On Deck: The Toughest Term Yet

Term 3 has come to a close and I have a three-day weekend to enjoy before getting back to work on what has been hyped as the new toughest term in the program, Term 4. The reason? Term 4 stacks the entire pre-production cycle for our final projects on top of a standard course load (and if you've been keeping up, a standard course load here can become hectic in a hurry).

There is much to look forward to. I will be learning how to build machinima (in-game cinematics) in the story stream while continuing to build my skills with UDK. I will get to fully test my abilities to guide my new team, and I will have my two favourite instructors—Chris Mitchell and Olivia Bogacki—back this term to improve my processes, expand my horizons, and tell me what to do if I lose my mind. 

With so much work to do it would be easy to relax a day too many and fall behind, but I keep tabs on the students who have come before; their advice usually constitutes the very practical "be proactive and work hard." I'm about as ready as I can be.

Over this break I have a list of 10 priorities that I want to take care of before I start again on Monday at 9:00AM. One of the lowest-priority items is posting what you are now reading, but when I have a lot to do I like to knock a few lighter items out of the park to build momentum for the tougher items. Here are a few of them.

1. Apply for the Associate Producer job at Irrational Games. http://irrationalgames.com/studio/careers-at-irrational/production-associate-producer/

2. Hold a LiveFire Studios meeting to discuss our priorities heading into T4.

3. Spend three hours each on making matinées and editing materials in UDK.

4. Get Pistol Reef internet-ready with the help of my Flash team.

5. Go through the business cards I collected this past term and contact the industry professionals to thank them for their time and establish connections.

You'll have noticed that some of those items are multi-parters, particularly applying for that very appealing job with Ken Levine and Co. Applying for that job involves updating a resume that will be so different from the previous iteration that I wonder if I shouldn't just start all over. Many new skills, many new featured projects, and even a new career direction. Stack a cover letter on top and you have a lot of work.

The only qualification I am missing is that I haven't shipped at least one title, but my years of experience as a manager could combine with the very targeted experience I am earning now in school to provide a strong case for equivalency. Without fooling myself, there's a possibility that I would be considered as a candidate. I don't really expect to get a call back, though. 

It might make sense to hire me on paper, but if that was all it took I would have been hired at BioWare almost 10 years ago. No, I'm doing the work to get a leg up on the job hunt. I will be actively looking for work from here until I graduate. For that I will need business cards, an updated resume, and good portfolio pieces.

I mentioned the job application to one of my peers in the program—an artist named Jay—and he asked me what I would do if they offered me the job. After some discussion I realized that the only thing I could do would be to ask them to start my contract with them after school was done. Not only do I want to finish the program here and earn my diploma (with an honors average of 90+), but my team is relying on me to work my ass off over the next six months.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Thanks for stopping by.

Scheduling and Team LiveFire

Term three is winding down and I am looking forward to my break.

I may have mentioned that I have never worked this hard in my life. I know, I know—you hear that from people and it's easy to dismiss it, but I can quantify the claim for you by describing my average weekly schedule.

Here goes.

I have between seven and nine classes every week. Each class is scheduled for three hours, with a handful habitually only reaching the 1.5-2 hour mark, providing lab time for the remainder. Let's average that out to 25 hours a week in class.

I have major assignments due in two of those classes most weeks. Major assignments might take anywhere from five to forty hours to complete. Those are extremes at either end, and averaging them out is basically meaningless considering the range.

The time I spend at school is much more telling and useful. For terms one and two, I stayed home for about five days in total. That means I spent 55 days out of 60 at school. On average I probably did around 10 hours of work for each of those days, inside or outside of class. My schedule was a bit different in term 3, and I tried having a day off each week. It didn't go well, and I have spent the last week scrambling to catch back up.

The bottom line? I spend 60-90 hours a week on school projects. That might not seem like a lot to some people—I'm sure there are stock brokers or realtors or career criminals out there who spend 100+ hours a week doing their thing—but to most people, to me, it's a lot. As the end of each term rolls around I start to crave a little downtime for my brain. Well, I have some coming to me, though I have one more massive assignment standing in my way before I can really relax.

There are a couple of contributing factors to my excessive time spent at/with school. I want to do a good job of every assignment I touch, and I also want to maintain my honors average. I'm sitting at 93% atm. The other thing is my specialization. As a project manager I end up not only doing a fair chunk of every group assignment I am on, but I also take on the role of keeping other people rolling, setting deadlines, and organizing the workflow. This adds anywhere from 10-50% to my project workload, but someone has to do it for a project team to turn out good work, and I'm happy to be practicing the skills that I am hoping will get me hired at companies like Irrational Games and BioWare.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to polishing Pistol Reef over the break—I want to get it up on Kongregate or another web portal—and Sacrifice (my board game) is begging for some playtesting so I can get it up for sale online. That's work, too, but it's so far removed from the stressful school stuff that I am really looking forward to it.

Oh, and also? LiveFire Studios is a thing. I will be posting there a lot over the next six months. Check us out.

Pitching Shroud Isle

Shroud Isle is the name of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ran with some buddies over the course of two years. It's a complex story that unfortunately never even reached its halfway point at the gaming table, though I had planned well beyond that. It's got everything, from love to betrayal; from gunzerkers to jungle ninjas; from conflict borne out of individual racial prejudice, all the way to the potential for the players' to end the world.

After spending so mich time and effort building characters and planning encounters and even creating a basic language for the natives of the island, the San'Nakkai, I have subconsciously been keeping my eyes open for an opportunity to pay all that off. I got it this term with my Creative Writing class, where we are expected to pitch a story as our final project.

Pitching a game story is a lot like pitching a game, something I have done a lot of these five months. As a side note, I am more than a bit flattered and proud to have heard from a couple of fellow students that I'm the best speaker in our class. Anyway, I've had four meetings over the past two weeks to pitch my game idea to fellow GD students and some of the excellent guys from the VFS screenwriting program. I was unprepared for the first pitch, which was unfortuate since that meeting was with a guy working as a producer in Vancouver. He was all business, and the 60 minutez I spent with him were exhausting.

The next three meetings went very well, with one listener even going as far as to say that he loved my story and thought I should pursue it to completion. Never mind that the game would rival a BioWare title for length, complexity, and production costs, it was still incredibly gratifying to have someone buy my creative work so completely.

I owe that positive experience to knowing my story well, understanding what a listener needs to hear to to keep them centered on the plot, and being passionate about the whole thing. I broke the ice first thing by asking him about his schooling, something I sometimes struggle with, and drew a map on a handy whiteboard to keep him oriented in the world as I told my story.

Most of all, I owed that later success to that first failure. I made sure to do all the things in that second pitch that I didn't do in the first, and while I hope I won't have to screw up to learn at some point in my life, I'll never expect it to happen. You learn a lot from failure.

Anyway, I'll be presenting that story in a couple of weeks, and maybe in five or ten years you'll be playing Shroud Isle or zome derivative for yourself.