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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.