears on. I expect it will have similar effects on our instructors working in the industry when our resumes cross their desks.

4. Follow Directions. With so many instructors, classes, and students, it can be challenging to keep things straight. Even the instructors occasionally fail when communicating exactly what's required. At the end of the day, though, you are responsible for your work and your learning here. Following the assignment directions is the quickest path to good grades. Use your eyes and rely on yourself.

5. Know Your Role. As a student, you're here to learn. As a friend of mine once said when I was interviewing at BioWare, "be awesome and be humble." I`ve noticed a lot of bruised egos getting in the way of learning here at VFS, and the sooner you get past the impulse to protect yourself you learn that being wrong, especially at school, is awesome.

You can boil this all down to taking this seriously. Have fun, get drunk, play games whenever you can, make friends, but expect to spend at least 60 hours a week transforming yourself into a professional skilled and lucky enough to work alongside the awesome people making the games you love.

I feel like I've been standing on a soapbox too often lately, but as our group projects get into full swing I'm becoming more aware of, and less forgiving of, people who are giving half an effort. There's just too much at stake.

The next few posts will be more fun, though. I promise. Thanks for stopping by!

Thursday 3 November 2011

The Road to Pistol Reef

Pistol Reef is a 2D, third-person side-scrolling shooter where an adorably furious pistol shrimp named Rotor uses his claws and an arsenal of upgradeable weaponry to battle the forces poisoning his reef home. It will feature over-the-top character and enemy designs, a cel-shaded art style, and rotating weapon nodes around Rotor's body. 

Pistol Reef is the Flash game my team is making over the next six weeks.

I mentioned before that we created our Flash teams before the end of Term 1. Our first step as a team was to discuss our roles, followed quickly by me (the PM) setting a deadlined meeting for the five of us to share at least two well-developed ideas for games that we would want to make and play. The results were lackluster, but fortunately we settled on an idea that has some real potential to be tonnes of fun and a beautiful portfolio piece. Before I get into that, though, I wanted to discuss why Pistol Reef, my idea, was chosen over the others.

Let me state first that my idea wasn't better than any of the other (few) pitches that came out of our first meeting. There were some intriguing ideas there that could make for good games. Still, I've found I often get my way—my ideas get "made" in the confines of our assignments and projects—for four reasons.

1. I take the prep time and the assignment seriously so I can develop good ideas.
2. I present entire ideas (not just gameplay concepts) using the structures we have been taught.
3. I only pitch ideas that I am invested in. I pitch ideas for games I would want to play.*
4. I'm willing to be wrong. Ideas are cheap and everywhere, and better ones are bound to come along. This makes humbleness easy to come by.

* From speaking to our instructors in the industry, this is a habit I will want to break if I want to seem intellectually fecund**; somewhere between one and five percent of professionally pitched ideas end up being implemented, so I should get used to pitching everything, not just the "good" ideas.

** I don't care how haughty this sounds. It's my vocabulary and I can dig into it if I want to. :)

Anyway, I have no doubt that being older and bolder than the other students also plays a part in me getting my stuff "made", but I've been more than willing to take the passenger role during group work when someone else steps into that leadership role. Someone's gotta do it.

Back to Pistol Reef. GD has six intakes (one every two months) right now, so there is plenty of wisdom to plumb, and the most common advice has been to manage our scope for these major projects. Pistol Reef's goal length has been set to a modest five levels, and while we have some ambitious art and design aspects (20+ enemies, minibosses, bosses, and multiple weapon types) I think our team is up for it. Ideally, it will look a little like Castle Crashers and play a little like Metal Slug, and if we can achieve those goals I will be incredibly proud.

This is the first project of this scope for all of us, though, so I am being cautious with my optimism, but yesterday we received feedback from our instructors on our concept document, and it was overwhelmingly positive. The few negatives were already picked up by us and addressed as a team, and we were also warned to put our core gameplay before our sweet unique mechanics, lest we fall behind and have to scale back.

I'm hopeful, and I know we have the talent to make a good game, but we have our work cut out for us and I have some creeping doubts that I am hoping to address soon.

I'll tell you about those soon. Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

My First, Real Test in Project Management at VFS

So, let me just acknowledge how poor a showing I've made with the blog lately. Mid October was the last time I even so much as tweeted anything. Shameful. With the new term ramping up (but still relatively, blessedly light on work), I will write here more often over November.

Let's talk about my Flash group.

The second term in Game Design at VFS is well-known as the Flash term. There are plenty of other assignments to do, of course, but creating a Flash game from nothing is "the" assignment that defines these two months. Late last term I sat down with the other class rep and we worked to create six teams from the 26 students in our class, endeavoring to create balanced groups of programmers, artists, level designers, and project managers. We succeeded (or, if we haven't, no one has brought up that they are missing a key skillset just yet).

My team is five people strong, and we are pretty well balanced overall. Over the past week and a half we have organized ourselves into roles, chosen a game concept from a shortlist that each of us brought forward, and played some sample games (Castle Crashers, Tentadrill, and Metal Slug 3) to help develop our aesthetics. As the PM, I have deadlines set for each of our team members so we have a prototype running on Monday. Things seem to be humming along. I have high hopes and a solid plan to bring this all together, but I also have some concerns. I want to expand on one of them here, and I'll do another tomorrow.

First.

Despite how often and how clear it has been communicated to us that being unprofessional is bad for us during our "year-long interview", one of our team members is habitually late for class. I'm not sure how you commit a solid year of your life and a modest year's worth of wages to an organization, and then fail to show up. Each late in GD drops a student's grade by 5% (to a maximum of 10%), not to mention the considerations given to our professionalism grades (each class has some of those, too).

Worse than all of that, by far, is that the people who are teaching us know EVERYONE we will be working with when we graduate. Those bullshit lates and unexcused absences will stick in the minds of our instructors and classmates, and they provide the easiest excuse you could ask for to pass on a resume.

You might be thinking that this is all none of my business, but I disagree. Not only am I working directly with this student—the success of my project hinges on his hard work and consistency—but his attitude reflects on us as a class. The gaming industry is a tightly knit group of people, and my time as a GD23 will likely follow me for much of my career. I want us to be known as a class of professionals that created consistently excellent work, and I know we can be that group, but not if we have people wandering into class late or not at all.

Anyway, enough preaching. The short version is that I hope this student can turn this around and destroy the reputation he has built for himself. I'm going to help him do it, if I can.

