Category Archives: games

Train2Game Student Diaries Matty Wyett Simmonds weeks 33 to 35

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Week 33

So as My Sea Park is now out and getting updates constantly with upped level caps and more items to get, we have been working on a new project, similar in a few ways but completely different in many. It will definitely be an interesting process, as we aren’t using the same game engine anymore, which means none of the Sea Park stuff is reusable! I’m sure the T2G students will enjoy this when it’s out in the open.

I’ve been kept busy with setting up a pipeline and making things workable, it’s been a hard process but the payoff seems worth it.

Not long left for two of the students here, as they will be leaving soon, making us down by one designer and one artist. The new artist has started recently though (staff not student) and he’s been great so far, learning a lot from him already! And it’s nice to have a definite person in charge of art now, as it’s giving us some direction that has been needed for a very long time. He’s worked at a few other studios that vary in work flow, giving insight into how other studios work differently to each other, which is interesting.

Week 34

Another week passed now, and last Friday we had some interesting news from Clive which basically meant we were in crunch for this week! That’s not too bad though, crunch time for me means staying late, listening to music on the sound system and getting free pizza/curry. It’s hard work but lots of fun, especially with mine and Craig’s DR play list that we setup on Spotify, anyone can join in and vote for songs to be played next, so we had a few students logging in and choosing what we listened to during crunch and it was a lot of fun!

During the week I have been working closely with Rod, the new artist, to make the art style work and to produce a lot of content that could be used quickly. The other student artist Ezekiel has been working on character art, while I was working on building art. There’s not much else I can say really without giving too much away, so I shall leave it at that, as I have to be off early this Friday because I have to go to a christening and graduation over the weekend (Obviously not for the same person).

Matty Wyett Simmonds week 35

This week I have had a few days off for the events which I mentioned in the last diary, so I started this week on Wednesday and got straight back into it, there is not too much to say about this week since being off for half of it! We had a meeting on the Wednesday that I got back and everything has basically been the same since I was away (as you would expect from two days off). I have just been starting off where I left off on Friday.

This week however is an unusual week, as today (this Friday) is the last day of two of the students, Ben and Johnny (Johnny as in Ironcore on the forums) Ben has been here a good few months now and Johnny has been here even longer. It’s a shame to see them leave, although when ben leaves I get an entire desk to myself at home but that’s beside the point.

I wish both of them good luck and I hope they both grab another job in industry quickly, too long out of the loop may leave you out of the loop permanently and I hope that doesn’t happen to them, they’ve both worked hard and have done well to stay here longer than their original contracts, so they must have been doing something right.

www.train2game.com

Train2Game Student Diaries Craig Moore Weeks 34 to 36

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Week 34

We are now pretty much in full swing with the next title.

The beginning of the week was fairly run of the mill, building up concepts and fleshing out documentation. Having a much larger art resource available this time around I am having to prepare a lot further in advance. It is no longer the case where I can simply do a quick sketch for Matty just as its needed and we run from that.

A little bit of a change of pace but it is all for the want of a better process.

As the week went on there was a pretty big surprise that has really kicked things in to gear, a massive opportunity that we have to take with both hands. While it is going to be a lot of work over the next few days it’s going to push the project in to overdrive and really get some work done.

So for the next few days I am going to be putting some heavy hours into collating a document as well as doing some concrete UI concepts to help push the project forwards, and we shall see what we have at the end!

See you on the other side….

Craig

 Week 35

Well that was busy!

After clocking up close to 40 hours work in 3 days we managed to get the work done and I think we were all incredibly pleased with the result. It was a great experience to come together with 3 artists to build a really impressive and important document. It’s been a fantastic learning experience for us all in both regards of creating such a high profile document, and working to a very tight deadline.

I would like to say we did a great job, worked well together and produced a great piece of work.

And now it feels like we are properly in full swing, documenting mechanics and processes. Collating everything that we have spoken about internally over the last few weeks and making sure it is all somewhere and exists so that it doesn’t get forgotten.

We are on an incredibly tight schedule for this next game, hopefully we can deliver. My big worry is simply not having enough time, I want this next title to be so much bigger and better than My Sea Park I have learnt so much, we all have, and with the right time we can certainly do it! Unfortunately, as always, time is money so we will just have to see how we get on I suppose and hope for the best.

