Train2Game Web Site FaceBook Train2Game Page
twitter.com/train2game FaceBook Gameathon Page
More soon as we add them
Category Archives: Games Developer
Train2Game teams with Microsoft to set game jam world record
The Guinness Book of World Records (for largest game jam in a single location) to be set at event organised by Microsoft and Train2Game
Luton, 01 August 2012: Microsoft Corp. will collaborate with online blended learning service Train2Game to set the world record for the largest game jam held in a single location, at the Microsoft and Train2Game Gameathon 2012.
Students on Train2Game courses will gather at the University of Bedfordshire from 14th September to 16th September 2012, forming development teams and creating Metro style videogames for Windows 8 in 48 hours. The world record will be set with a target of 301 or more participants. Representatives from The Guinness Book of World Records will adjudicate the event.
Microsoft experts will be on hand and the contestants will use Windows 8 software. Games completed during the record attempt deemed suitable for release will be available through the Windows Store. A judging process will take place with gaming industry representatives choosing a best game of the show.
“We’re teaming with Train2Game not only to set a world record, but also to support gaming development in the UK,” said John Richards, senior director, Windows Partners and Developers at Microsoft Corp. “We’re working with the students developing for Windows 8, as they are the future of the industry.”
Myra Smallman, Course Director, Train2Game: “This is a tremendous opportunity for our students to work with one of the most respected technology companies in the world. Microsoft is a major player in the video games industry globally and being part of this relationship will be incredibly positive for Train2Game students when they look for employment in the future. The students taking part will also be world record holders, a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Train2Game News BAFTA Masterclass
A BAFTA Masterclass with LA Noire BAFTA-Nominee Simon Wood on Tuesday 31 July at 19:00.
Join BAFTA at The Hospital Club with Simon Wood, an award winning Production Designer and creator of Rockstar Games LA Noire. Simon started as an Industrial designer before crossing over into films and working on The Phantom Menace, Tomorrow Never Dies and Thunderbirds. He then settled in as the Production Designer at Sony Europe (PlayStation) on The Getaway series. Haven spoken extensively at conferences around the world, Simon will be describing his role on projects and then discussing ‘good art’, ‘good design’ and the creative processes as a whole.
Tickets are £5.00
Thanks to BAFTA for the heads-up
Train2Game News: Lord of the Rings Online senior producer talks updates in Warbands video
Reply
Get behind the scenes of Lord of the Rings Online and its upcoming Riders of Rohan expansion in a new video from Warner Brothers and Turbine.
Inside the Game: Warbands sees LOTRO Senior Producer Aaron Campbell discusses Warbands with Community Manager Rick Heaton. Subjects include how they’ve changed gameplay mechanics to reward players for helping others and how they’ve tweaked the A.I. in order to improve the game.
Watch the video below, right here on The Train2Game Blog.
Get more insight into game development in various other videos here on The Train2Game Blog.
Are you a Lord of the Rings Online player? What are your thoughts on the changes?
Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.
Train2Game News: EA announce Battlefield 4 beta spots for Medal of Honor: Warfighter pre-orders
Battlefield 4 will enter beta in autumn 2013 with exclusive places for those who pre-order Medal of Honor: Warfighter, which is set for release in October this year.
The official announcement of Battlefield 4 comes from EA and DICE following news of the beta leaking on EA’s Origin store. Both games are powered by EA’s Frostbite 2 engine.
“Though Battlefield and Medal of Honor Warfighter each offer players a completely unique experience, they are united by their underlying technology base – Frostbite.” said EA Labels president Frank Gibeau
“These are two of the hottest shooters, coming together to deliver a one-two punch of action, intensity and shooter entertainment.”
Battlefield 3 went through open beta ahead of its release last year, with DICE making changes to the shooter as a result of testing.
There’s more about Battlefield here on The Train2Game Blog, while there’s plenty of information about the importance of beta testing, and opportunities to get involved, here.
What are your thoughts on EA’s decision to announce a the Battlefield 4 beta over a year before it begins?
Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.
Train2Game News: Frogster producer Rüdiger Moersch on getting into the industry
Getting involved with a gaming community and studying games related courses are great ways to attempt to break into the industry. That’s according to Frogster producer Rüdiger Moersch who was speaking to The Train2Game Blog at Rezzed.