One bit of wisdom that I learned during my past career was to "praise in public and punish in private." I won't punish anyone, but I will talk to this student, one on one, and let him know what's happening. He might not really see the effects of being late; he certainly doesn't see the reasons of some instructors who are learning his name for the wrong reasons. There could be something in his personal life that I have no right or need to know about, but this understandable issue could be affecting his ability to be a professional student here.

I'll get the facts, lay out my expectations, and see how we can work around any limitations (if any) that there are. If there are none, I will expect him to be as productive, hard-working, and dedicated as everyone else on my team.

Am I being unreasonable? Got any similar stories from your semi-professional lives to share? Leave a comment, and thanks for visiting.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

The Power of Planning (for me)

I had an interesting convo with Marc (the other GD23 class rep) last night while we were on a break during Level Design Theory.

We were discussing our deathmatch levels—just a few minutes shy from submission—and he made the comment that he *never* creates a theme before starting to work. He prefers to just dive in. No story. No characters. No setting for the events to take place. No real events, even. He just starts working. And apparently, it's working for him. His map was clean and functional and he'll probably get a good grade.

I'm the opposite. Everything starts with a plan; a group orientation meeting; an impromptu design doc. I answer every question I can before ever start the work itself, and this allows me (and other stakeholders) to focus on that vision. I also spend way more time than I would bet every other student in class on any given assignment. I also iterate and detail throughout. My map (I'll post it below) is detailed, functional, and I will also probably get a good grade.

The difference? I'm betting I spent almost twice as long on my map. There's another time management lesson here—it's the same as the last few—and one of these days I'm not only going to learn it, but actually act on that 80/20 rule I keep talking about. ;) I'm sure my planning will be very helpful in my chosen career path, but for now I have to be careful that it doesn't burn me right out.

Anyway, I *did* manage to keep my scope down this time around—it's a four-person map, and it is straight-forward in its design. I wanted something that would be fast-paced and accessible to multiple play styles. And, of course, I wanted the players to feel like they were in a set of crumbling jungle ruins.

Thursday 6 October 2011

The Role of Producers

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately.

Some of you know that my long-term goal in the videogame industry is to run my own development studio—I really crave that creative control and I can't exaggerate how satisfying it is for me to see talented people working towards the same goal (especially talents I don't really share, like real artistry). I want to influence the industry, reach out to new markets, and tell amazing interactive stories.

I've had this vague daydream these past few weeks of me running from team to team throughout the day and pitching in, solving problems, discussing others, escalating when necessary, and generally just being a go-to person when you want things done. It may not be entirely accurate to the industry, but it's very satisfying, and it all fits in with my goals.

Getting there won't be easy, of course. I need to fully understand every job in the studio, even if I'm only a novice in some of them. I need strong project management skills and an unfailing vision throughout the course of a project. Harder still, I need to communicate that vision to everyone else I want to work with—they need to love the idea almost as much as I do for it to succeed.

So, with these goals in mind, I think my best bet is to focus on becoming a Producer when I graduate. Producer roles vary from company to company, but I can expect to have some creative input, lots of control over projects without being the final say on any one thing (the leads on the core team will make those calls), and a broad understanding of the project as a whole. I love making plans and solving problems, and I'm results-focused without (usually) being too hard on people. Again, I think it fits.

What this means as I move through this year is that I need to focus on taking that role—it won't come to me. Our specialization streams are Art, Level Design, Coding, and Story (I'll probably be taking Design and Story to play to my strengths). Clearly, this lacks a dedicated project management/producer stream, so I will have to create those opportunities for myself if I want to practise those skills. Taking the lead on projects, (hopefully without squahing anyone else's ambition or ideas), being a class rep, and even putting on the Street Fighter Tournament (and hopefully other events) will help me practise these skills and teach me what I don't know.

Ideally, I would find a large studio where I could act as a producer on the story or level design side of things, marrying my "old" strengths with the "new" and pursuing my focus to its fullest.

Also? Leelee Scaldaferri (an artist who is also in the GD program a term ahead of me) just acted as the guest artist for one of my favourite things on the internet, Extra Credits (she also draws the Name Game webcomic for The Escapist). Her episode is about (surprise) the role of Producers in the industry.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the challenges. Class time.

Monday 3 October 2011

Super Street Fighter 4 AE Tourney

Just wanted to share this. I (with help from fellow GD23 classmates) will be hosting a 32-competitor Super Street Fighter 4 AE Tourney on October 18 in the Game Design TV studio. It's going to be "off the hooks," as the kids say. ;)

That'll be my second-last day of classes for Term 1, and while I'm sure I will be busy, I really wanted to challenge myself to run this thing, have some fun, and give out some cool, game-related, hand-made prizes (plush slimes and Metroid toques). I'm also going to be donating my Sega Dreamcast and a handful of games to our library here at the school in the name of the winner.

We'll record some of the final matches, and I'll be sure to post them on here and on Facebook.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sunday 2 October 2011

Burning Out in Early October

About to enter week six of my studies. This past week (and this weekend) was a tough one.

Since classes started I've worked very hard to do more than what I was being asked for—it's a good habit to be in when you're out in the real world, and I want to make a good impression on my instructors. My projects have been detailed and I've been getting good grades, and I don't want to be known as the guy who does the bare minimum.

Unfortunately for me, several unpleasant realities collided all at once this week.

First, I can't code for shit. I don't want to be crude—in fact, I want to convince my classmates to sound less like crab fisherman and more like young professionals, at least while we're in class—but it isn't an exaggeration to say that our programming class is making me feel like goddamned Gir from Invader Zim.


On the bright side, I am a little artistic and fairly creative, and I can draw passably well. These are handy qualities to have, but (as I mentioned previously) I'm a beginner with photoshop. Our "art" class (Visual Design Principles) has been pretty interesting but easily the most frustrating class for me because I am perpetually running into brick walls because I don't know the software, and there's very little time to learn it.

Naturally, week five was the intersection of a major, challenging assignment in each of these, my weakest classes. Plus a final presentation for Storytelling (a strength of mine, but the assignment was very time-consuming), and my final project in Storyboarding/Cinematics (another time-gobbler) is due next class. Layer on a few other, lesser assignments that require time and attention and the ever-present board game assignment (I have much tweaking and polishing to do) and you have a very full schedule.

There is no room in this schedule to do extra work on these assignments, so while it's painful and frustrating to do so, I'm going to be handing in assignments that follow the instructions, and nothing more. I need to stamp it all out, ignore my pride, get back on schedule (sleeping, eating, school, and play), and focus on my strengths and being a good class rep.