I couldn’t ask to be working with a better group of people though, so I will keep my faith.

Craig

Week 36

After the hectic push of last week it’s been nice to get back to a relatively normal pace. It is officially “on” though so we have a lot of work to do in a comparatively short space of time, essentially making the next game in half the time we did for My Sea Park; puts a lot of pressure on us all as a team.

However the ground work is there, we need to be incredibly clever going forward so that we don’t waste any time and that we take advantage of every possible outlet we can.

It is a sad day today; Jonny and Ben are finishing their placements. It’s been fantastic working with them especially Jonny whom I have had the pleasure of working with for quite some time now and he has become a very good friend of mine. Thankfully he will be staying in the area so we will surely be keeping in contact and I will keep a close eye on his movements as he surely finds himself some amazing role in the games industry! He deserves it for working so hard.

So tonight we are going out to celebrate, it’s fantastic to work with such a nice group of people who I can enjoy at both work and in a social environment.

What’s it they say, work hard, play hard?

Craig

www.train2game.com

Train2Game News BAFTA Masterclass

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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: Black Ops II’s story “is better than most movies” says writer David S. Goyer

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Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s story is better than that of many films. That’s according to game writer David S. Goyer – co-author of The Dark Knight Rises – speaking in a brand new behind the scenes video from Treyarch and Activision.

“Even though it’s a first person shooter, it’s got to be sophisticated, it’s got to be funny, it’s got to be challenging and it’s got to have twists and turns. In the case of Black Ops, I would argue the story is better than most movies that are being made” said Goyer.

The video also features Award-winning composer of The Social Network Trent Reznor discussing providing the score for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, while Studio Head Mark Lamia and game director Mark Anthony discuss the relationship between movies, music and games.

Watch Behind the Scenes with Trent Reznor & David S. Goyer – Official Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Video below, right here on The Train2Game Blog.

There’s more Call of Duty: Black Ops II news here on The Train2Game Blog, including a previous behind the scenes video preview.  Be sure to keep reading for more insights from developer diaries.

What are your thoughts on the high-profile team working on Black Ops II? Could it really have a story that’s better than films?

Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

Train2Game News: More games should focus on real-world issues and events says Jade Raymond

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Video games can be used to focus on real-world issues and provoke intelligent debate. That’s according to Ubisoft Toronto boss Jade Raymond who was speaking about the state of the games industry in an interview with Develop.

“The Arab Spring, class divide, internet freedoms… why aren’t there triple-A games about these topics? We can actually use the interactive power of our medium to talk about these subjects in a way that can provoke discussion about them.” she said, adding that while these subjects probably won’t become the core focus of games, they can quite easily be made a part of them.

“I am a realist – at $60m per triple-A game it’s not likely we can make a subject like this the core of a brand new IP. Games may be stuck in this narrow genre of action shooters – but that shouldn’t mean we are stuck.” said Raymond.

“So why not weave more meaning into existing blockbusters? Maybe GTA could make a statement about the penal system? Or maybe games like Call of Duty could make a statement about sexism? Maybe Splinter Cell could make a statement about the ethics of interrogation?” she continued.

“The first step is to add that into existing blockbusters, it’s easier to do it this way than introduce a new IP and be riskier with your content and your message.” the Ubisoft Toronto boss added.

The full interview is available to read in Develop magazine, or on Develop Online.

There’s more from Jade Raymond here on The Train2Game Blog, including her advice on getting into the industry.

What are your thoughts? Should video games make more of an effort to focus on real world issues?

Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

Train2Game News: UK Charts – LEGO Batman 2 makes it 4 in a row at No.1

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LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes makes it four weeks in a row at No.1 as it continues to hold onto top spot in the charts, matching the same number of consecutive weeks FIFA 12 spent in the position earlier this year.

There’s no movement in the entire top three, with London 2012: The Official Video Game and The Amazing Spider-Man remaining at No.2 and No.3 respectively.  Dead Island Game of the Year Edition moves up one to No.4, while Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future soldier jumps four to No.5.