Frogster are publishers of upcoming monster-hunting MMO RaiderZ, which is currently accepting sign-ups of an upcoming beta. The German company are also publishers of recently released MMO Tera.
“It really depends on what section of the games industry you want. If you want to go for CS, or something like that, or even some community management, you must have some experience in the community.” Moersch responded when we asked him for advice about getting into the games industry.
“The best way to get into community management for example, in my opinion, is to open up your own guild, manage it on a small scale, get the experience there, being involved in the games and love the games of course. If you want to get into programming or art or something like that, study.” he added.
The Frogster producer also revealed how he got started in the games industry.
“You know, I started something like 25 years ago! I was looking for a job at the time, living in Germany, and I stumbled over an advert in a newspaper looking for a computer gaming company for a CS guy, so I went for it, applied and ended up at Soft Gold.” he said.
“I don’t know if you know the name of it anymore, but it was a German publisher, and we had some really cool games like the early LucasArts games, and I worked my way up, basically.” Moersch added.
There’s more advice from games professionals about getting into the industry here on The Train2Game Blog.
As usual, leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.
Train2Game News: “Don’t expect to sit around.” after completing production of your first game
Finishing development of your very first video game may be an incredibly satisfying experience, but don’t expect that to bring instant success or to be the end of your work either.
That’s one of key themes to come out of a ‘Directions to take after your first game’ session at Develop Conference 2012.
“You build it, you’re happy with it, and you think you’ve crossed the finish line.” said Sean Murray of Hello Games, creators of Joe Danger, before going on to add that feedback from players about almost everything – including in the case of Joe Danger , custom soundtracks not working propely – will keep you busy.
Supermono’s Tak Fung agreed, stating its important for indie developers to keep working even after the game has shipped.
“Don’t expect it to be glorious Vegas gambling.” he said, pointing out the importance of getting knowledge of your game out there through PR and marketing. “Don’t expect to sit around.” he added.
Keep reading The Train2Game Blog for the latest news from Develop Conference.
What are your thoughts on the advice from the indie developers on what do you after your first game? Have you planned that far ahead?
Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.
Train2Game student Diaries of Jonny Robinson with some advice
Jonny Robinson
After many hours of game development and laughter making My Sea Park, it’s now live on the app store. I’m just blown away with how fast it has shot up the UK app charts and it is getting nothing but praise on the reviews section.
It really has opened my eyes to a monetisation model as a whole, which is vital for me to know as a designer since as the gaming economy is changing exponentially.
Clive Robert (CEO of DR Studios) very kindly took out all the member of staff for a meal which was a great laugh. We were like kids at Christmas, just wondering how many downloads we would get and continuously hoping it will make it to the top. Well it’s in the top 25 downloads at the moment and it is still climbing just like the smile on my face.
I need to take my hat off to development DR team and Fuse for doing such a great job!
As a little bonus, this will look great on my portfolio! 😉
Until next time peace!
Jonny Robinson 48
Another week another gigantic lesson learned. Doing what I do, I have to keep a lot of things close to my chest as I don’t want to be legally done by NDA or anything else of that matter. All I can say is that I went for a job interview for a position in the game industry. The person who interviewed me passed on some fantastic advice that I want to share with you as he is very experienced in what he does.
Anonymous game industry advice:
1) When you first walk into an interview; make sure you always introduce yourself, pass your CV to the interviewer (just in case) and tell them what position you are applying for.
2) Make sure before the interview you email the interviewer a link to your portfolio and CV; so they can do a little homework on you before the interview. This is so the interviewers are not focusing on the portfolio so much and instead are paying more attention to you, the interviewee.
3) Show passion if you are new to the industry, this will go a long way if you are less experienced as this will state that you are willing to go the whole nine yards and back to get the job done.
4) This last one is my own advice, if this is your first interview for a game industry position, say so. This may make you look less professional but it will give you some leeway as the interviewer knows you new to this whole experience.
This is just a snippet of information I’m willing to share with you, as we Train2Game members need to stick together and plus, I’m nice like that.