The alternative is burnout and a bad attitude, which has been creeping in steadily these past two weeks. It ends today. Right after I run through that powerpoint presentation another couple of times...

Tuesday 27 September 2011

A Few Noob Tips for Sketchup

I shared my Sketchup map last time, and I wanted to share what I learned while I built it and just after.

First, Sketchup is just as flawed as people warned me it would be. Its got a lot of "smart" logic built into it, which means it is constantly guessing exactly where you want the line or shape your drawing. This makes for a lot of grid-snapping, and if you're careful and methodical I imagine it would/could be an extremely smooth process to draw with.

I should point out right now, though, that easily creating original 3D structures in only a few minutes is a pretty exciting thing for me, so my experience with Sketchup has been really positive. Yeah, I had a lot of problems with perspective, and yeah, sometimes just controlling the camera can be a chore, but I'm pleased overall.

Anyway, here are a few tips for those coming behind me in GD24 and beyond, and maybe for those trying out Sketchup for themselves.

1. Choose a strong theme and settle on some USPs First - My theme (or story) in broad strokes was that Samus is investigating a space pirate excavation on a jungle planet. I also wanted a branching path right off the bat, and I wanted there to be very old-school Metroidy secrets built in to the map. By laying this out in less than ten minutes I was able to focus my design for the entirety of the project. It made the process uch easier.

2. Know Your Scope and Stay There - Limit your scope to the ~5 minute playtime the assignment calls for, and control that scope creep. I know some guys who are much more talented than me with software and art, and their maps didn't have the flair or detail that mine did. Having said that, there's were almost universally much cleaner than mine, but more on that in a minute.

3. Keep Your Extrusions Small - This will keep your level more manageable, and make it more obvious when Sketchup is sticking lines along an axis you can't see right now. It will also make any models you create (like my chozo and Samus) look decent even from different angles. Note that my extrusions were almost universally too big (deep), which makes some of those models looks a bit funny.

4. Check Youtube for videos about specific effects you want to recreate - There are some excellent tutorial videos out there. I found out how to make transparent textures in five minutes, rather than hunting around for the capability myself.

5. Do a "polish pass" on your map and eliminate any unnecessary lines, especially on transparent textures. If you look at my water, elevator, and the huge chunks that make up the outside of my map, you can see exactly what I'm talking about. With a bit more know-how and just a few more minutes I could have improved the looks of my map significantly.

Anyway, while I am expecting a few headaches and some swearing during my next go-around with Sketchup (I am tasked with creating a UT3 deathmatch map), I'm looking forward to learning a bit more about what Sketchup can do...

Maybe a map that has a tonne of transparent textures?...

Monday 26 September 2011

Super Metroid Lite in Google Sketchup

So, Yesterday (Sunday) I came in to school at around 9:30AM for "five hours" or so, and instead I didn't leave for more like 15. What was holding my attention so completely that I missed the last skytrain out of Chinatown? The creation of my very own Metroid map using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Google Sketchup.

Most you know of Photoshop, an industry standard software for image manipulation, but you may not have heard of Sketchup, which I think is considered by many to be the "rough draft" of a 3D imaging software. It's free, too (with CS5 being really expensive). Anyway, Photoshop and Sketchup are both brand new to me—more on that later—and Sketchup is notorious for being extremely difficult, so I had a few things working against me in creating a decent level map.

Worst of all, though, was that I was really enjoying the process (except for becoming regularly apoplectic when Sketchup wrecked things up). Long story short, I made an extremely detailed level map that I'm pretty proud of, and I wanted to share it with you. It's hard to make out details in the screenshot, but it's got a chozo, Samus' ship, and Samus all in 3D. Well, kind of. It started out as a 2D pixel grid I made in photoshop.

Anyway, here's hoping for good grades. Now I'm going to learn about Flash.



Friday 23 September 2011

Portfolio Class - Re-Experiencing Chrono Trigger

In class right now and our instructor (Jacob Tran) is leading us through some of the ways to market ourselves and our new/polished skills. He wants us to write about a recent game we played, and while I haven't had much time to play anything recently, I did indulge in some retro gaming since coming to the Vancouver area. My game of choice? Square's ground-breaking and trail-blazing 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger (originally on the SNES).

Chrono Trigger follows a spiky-haired redhead named Crono through his adventures through time that start out fairly small in scope (with a princess requiring some rescue), but the story (and stakes) quickly escalate to include the fate of the entire world as the heroes hop through time to discover that the year 1999 is the date of an apocalypse engineered by a creature called Lavos. The willing heroes commit to travel through time to unravel the secrets of Lavos' dire machinations and end the threat.

Chrono Trigger's graphics, at the time, were pretty great, with large, detailed, expressive characters designed by Akira Toriyama (of DBZ fame). The characters and critters are a mix of realistic and cartoony, and they do the trick. The storyline is a good deal easier to "get," unlike some of the other stuff Square has done, with some nice twists and suitably epic battles supported by an excellent score from master Square composers. The combat system is simple, based on a timed system between character "turns," and when multiple characters are ready to attack you can activate multi-member techniques that typically deal a lot more damage to more enemies.

I found the story arcs were a lot shallower than I used to believe they were, and while this could just be the nostalgia talking, I'm pretty sure they weren't even as fully realized as those from FFIII (which Square released a year earlier in North America). Still, they're on par or better than most of the games ever released in terms of storytelling. Some of the moments (like Lucca's travel back in time to the site and date of an accident where her mother lost the use of her legs), are poignant and raise some ethical issues that leave an impression.

Anyway, Chrono Trigger (and its unheard-of-before 12 endings) stands up pretty well overall to the 17 years since it was released. Now I have a craving for FFIII...

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday 20 September 2011

Board Game Scope Creep...

So, I clearly can't take my own advice. The original vision was for a simpler game so I could focus on iteration and polish. Sacrifice (mentioned before) is creeping into the universe of too much complexity. We're talking combat, character cards, an evasion track, multiple critter types, hundreds of cards, dozens of tokens... simple core mechanics and a strong theme could make this game great, but only if I have the time and skill to make it. I probably don't.

Now is probably the time to rein this in and go with a simpler idea. Let's see what I can find online for making my own board game...

Monday 19 September 2011

Board Game Theme First Draft

On the heels of my post about being a writer, I have settled on two finalist ideas for the analog game we need to build from the ground up for the end of this term. And, of course, I've started by writing stories to orient the players, establish the stakes, and (hopefully) grab interest.

