Notes from the VGXPO2008: Breaking into the industry

There were 6 or so people on this panel. Here are some general notes that I"ve tried to organize by topics

General

• Hard to get in, no guaranteed jobs, everyone above average, you have to stand out, you have to be the best at what you do, you have to bring a lot of knowledge about games, and you have to put in a lot of work to find a good job. Industry has a "churn and burn" attitutde towards employees because there is a never-ending stream of people who want the jobs. 30-40% of industry jobs are non-production (marketing/PR brand development, project management)
• Think about games broadly - lots of different types of games - casual, seirous, mobile, simulations - all need people with game making skills
• Have to show you have a passion for the industry, for making games - shows in your portfolio, in your conversations

Education/Learning

• College degree shows you can finish something big - Graduate degrees good for pure game design - grad school like boot camp for the industry. Full sail starting masters program
• Make games while you're in school - all kinds of games. Mod games
• Need experience working on teams
• Play games, lots of games, all kinds of games - don't have to finish them - play and understand the basics. Be able to talk about them. Play the games made by the studios where you would like to work.
  
• Get experience playing and making online games - everyone is looking to be online
• Look at the studios where you want to work and see what jobs are listed on their website, then see what skills they want in those jobs, then look for a program that offers those skills. look for the job titles so you know what to search on. Look for the names of people doing interesting work in the field you want to be in - follow them in the news, read their blogs so you have something to talk about if ya get to meet them.
  
• Get skills to do other stuff in addition to making games so you have stuff to fall back on when jobs are scarce.

Portfolio & Interviews

• Portfolio should have a clean professional design. Include stuff specific to the kind of job you're applying for. Have someone in the biz review your portfolio.
• Degree and resume not enough - you need a solid portfolio that shows how you're different from competition, there is lots of competition, you can put in games that you made in class. Be sure to say what you did on projects - don't lie but don't sell yourself short.
• Start working now to develop and build up your portfolio - mod, mod, mod make own game with lots of tools - XNA, Torque, web tools. Have friends play your games and give you feedback.
• Look for internships - not all companies have organized internship programs so you ahve to contact them and ask for opportunitites
• If artist, put in things that have real world equivalents (reference pictures) and your drawings better be picture perfect. DOn't put in cars, mechs robots, spaceships imaginary sci fi landscapes
• At interiew be very professional be sure you know about the compnay and the games that they make
• play games from the studio(s) where you want to work - they're going to ask you about it at interviews and you need to sound/be informed
  

Networking

• Network, network, network - especially when economy tough, industry very competitive so you have to know people and make good first impressions. Be sure to have business cards (that say the title you want, not student). Talk to the speakers at panels. Ask if you can contact them about portfolio reviews. They believe that most people in the biz are willing to give advice.
• Volunteer at conferences - good for networking, good for showing your dedication to the industry, learn a lot
• Blog, create a website - have an online presence, a professional presence
• Join professional orgs - IGDA, ECA, Videogame Voters Network - take part in student chapters, take leadership roles, invite guests.
  

Here's a good blog post by an audio guy who was on one of the panels - http://www.mikeworthmusic.com/blog/?p=26

FuturePlay 2008

What I'm mostly doing at the Future Play confernce is going thru the 3 day game producer's workshop. Today we covered preproduction and got an intro to production. Lots of notes, we did a couple of group exercises. I got lots of ideas for things we need to do in the 4 year curriculum to give everyone exposure at different levels to these preproduction ideas. The game producer's workshop is led by Heather Chandler who was the producer for the Ghost Recon franchise at Ubisoft up to 2005 when she started her own company Media Sunshine, inc. to provide producer and creative services as a contractor. Here are a couple of ideas from today's class.

• I think i would like to be a game producer - they do the budgeting, the scheduling, the relations with the team and with the "suits". They have the big picture in mind at all times.
• independent stuios/developers have to prove that they can deliver on time and on budget and they can quickly get a bad reputation if they mess up a project
• preproduction should take up from 10 to 25% of time alloted to the game development - more ya do up front, the smoother hte production will go
• brainstorm often with people from the team - game concept, character names, character appearance, gameplay, look and feel - - get lots of ideas and you get buy in from the people on the team good for morale and good for game quality
• Image via Wikipediaproducer has to do competitive, SWOT, and risk analyses - for competitive analysis look at past games that set the standard for the genre, present games that are selling well, announced but not yet released games to see key features, how you can position your game against hte competition - she says to write down for each competing game - title developer, publisher, platform, release date, game summary, key features, sales estimates, game reviews on things like metacritic, - can do in a spreadsheet
• prototypes are good - show people your idea, play test early on, can be paper or digital, good for iterative design, can prototype parts of the game like new game play mechanisms - - gets people from all parts of the team talking about the game since they will all be able to see how it looks and plays
• milestones - deliverables on key dates key events to track game progress, goals for designers & programmers - have to make sure everyone agrees wiht the definitions of hte milestone deliverables, break down what each part of hte team should have ready for each milestone so each part of the team knows what to expect to be getting from other parts of the team
• she talked about very detailed schedules i project management software that has dependencies and resources assigned, break down tasks to that subtasks might take just a day or two, get a list from everyone of al the tasks that they think they need to do, organize and prioritize it
• hard to plan 2 years in advance so producer has to be flexible and be willing to update schedule as you move thru development phases
• as ya get people to play the prototype - need them to say what htey like/dislike about the game and why - why is the most important and the toughest to actually get, have to tease out what they don't like specifically and what they'd like to see instead

during production - focus on finishing the game - no new features without compelling reasons, stick to the plan, easier to do if there's buy in earlier from the preproduction phase

gamasutra has salary reviews that you could use for initial budgeting
share schedule with the team - again gets buy in, lets them see what happens if they fall behind on their tasks - they can see all the other tasks that will be put off schedule

I ahve a copy of the slides and we're getting a copy of her book with a lot more detail.

I think we have to give students a chance to practice these preproductin skills - developing budgets and schedules, doing QA being the producer, being lead designer/artist/programmer

Notes from FuturePlay conference in Toronto 2008 pt1

Image via WikipediaThis is the first of a couple of posts about the FuturePlay conference in Toronto in November 2008. It started on a good note - lots of tasty fresh fruit and yummy soup for lunch. The picture is the Toronto skyline from the CN tower (which I went up in. I have some of my own pics from the tower that I"ll post later. Now for the relevant stuff.....

The morning keynote was Ben Sawyer talking about serious games. He started Digital Mill. He started games for health and the serious games initiative. He has the experience to back up his thoughts, predictions, and suggestions for future work. I have a lot of notes but here are a few cool things.

• they have a serious games taxonomy with definitions and examples - handy reference
• most people are working with uninformed opinions about serous games - it's not just games for education
• most people talking about serous games have a poor sense of what's a game and have little experience with modern games or what people expect when you say something is a game now a days
• serious educational games shouldn't think that one measure of success for htem is that people will just pick them up and play (like they do halo or gears of war) - as long as the games are a little more interesting/motivating than the alternative that's a success - because content matters and fisheries management is just not as inherently interesting as is blowing up space aliens - i hadn't thought about this before - you can't just say oh it's a game kids will want to play it without it being assigned as homework --- that's just not true for most games for education and that's ok since they will play them a little more frequently, will actually do their homework, will get a little more practice with a game than a regular workbook for instance
• people shouldn't assume that serious games = boring games; bad games regardless of whether they're serous or not are just boring, don't make bad games
• games play into the idea of learning as behavior change
• we need more research - especially design research relaqted to games - about serious games, need to organize a foundation of research literature, need more theories than just hwat James Gee has proposed

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