So how did my interview go? It went as well as it could have done, to be honest, but I have been asked to come back for another interview which is fantastic news.
So I hope this information helps you as much as it helped me.
There is so much more that I could talk about, but I will leave that one for my next diary, so stay tuned.
Until then… peace!
Train2Game student Diaries James Bouckley week 15 and 16
Week 15
This week we discussed targets for the game. When should it be finished by and when would we have a demo ready. We tried to have a demo ready by Friday but unfortunately we failed. Despite the game being interesting and very fun to develop, the support cases have to come first and a surprising abundance of them this week and Rob still being on holiday meant we just didn’t have enough time to work on it. It came as a bit of surprise to me this week when I discovered we needed desktop controls because the game was going to be multi-platform and the dual-joystick imitation controls for keyboard I had made (purely for testing purposes), weren’t going to cut it. After a bit of stressful week, I have to admit that being told this didn’t find me well. Ben spent some time going around the office with the iOS version of the game, which was finished, getting as many opinions as possible so we could polish the demo. Meanwhile I struggled to finish the PC controls and failed. Not a great week in all, but still a fair margin better than any week I’ve ever had in any other job… ever.
Week 16
Unity 4.0 has been announced! It was announced this Monday and boy does that make for a lot of support cases! Rob is now back with us and good job too because I think without him Ben and I would have struggled. This again meant another week with not as much work done on the game as I would have liked. The desktop controls are finished now, but buggy and I’m not happy with them. Also, one of the major things that people noted about the game when Ben showed them last Friday was that they didn’t like the linear mapping between finger-joystick position and player speed. What that means is that there is linear dependence between the distance of your finger and the centre of the joystick and the speed the player moves at. People would have preferred a relationship that meant when you’re near the centre you move slower but then you accelerate faster as you move further away. When I heard this my reaction was “Okay, that’s doable but it’s going to be expensive. We’ll have to do a square-root operation every frame.” God bless Unity though because they have already thought about it. Mark showed me how to sample a curve and apply it to a script and the iOS controls are now far more user-friendly. Another thing that came up is what happens when the player moves behind something. Currently we have a shader that highlights the player so you can still see him. This however sometimes makes it look like the player is on top of the object instead of behind it. So instead I have started to implement a script that will make the objects see-through instead of the player being highlighted. I was having some difficulty with this and with some help from Cat, we nearly got their. I’m confident I can finish this myself early next week.
Train2Game Student Diary Ezekiel Morris Weeks 6 and 7
Week 6
Well this week has been awesome so far facial expression are working in unity now so I’m glad about that , three weeks struggling to get this face expression working but as a student I haven’t had experience on flat facial animation before so it was Difficult to solve this issue. I needed some guidance so Ben, a student at train2game took a look at this flat facial animation problem and got it working in unity 3d.
Next stage working on another character, creating textures but keeping the same model but still I’m not satisfied how my first character textures are looking, when I’m doing concept art I make sure you have a good understanding of the concept, for example how big it is, what is it wearing a reference image of my character once I’m clear on the design of the character I can prepare texturing the character.
I feel that this is just a work in progress on development but still we got a working function game it just needs some cleaning up so things are pitting up and also I like the workflow I’m doing now, you just feel that you know what you doing without thinking about it.
Oh yes we have a new environment artist joining the DR studios.
Ezekiel Morris week 7
This week DR studios had a launch party to celebrate their new release – my sea park, I’m happy to say my sea park is doing well and I’m happy to say I did collaborate on the project as well .
On my sea park I did the penguin and the seal sketch and then Matty helped clean up the sketches. When I started at DR Studios I was working on another project and I was told to help on my sea park for bit. After finishing the sketches for my sea park I when back to my original project .It was a nice day and a nice lunch out with my associates, the place we went was called red hot world buffet the food was excellent but I couldn’t eat anymore I was full.
We all went back to DR studios, I was food drunk, now I’m on another project and my task is to model this character in three days but it’s going to be a video render with a pink or white background, then I’m gonna put a camera in the scene so that it goes around the character when it’s being rendered.
So I started off doing a model sheet of the character head but I wasn’t sure if I should sculpt the character or model it in 3d max but gonna model it straight in 3d max.
The Train2Game Blog 