Before I get to that, though, I want to point out that there are some near-legendary analog game titles floating around our classrooms, namely 'Polarity' and 'Shockwave'. These titles—being two winners of previous VFS board game nights and with their creator's names immortalized on a plaque in one of our game labs—are held by previous students who took an extremely simple game mechanic and built fantastic and highly strategic games out of them. The equivalent of re-inventing checkers. Easy-to-play, hard-to-master.

Being me, I want to see my name on that plaque. Unfortunately, despite a lot of solid ideas—I'm pretty sure I could make 15 enjoyable board and card games from my list of 26—I didn't re-invent checkers. Early on, I decided to focus on polish, rather than pure innovation. So, here are my two front-runners.

1. God Seed - a card game where the players take the roles of enormous, warring anthropomorphic trees. This game would be heavily steeped in African or South American mythology, and would be played over the course of 1000 years (20 turns). The goal is for the trees to grow the largest and wisest, and to have the most followers. The trees would unleash their wrath upon each other and perform miracles for their people.

Pros: Easy to build, easy to iterate, interesting premise, strong uniqueness
Cons: I don't have many of the mechanics worked out, which means I have no game

2. Sacrifice - A board game set in the distant future where four survivors battle starvation and horrible mutants as they scrounge for supplies in post-apocalyptia. Safety can come from numbers, but splitting provides more draws for supplies while increasing the chances of running into dangerous critters. The goal is for at least one player to survive long enough to collect (or build) a set number of fuel cells, reach a shelter, and seal themselves inside in relative paradise. The sacrifice mechanic may come into play regularly as food is scarce and rampaging mutants are content with a single meal.

Pros: Accessible theme for the average gamer, high degree of (scalable) challenge, boss critters, multiple paths to success, clear mechanics, sacrifice mechanic is unique, if done right this game could really cause some emotion
Cons: Much harder to make, more complex (so harder to playtest and iterate)

So, as of this evening I was leaning towards Sacrifice (actually the whole title might be "What are you willing to SACRIFICE?), but I have just a touch over three weeks to build a whole board game. It's a difficult choice for me, and one that I have to make this week.

Here's the first draft of my intro text for Sacrifice. Let me know what you think of the ideas.


What are you willing to
SACRIFICE?

Earth during the 24th century. The bombs have fallen and the atmosphere has been scorched away. The sun's energy, source of almost all life on our once-verdant home, kills without mercy anything that is foolish enough to brave daylight. Humanity is all but extinct, having fallen side-by-side with the flora and fauna worldwide. There is no industry; there is no civilization. There is only the flagging hope of the few starving survivors brave and strong enough to scrounge for forgotten food and shelter during the longest, coldest nights since our last ice age.

But at night, the abominations come out to hunt—twisted monsters from the films and videogames of ages past. They scream and charge and relentlessly call to their horrid siblings, growing silent again only in death or when they feed.

On the brink of starvation, you are one of four survivors who have beaten all odds to reach what could be your salvation—a huge sealed shelter that will provide food and safety for years. Only now, at the end of your strength, do you face your greatest challenge of surviving long enough to gather or build the fuel cells required to get inside, activate the shelter, and seal yourself away in relative paradise.

You'll need to work together, watch each other's backs, and take a great number of risks—any one potentially spelling doom for you all—to succeed. You may be hunted, wounded, or killed, but above all else you will answer the following question: what are you willing to sacrifice?

---

Sacrifice is a game of survival horror, where supplies are scarce, danger is around every corner, and fighting will usually be your last resort. Your goal is to find (or build) eight fuel cells and get them to the shelter in the middle of the city. The abominations pose a constant threat, but even more relentless is your need for food—your bodies are at the very end of their strength, and missing even a single day will cause you to start shutting down. Balancing your immediate needs with the constant threat of abominations behind every door will be difficult, but it is made far worse by the slow but steady and permanent migration of abominations into your area of the city.

Each day leaves you with fewer places to search for supplies and a greater chance that a single abomination could summon several others. At the end of your 10th night in the city, the abominations will have filled this area, and you will be forced to wait outside for the sun's deadly rays, or to be killed by an overwhelming force of monsters. Hopefully you will have unsealed the shelter by then...

---

What do you think? Got any feedback? Think I should focus on God Seed instead?

Thanks for reading.

Story Guy in Digital World

Heading in to my fourth week of school already, and I've completed around eight assignments of varying complexity with a few more in the pipes. Got a big win today after submitting my back-alley dice game programmed in C#. I had a LOT of help with it from fellow students (big thanks to Angus, Cramer, Marc, and Gray), but I'll take the win, and the game turned out to be pretty entertaining (with Zap Brannigan and Kif providing the dialog). It wasn't elegant—I finished up with somewhere around 550 lines of code, where the guys with Comp Sci degrees were finishing in under 300—but it doesn't break and it has a lot of personality.

It also reinforced with great strength and clarity that I will not be a programmer without a complete change in personality and inclination. Wow, do I hate feeling clueless. Our next assignment will be to code a Tamagotchi-style virtual pet, which might just be terrible, but the group project afterwards (a text adventure) has me pretty excited to have my strongest skills at the group's disposal.

Anyway, here is one of my favourite Zapper lines before I go any further.


For the most part, my assignments are going really well with good grades and high praise rewarding the extra touches I've been focusing on. I would be surprised if I don't end up with a 90% average heading into the second half of my first term. As a story guy with a strong writing background, these early assignments (which are mostly written) are a breeze, and the topics are awesome (I broke Chrono Trigger down into the three-act storytelling structure last week, for example). This bodes well as the writing will remain important and useful throughout my stay at VFS.

What's strange, though—shocking, even—is that I haven't been taken up on my offer to help anyone write or edit their assignments so far. We have ESL guys from India, Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil, as well as guys and gals fresh out of high school, and not one of them is looking for free help from a seasoned editor.

It boggled my mind, and it took a comment from my wife to sort out what I should have known already. It's simple. Most people think they can write. Some people who have no formal training or a good deal of experience can write very well in their fields—my last boss was a good writer, for example, and he was an auditor before running his own software company. Most people, though, are only passable writers with little grasp of grammar or pacing or sentence structure. For most people that's just fine, too—it's just goofballs like me who would scoff at investing in a venture with typo-ridden documentation or poor marketing or bad dialog. Right?