The Train2Game Blog recently spoke to Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Creative Director Jean-Marc Geoffroy and Ubisoft Development Director Adrian Lacey, with the pair offering advice to Train2Game students on getting into the industry.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 moves up two to No.6 in its 36th week on sale, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim dropping one to No.7. FIFA 12 is No.8 in its 42nd week in the charts, with Spec Ops: The Line dropping five to No.9 in its third week on sale. Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games completes the top ten.

New release from Namco Bandai and Saber Interactive, Inversion, doesn’t even make the top 40 in its first week on sale, debuting at No.50.

The UKIE Gfk Chart-Track All Formats Top 10 for the week ending 14th July is therefore as follows:

1. LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Warner Bros)
2. London 2012: The Official Video Game (Sega)
3. The Amazing Spider-Man (Activision)
4. Dead Island Game of the Year Edition (Koch Media)
5. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (Ubisoft)
6. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (EA)
7. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)
8. FIFA 12 (EA)
9. Spec Ops: The Line (2K Games)
10. Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Sega)

It’s a quiet week for new releases, but new games to hit the shelves include Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for Nintendo 3DS.

What are your thoughts on the charts this week? Are you one of those people who’ve bought LEGO Batman 2? Will it stay No.1?

Leave your comments here on The Train2Game Blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

Train2Game student Diaries of Jonny Robinson with some advice

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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!

www.train2game.com

 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!

www.train2game.com

Train2Game student Diaries of Ben Stoneman May to June

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18/05/12
This week the game had changed quite a bit in regards to movement and controls, at the moment we are not near getting a build done and there are still many design issues to consider. I have been finding that a lot of design issues are hard to understand by other team members. They find it hard to see how some of my requests make the game better for the player in terms of gameplay and control. We also needed to begin work on the enemy, however the artist had no idea where to start and frankly came across as not being very excited about learning. I worried this would take too long, so i decided to begin learning how to model, rig and animate in 3ds Max.

25/05/12
This week I have been working on the developer diary for the Asset bundles project. I have been happy to hear feedback from others in regards to the diary, It has given me insight into how they understand the document and has allowed me to make changes that ensure that all can understand and enjoy reading it. One thing that I have found hard whilst doing the developer diary is understanding the problems the coder has faced when working on the game mechanics, also why they decided to program a mechanic a certain way and a lot of other things concerning the programming side of the development.

01/06/12
This week we have tried to get as much of the important art assets for the game finished before our artist goes on holiday for two weeks. The artist had been on cases all day most days, however on the Friday i pushed him to get the essential art assets completed. The art assets had been modelled and UV unwrapped, however the textures still needed to be made and the models need to be imported into the project. the rest of the week has been basically getting the support cases done and giving a personal touch to each of the 9 rooms in the game, including lighting and scenery.

08/06/12
This week was quite short, however I did volunteer to work the Monday and Tuesday, which were bank holidays. I came into an empty office on Monday and got straight onto the cases there were a lot of cases and they were all for me to complete. I did not find it daunting at all, in fact i knew exactly how I was going to go about getting it done. so I began to plough through all of the simple activation cases. On the Tuesday I decided to work from home, I was now past the activation cases and onto the asset store related content. Usually I do not get many asset store cases when working with Rob and James so i did find it quite difficult to answer certain issues. I was advised to say to the customers with issues i needed help solving, that we have limited staff due to the diamond jubilee weekend and the issue will be dealt with asap. the rest of the week was recovering from the hardcore case work over the two bank holidays, however i found i had learnt alot about the asset store cases and how to solve them.

15/06/12
We had our latest build done today, after we tested the build and saw it was working like a basic beta version, we began setting up a presentation. Unfortunately we were unable to link the iPad to the projector, so therefore we decided to go around the office allowing others to test the game and give us their feed back. All my life i have valued feedback, ever since my primary school teacher said “ask your friends what they think”. The feedback we got for those who tested it brought up good points and most gave us a solution. The rest of the week has been mostly cases and polishing the game
ready for the Friday build.

www.train2game.com

Train2Game student Diaries James Bouckley week 15 and 16

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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.

www.train2game.com

Train2Game Student Diary Ezekiel Morris Weeks 6 and 7

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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.

 www.train2game.com