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.

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.

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 précis. 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.

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.