Well, maybe not, but I know that unless you have written a one-hour weekly drama or a best-selling novel, people generally don't consider written communication skills to be all that important or impressive. For example, I can't count how many times I've had to explain what I did these past nine years (four of them in school). Journalism? Not really my focus. Software development? You, reader, know that isn't true. IT? If I'm handling your IT, you have a problem.

I write and I edit. Words. Those may be my greatest skills.

Writing and editing are disciplines like any other—art forms, really—with each requiring practice and, in my case, formal training to polish into career-worthy skills. I didn't know this in high school, and I have met dozens of people of all ages and at all stages in their lives that don't get that.

Anyway, this is a VERY long-winded way of saying that I hope some of my fellow students take what I'm offering. I hope I can convince them over the year that I have the expertise to help them write clear, interesting, and useful works. I know that strong communications skills will be useful to every one of them in their future careers and personal lives, but maybe they're hoping to get by with the basics of the craft.

Considering my feelings about C# and photoshop, I'm not sure I blame them. :)

Thanks for reading.

Saturday 17 September 2011

Five Tips for a Good Elevator Pitch

For those of you who haven't heard the term, the elevator pitch or elevator speech is the laser-focused information you give about your company, your script idea, or (in the case of one of my recent assignments) a game idea you want to work on. It is supposed to last a minute or less (the length of an elevator ride), and you have to grab the audience's attention, hit the key points, and reiterate in simple terms so they have a strong image to associate with your brand.

It's pretty simple in practice, but like all public-speaking tasks it can be nerve-wracking. I'm pretty outgoing, but public speaking does make me nervous. You want to be natural, relaxed, and memorable, but as a writer, I prepped a decent, vivid "script" for myself that hit all the main points, and then set out to memorize it.

Do you see the potential problems here? I was stacking the need to memorize on top of anxiety, and whenever I forgot the beautiful terms I had dreamed up it made me stumble or blank out.

Fortunately on the day of the pitch, I gathered small groups of classmates and we did round-table pitch critique. Even more fortunate, one of those classmates—a guy who taught sexual education to groups of students and who is extremely comfortable speaking to groups—was among them. With his coaching I delivered a pitch that got very high praise from the instructors.

So, here's how I did it (with a great deal of help). Your mileage may vary.

1. Know Your Vision

The game idea I pitched is a fully-fleshed out and attainable game which made it very easy to focus my pitch. You don't need to have a design document written, but you do need to grok the broad strokes of your game's theme, core mechanics, and its unique selling features (the three things you are hoping people will take away from your pitch).

Having a killer new mechanic or a twist on an old one is great, and as a concept pitch it could be enough to carry you through, but you'll probably be better served building at least a skeleton around that mechanic; the questions you answer for yourself will almost certainly be asked after your pitch.

2. Know the Structure


A basic game pitch should have:

* a memorable name that is on-theme
* a one-sentence statement that orients the audience by providing the genre, the protagonist, and the core gameplay
* a brief (one-sentence) explanation for each of the three unique features the audience will remember
* a reiteration of the name and those three unique features

You don't have to follow this structure, but it does pack in all the required info in under a minute, and it will make your life easier as you prepare to deliver.

As a side note for game designers, your pitch should be focused much more on mechanics, rather than on story—it's an interactive game you are pitching, not a movie, so explaining how the player interacts is key. A solid story and theme are great to have, but ideally you will communicate those in the one-sentence statement and then only refer to them throughout the rest of the pitch. Use the theme or story to grab attention, then focus on what really makes your gameplay unique.

3. You Gotta Believe


Love your idea. If you aren't passionate about your game, no one else is going to be. You don't want to be up there frothing at the mouth, but a bit of professional intensity and measured animation will sell people not only on your vision, but on you. It will also help to loosen you up and think better on your feet.


4. Write a Script, then Throw it Away


Now that you know the subject and the structure so well (and clearly you love your idea) it will be easy to write that killer pitch you want to deliver. Unfortunately, you don't want to sound like you're reading off a script; you need to be charismatic and natural, and trying to fake it on the 22nd take adds a barrier to your successful pitch. Are you a trained actor? Are you willing to risk sounding rehearsed, and therefore, phony? The answer is probably no to both.

For future students, we were allowed to bring notes up with us for our pitches, but the assignment stated that written notes were not allowed. I would be surprised if the instructors didn't take that into account when grading us.

5. Use Your Nervousness - The Audience Doesn't Know What's Inside


A little bit of nervousness can give you the energy you need to push forward and deliver a good pitch.  Remember that the audience doesn't know that you are screaming inside. A slight quiver in your voice or your hands, a pause or the need to clear your throat—these things probably won't even be noticed by the audience, so allow yourself that and focus on getting those points across.

If you do stumble or need to pause for any reason, don't draw attention to it by exaggerating a mispronounced word, making weird noises, or worse, cursing. Take the moment, breathe, and continue. You're human. People forgive nervousness all the time, but they can't make your game idea if you don't pass it on to them. If it has merit (and you know it does), you've won just by telling them about it.

6. (Yes, I know I said five) Practice


This sixth tip isn't for everyone—the guy who coached me, for instance, took no notes and delivered his pitch only once before he was up in front of the class. He did a great job. His idea was wacky and hilarious, which broke the ice into a million little pieces, and he was clearly as natural as possible because he hadn't committed a single word to paper.

For others, though—for me—practice reinforces your points, provides warning signs for words that may make you stumble, and (if you workshop in groups), gives you that all-important feedback from others. You don't have to take all the advice you are given, but being aware of how people perceive your ideas can make or break your pitch.

Appearing polished and comfortable with the subject matter are good things, but you have to balance those with your ability to speak naturally and be relaxed but personally and emotionally invested in your idea.

Most of all, though, do what works for you.

Saturday 10 September 2011

Brainstorming Analog Games

So, two weeks of school and things are in full swing. I didn't get home earlier than 10PM all last week (though to be fair I was socializing Friday night when I could have come home). Having a good-sized commute (45 minutes door-to-door) and a 9-9 school schedule leaves little room for homework, so assignments have, unfortunately, piled up for this weekend. With my communications background the writing assignments are a snap, and the subject matter make them a lot of fun to write. The coding and photoshop-related assignments, however, are languishing. I'll tackle those tomorrow at our campus.

I'm pleased to say that this ridiculously busy week transformed me into a full believer in the school. The instructors are largely very passionate about what they're doing, and we are being crammed full of knowledge. Better, that knowledge is immediately tested with practical assignments in class—group work, mostly—and then individual assignments due the evening before our next class. If you keep up with it and always aim to do a little bit more than what is asked, you'll learn a lot.

Let's talk about one of my first assignments. I was required to brainstorm 25-50 analog game concepts—high-level ideas for non-digital games based on an interesting theme, mechanic, or both. In a single train ride I powered through my first 10 with no trouble at all, with a couple of those being my faves of the bunch. The next ten were more challenging, and the last six (I settled on 26 quality ideas, rather than wrecking myself coming up with several throw-aways to meet my original goal of 30) were the toughest of all.

After our list was complete, we were expected to select five, one of which we will build—boards, pieces, instructions, and box—for the end of the term that is coming faster than we might think.

The process was pretty interesting, and got me thinking about different ways to play games. Almost all of my games were board games, with several card games, and only a couple of games that wouldn't really fit in either camp.

Here are some that I felt were interesting (but not my top five). The advice I have gotten from earlier intakes is that playtesting and scope management are the MOST important contributors to your game's success, so while I have some original ideas here, I left them out because I either have no idea to make them, or felt that their scope may be beyond my reach. I would rather create an extremely polished and fun twist on an idea that exists—a shiny portfolio piece—rather than have a neat but wonky original that I might be embarrassed to hide... time will tell.

Anyway, let me know what you think with a comment. Would you play any of these games? Got any ideas of your own?


1.      Forge is a board or card game where players gather ore, hire helpers, and stoke their fires to create the highest-quality weapons and armor required by heroes. Loan your wares to heroes and win (or lose) by their skill and deeds.



1.      In Guzzler you use liquid water in an analog puzzle game, where, at certain times, specified amounts of water are added to the playspace to raise puzzle pieces into place. Doing it wrong means the pieces are trapped and you lose.



1.      Old Folks Games is a board game where each player draws a cranky old codger as their avatar, and each has a unique goal that they are trying to reach. Unfortunately, the trappings of Pearly Gates Old Folks Home (and the forgetful/senile nature of the characters) make forward motion very difficult. Misplaced glasses, frequent bathroom breaks, and cats eagerly seeking warm laps stand in the way of your goal.



1.      Finger Climber is a vertical board game based on rock climbing where teams of two players need to plan their route and “climb” up the wall using the preset “hand” and “foot” holds (fingerholds). The non-climbing player acts as a belayer and spots holds for his straining partner.



1.      In Keys and Locks players unravel clues and gather various keys to unlock the treasure chest. There are multiple keys and locks. At the end of the game players see whether the keys they have gathered will open the chest.

Monday 5 September 2011

Lessons From Week One

So, it's Monday. I just had to say goodbye to my wife at the airport. She was visiting for the weekend but has a contract to finish up back in Edmonton. She'll be rejoining me permanently here in New West in October. I have a handful of assignments on the docket and a week's worth of game design wisdom to share.

Let's start by mentioning that I am a critical person, and I have no trouble voicing my opinion and objectively taking care of business. These qualities (good and bad) are earned through having your work broken down and rebuilt, and allowing your ego to be bruised until you realize that it simply isn't the important issue. I need to remind myself that many of my classmates are fresh out of high school, or near enough, and they won't be used to a semi-professional workplace; If I want to stay friendly—and I do—I will need to be sensitive.

Also, in re-reading my last post I realized I was allowing a bad attitude to creep in and colour my outlook on some of those initial classes this past week. This will serve no one, and it's simply too early to judge. Besides, the school has to solve for the lowest common denominator, and (in my case) that means that the C# and Photoshop classes will feel a tad overwhelming at times, with me pulling a good deal of satisfaction (and maybe some boredom) from the classes focused on my strengths (creativity, communication, leadership). I'll correct this attitude starting right now. It'll help that I've almost entirely beaten the cold I am convinced I caught from one of the TAs. ;)

"Treat your time at VFS as a year-long job interview." We've heard this a few times from a few sources so far, and I think it's really good advice. Many of our instructors are working in the videogame industry right now—the class on Thursday was run by a passionate man who runs his own development studio in Burnaby, for example, and he's doing some interesting things with Augmented Reality Games that I'm looking forward to learning about. Other instructors, like the head of our program, have dozens or hundreds of contacts throughout the industry. We students need to earn the trust of those around us so they will want to pass on those opportunities or even recommend us. People like to hire people they like. It's my goal to be hired before I graduate.

I've been fortunate to meet and get to know several people working at BioWare these past few years, and I've heard from them that "fit" with the company culture is often as important as a person's skillset. After all, skills can be taught on the job, but having an open mind, a great attitude, and passion for your work usually come with the person. More good reasons to be the humble, outgoing, hard-working guy that consistently does good work.

Let's talk about specialization. Unless you are running the company (which is my far-flung goal), you are much more competitive in the job market to be the best at something specific. Outgoing generalists with an understanding of their entire product make pretty excellent leaders and project managers, but they'll never get hired to, say, be a concept artist when there are plenty of talented specialized concept artists out there. They'll also have trouble breaking into the industry without a good deal of experience behind them. So, while my goals include being a talented, generalist leader—running the show and bringing the amazing talents of others together to make incredible shared storytelling experiences for the public—I would be better served by specializing in one or two specific game design disciplines.

My writing background (and passion for storytelling) makes it pretty clear that I should focus on Game Story Writing (flavour text, dialogue, cinematics), but I also have some small artistic talent and a flair for creating dungeons and game encounters, which will lead me naturally to level design (though I have an uphill battle learning UDK and the other tools most level designers use). So, in one year, I will have a diploma in game design with a specializations in Game Story Writing and Level Design. I'll have to find out how (if) our specializations affect our certification.

As I gear up for week two I'm going to focus on beefing up my Photoshop and C# "skills" (through online tutorials and maybe asking one of the other students to walk me through a few things), maintaining an upbeat attitude, and NOT getting sick. For now, I have about 20 more analog game concepts I want to come up with. I'm getting some wacky ideas with a lot of potential to make excellent board/card games. :)

Happy gaming.

Thursday 1 September 2011

A Day in my Life as a Game Design Student

Hey there, it's been a little while. School is is picking up speed and I am already having a bit of trouble getting to everything I want to. As homework actually kicks in (it's light now on day four), I will need to have some excellent time-management structures in place. For now, it all feels a little bit crazy.

Our classes are three-hours long and never start earlier than 9:00AM, which is pretty great since my commute is 45 minutes door-to-door (walk-train-walk). However, the bad news is that we are scheduled to regularly have classes until 9:30PM (next week we make up for the long weekend by being at school until 9:30PM every night, on three of those four days we start at 9:00AM. It's just the way it is.

Today's classes started with Game Production at 9:00AM. I've heard from one student that he felt that production was basically just common sense, but I disagree; learning to manage your time and understand workflows and pipelines, and above all being a good leader—these are the farthest things from common sense. It was just an introduction this morning, so nothing was mind-blowing, but I did enjoy the class and learn some stuff already.

Hit a nearby Chinese food place for lunch (this is Chinatown, and there are MANY places like this one to choose from). The food was so-so, the service was poor, and they screwed up our order on top of all of that. I won't be going back.

This afternoon we had Cinematics/Storyboarding, which most people would recognize as being disciplines straight from the film industry. I'm pretty excited about this class as designing cinematics would be a great career, and I expect to do fairly well with my background with scriptwriting and film analysis.

We had a couple of hours between classes, so a group of us went into one of our game rooms and played Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Halo 3. Good times! I came to our class' computer lab to polish up some homework, and now I'm here writing this post, and it's class time in about 20 minutes.

This evening we have Analog Game Theory (board games, card games, etc.), which I am a little leery of. On our first day of classes we had a double-block of this, so we basically played Diplomacy as a class for five–six hours. I'll hold my opinions for now since it's so early, but I'm not quite convinced that was a good use of our time, and this education is too expensive to waste a single minute.

I'll get home tonight around 10:30PM, and tomorrow it'll all start again.

More later. Class time.

Saturday 27 August 2011

My One-Year Inspiration


At orientation a little less than a week ago, the newest student intake was herded into an auditorium in the Scotiabank theatre in downtown Vancouver to hear about our coming lives. The presenters told us that this year will be transformative, and that we will be amazed with our skills and the quality of our work by the end. There was a great deal of inspirational messaging, and being a natural romantic and a dreamer (and wanting it all to be true), I ate it up and asked for more.

Even while awash in the good-time-feelings I haven't forgotten that the real world is a tough place, and things seldom just work out. It is almost never that you wanted it so badly that things fell into place; it is that you wanted it badly enough to ask the right questions, do the right research, and work hard enough to make it happen for you. We should all learn to take more credit for our victories and defeats.

Still, I've been working and living long enough to know that a truly positive attitude—from the moment you wake up to the moment your day goes entirely to shit—is incredibly valuable. It keeps you sharp and able to roll with that RL grit. Best of all, it's infectious, and energized, challenged people tend to be surrounded by same.

My point? I wanted to share with you my one-year inspiration—the future event I am holding in my mind to push/pull me through the late nights and frustrations; the missed trains and setbacks and arguments.

The Game Design program at VFS has an industry night for each intake where the student groups present their final projects (playable games) to videogame industry recruiters and other important industry talent. As you can imagine, having an audience like this is exceedingly rare—it may never happen to any of us ever again—and I won't be the only one there that evening hoping that my specific combination of personality and the hard work from my whole team will garner some interest from movers-and-shakers.

So, here is my one-year inspiration.

A year from now I am about to present my game at game industry night. The other presentations so far have been great, but then I knew they would be since all teams worked pretty closely together this year. Our demo is ready and the tech seems stable. My team and I exchange some nods and nervous smiles, and then I step on to the stage. The lights are bright and too warm—I'll hate that—but I'm confident in our project and the work we have done. "Thank you for coming tonight," I'll say as the screen lights up behind me, "I want to share something with you that I am extremely proud of. This. Is."

And then I'll name our project. That's it. It will be nerve-wracking to get there, and there are no guarantees that I will be taking the lead on the industry night presentation (it looks like project management is a skill fostered in all Game Design grads). Still, that twenty-second snippet from those 20 minutes one August night about a year from now will be my goal for the foreseeable future.

It may sound cornball, but being inspired is a big deal. Regardless of your passion, what's your inspiration for being excellent in it? Let me know with a comment.

Monday 22 August 2011

Orientation Day: Classmates, Drizzly Wrong Turns, and No Backpack

After two solid weeks of beautiful weather here in the New West area, I finally got my taste of famous Vancouver rain. Of course it fell on the first day I had a mandatory appointment—orientation day—so after wandering around in the downtown drizzle I found my way to Scotiabank theatre and started introducing myself to some of the other students. I brought a book, a leather case to guard my student loans documents and various forms of ID, and an umbrella, but I was disappointed to learn that I would have to wait for classes to start before I get the free backpack I've heard about. Not enough hands for my payload.

Anyway, it was great to meet my classmates, and I think I shook hands with every one of them. Game Design 23 is a male-dominated intake of roughly 20 people aged 17-29, making me the oldest in our class by one year, with most of our students being around their early 20s. We've got a guy from Mexico, one from Brazil, and two Indians with awesome names. It seems a bit shocking to see people coming from so far away just to attend VFS, but it's a strong testament to the school's marketing machine and talented grads that these people are here.

A good deal of these students are, well, kids, so I'm a tiny little concerned about being alienated (or, worse, alienating) because I'm older, but so far the group is just an open bunch of gamers looking to improve their skills. I took the lead on pulling a group of us together right at the get-go, and I intend to be one of our class representatives (or the sole rep, if we go that route). Watching the presentations for the various VFS programs got me pretty pumped and antsy to get rolling, and I'm looking forward to living and breathing game design this coming year, and for years afterwards.

As expected, we may have some 12-hour days right off the bat, with our Friday evenings usually left to us. Looking through the student handbook, I'm really, finally, getting excited for the coming year and the work ahead. I'm going to be surrounded by people who will simply get what I'm saying and trying to accomplish, and reading the course descriptions simply makes me smile.

It's going to be an amazing year.

Sunday 21 August 2011

Choosing Vancouver Film School

Hey there. I wrote this six or so months ago while I was researching my school. It's still relevant to me, and may be for you, too, if you are looking into a Game Design discipline as a career.


The Art Institute of Vancouver and the Vancouver Film School

Let me start by saying that, by all accounts, you don’t have to go to school to learn game design (much like you don’t have to go to school to learn to be a writer), but for many people the structure, focus, and relationships born of post-secondary education yield results. I believe it is the best path for me to earn broad experience in the field.
Unfortunately for me, short of taking a four-year Bachelor of Computer Science degree (and changing who I am), my local options for game design are limited to experimentation with the editors that are becoming more and more common in games these days. To that end, I looked west to British Columbia and found the Art Institute of Vancouver (Ai).
I should point out that you can find negative reviews of every post-secondary school out there, and the two I looked at most closely are no exception. This makes choosing a school to invest money and time into very difficult. More on that in my conclusions, below.
Ai
At the time of this writing, the Art Institute of Vancouver’s Game Art and Design curriculum covers a full range of game design principles including classes in writing, art, animation, design theory, and a large practical component where student teams create game prototypes. The program costs nearly $40,000 in tuition, and requires about $500 (Can) in books and materials. I was told that tuition will go up sometime soon.
I attended an open house held by Ai in Edmonton, and after expressing interest in the program I was promptly contacted by extremely helpful people from their enrolment and student financial services departments. Ai does an excellent job of selling themselves, and is more attentive than I would have ever expected from a post-secondary institution. The application fee was $150, and I was accepted in about 10 days after providing my college transcripts, fees, and other documentation.
I was set to attend until I discovered some troubling accounts of Ai exaggerating their success records, with specific examples from the Game Art and Design program pressuring their staff to deem a graduate working as a software retail clerk as “successful.” I have higher hopes for my very expensive and time-intensive education, so I started searching around for another institute. I didn’t have to look far before finding the Vancouver Film School (VFS).
VFS
The Game Design program at VFS offers a similar curriculum to the Ai program, but by all accounts it is much more intensive, with 30-hour weeks (in-class), and an expected 15-20+ hours of homework on top of that, which translates into one solid year of schoolwork (rather than the nearly two years for similar certification from Ai). The program has a strong practical component as well, with teams building game prototypes for the last six months of the program to present to industry professionals on scheduled “Industry Night(s)”. The costs are a little under $33,000 for the year, which includes all materials. They accept students 3-4 times a year, 30 students at a time, so competition is strong. As of this writing I am competing for one of the last open spaces in 2011.

UPDATE: I’ve been accepted, so it is officially decision time.

The application fee was $200, and I needed to include two work-relationship/personal references, other documentation, and (most enjoyably) a four-page game idea prĂ©cis. If I want to officially have them hold my seat in the program, I need to provide a “probably non-refundable” 5% deposit of the entire cost, which comes to $1612.
VFS offers a shorter overall program with a similar curriculum for less money. They only have campuses in and around Vancouver (where Ai is spread throughout the United States), and there seems to be a great deal of success coming out of the program, including some notable talent working at (you guessed it) BioWare.
I read a half-dozen reviews, crunched the numbers, asked advice, spoke to advisors, reviewed my goals, and contacted one of the VFS alumni, a game designer named Grayson Scantlebury to ask him a million questions. (Thanks, Gray).
In short, I’m hoping to get in to the Game Design program at VFS for the reasons outlined above and also because my needs and priorities have changed. Both programs claim a 75%+ graduate success rate (with the online reports of unhappy students vehemently contradicting those numbers), but the actual success rate for me is unimportant—I am determined to graduate at the top of my class with a knockout demo reel to ensure I’m in that employed bracket. Later, after 5-8 years of experience in a variety of industry roles, I intend to open my own development house. I expect to have to work hard (and live a bit of a lean lifestyle) to achieve my goals, but I have no doubt it will be worth it. Ya gotta believe.
Here are some conclusions or thoughts I took away from this experience.
  • Time and cost are strong influencers, but trust makes just about anything possible (or not). I see more success coming from VFS and less of an investment in time and money for identical certification. Finally, VFS is an accredited institution with a 20-year history (not including my chosen program, of course, but it’s nice to know that they aren’t new to this).
  • You have to take reviews with a grain of salt—you will always find someone willing to complain about a given institution, and you won’t always find someone who loves it. Your best bet is to do your research and find out which program will drive/allow you to succeed.
  • No education guarantees success, Don’t expect to just graduate and get a job.
  • As with most things, you’ll probably get out what you put into your post secondary education. Attitude matters. Relationships matter. Grades may or may not matter, but being able to demonstrate your talent most assuredly does.
  • Game design is a relatively new discipline, and is hard to define. Game design may not officially be broken up into sub-disciplines of art, level design, audio, story, etc., but game designers tend to specialize, anyway. A good game designer will have a strong grasp on each sub-discipline, too.
  • Game designers are not idea people. They have ideas, but so does everyone else in industry.

Saturday 20 August 2011

Getting Here

Hey there. Welcome to my blog. I'm Isaac, though some of my friends call me Ike, and I believe that videogames have emerged as the premier storytelling medium. Yes, greater than novels and film, and comparable to live theatre and (you're gonna laugh) tabletop roleplaying games at their best.

All of these are some of my favourite things, and I don't want to take away from any of them—I'm well aware that each has informed the videogames I love to play today.

I've wanted to be a professional storyteller for as long as I've had direction in my life, and I figured that writing novels and scripts (for my very own one-hour weekly television drama) would be the best way to make a living as a storyteller. Could be. Hard to do.

After graduating from Edmonton's Grant MacEwan University (then a college) with an applied communications degree, I thought I had hit it big by scoring two enviable titles—I was both a Creative Writer with Codebaby, a software company with ties to BioWare, and I was also a Scriptwriter with a tiny startup film production company. Both of these contracts dried up, and I found myself taking a technical writer job at another software company in Edmonton.

There I stayed for four years, somewhat content to make money and put off my creative needs (which I fulfilled somewhat unprofessionally through running several tabletop roleplaying campaigns, writing the occasional short story or game "design" document, and launching a website dedicated to those TRPGs I loved so much. I had dreams of success in e-business, but I was in turns lacking the skills or the drive to make make them a reality.

And then I was laid off. I applied for a lot of jobs and had some interviews, but what proved most effective was the research I did into learning game design (or, more accurately, where to learn it). As a field, game design is somewhat misunderstood, and only now is the career path being explored and defined by industry professionals and academia. As a new game design student, I look forward to being a part of that process.

So, that's the short version of why I'm writing. I plan to cover many related topics over my upcoming very intense year of studies. I plan to address real-world concerns like choosing a school and student loans, but I am most excited about covering topics like game design in education, storytelling in games, game art, sound, and aesthetics. I want to talk about the effects of innovation in games and whether the term "gamer" really holds any meaning anymore. If I have time, I'm also hoping to talk about the games I am playing or the games I have played, and the reasons those games are good, bad, or in between.

But for now, I want to welcome you to my blog. Best wishes and happy gaming.