Tag Archives: games industry

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

Train2game Student Diary Craig Moore – What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

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Craig Moore – What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

Student Diary , Week 30

Unleashed on to the world like a penguin in a paddling pool! My Sea Park hit the unsuspecting world head on yesterday and it’s been an incredible experience, and this was only day one!

We had already seen the beginnings of the social media pushes, by our publishers, earlier in the day but it wasn’t until we got word of My Sea Park creeping in to the charts that things really got exciting. There was the hope it was doing well but the visibility wasn’t really available.

That was until around 5pm, while we were in the meeting with the publisher we heard word it had crept in to the top 50! Of course everyone became very excited, but by the end of the meeting it had already, again, crept in to around 37!

Of course this continued throughout the day, admittedly it wasn’t the most productive of days but it was a really lovely reward for all the hard work.  Of course, being a free title, there is now the hope it will actually monetise well.

That was pretty much the key moment of the week, the rest of my week has been spent illustrating and working on the concept document for the next title, which is going incredibly well. I am waiting on feedback from a few of the other guys here, but fingers crossed it will get some approval; It’s a really exciting project!

-Craig

www.train2game.com

Craig Moore

Student Diary – Week 31

What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

Suffice to say, with My Sea Park being released, the entire office were glued to iTunes watching our brand new game slowly work its way around the charts.

It was great watching it go up and down, and really muscling with the big boys, I got in to the habit of checking it with a stupid regularity, but seeing it in the same space as games like Angry Birds, Infinity Blade and Temple Run was such an amazing feat I can’t help but feel proud.

I think everyone in the office is pleased with how it has done, but the fun isn’t even over yet! With version 1.2 of My Sea Park put into submission last week we are hoping for the first update to drop either today or Monday. With that we should hopefully see a load more faces in the door, as well as hopefully some of the older ones who perhaps didn’t get chance to play as much as they would like or simply didn’t give it a good enough try.

I think it does highlight how competitive the market is at the moment, particularly for My Sea Park’s genre. We have to simply keep working on it, while also working on the next project, to ensure it stays fresh for customers both new and old.

This week I have been getting deep with Unity, finding my way around it and putting time into learning the way the UI systems work, it’s been a great learning experience and so far and I’m finding Unity incredibly pleasing to work with.

-Craig

www.train2game.com

Train2Game Student Diary Matty Wyett Simmonds Very exciting news for us all

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Matty Wyett Simmonds Very exciting news for us all

My Sea Park has come out this week! Very exciting news for us all, we’ve all been glued to the ratings and comments on the App store. So far the feedback we’ve had is great with mostly 5 stars!

Currently as I type this Diary My Sea Park is #19 in the Top Free Games in the App store! This is the kind of good news people need to hear, without Train2game Craig and myself wouldn’t have been in the situation that we are now.

We were given such control and flexibility over the games development and thankfully it’s doing well so far beating apps like Facebook and Twitter! Everyone has been working hard up to the release of the game and I am still working on it at the moment for updates and more downloadable content so it’s far from over just yet.

I’m glad everyone thus far likes the game and we’ve had a lot of comments on the art work, which for me is great to see (seeing as I lead the art for My Sea Park), and everyone is finding the Game fun and intuitive which is good for Craig too! Great week and more to come!

Matty Wyett Simmonds

OK so My Sea Park has been out for a week or so now and it’s doing extremely well! It managed to get to number 16 in the Top Free Apps chart on iOS which is amazing for the first day of release too! It got to number 1 in role playing games somehow and managed to get into the 70’s for top grossing apps which means people are enjoying the game enough to invest time and money into it. We’ve had some great reviews from all over the internet and on iOS devices and it’s just generally managing to get a name for itself. I’m very pleased with the outcome of my first published game; it’s amazing for my CV right now.

Thank you to everyone who actually downloaded played and sometimes bought in app items in the game! It has made a massive difference to the success and every download counts, even if it is free. We are working now on updates and more to come for the future!

 www.train2game.com

Look Who doctored a visit from a Dalek at the Train2Game stand at GSL?

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Train2Game at Gadget Show Live gets a surprise visit from a Dr Who Dalek

Train2Game news: Volition designer speaks out against pre-owned game sales

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Train2Game students may already be aware of the methods game developers are using to encourage consumers to buy new copies of their games, rather than second hand versions that are available at retail.

Some include bonus content when the game is bought new, others require a code to play online which comes with a brand new version of the game. Some even believe digital distribution is the way forward.

However, recent rumours suggest that the next generation Xbox console won’t play second hand games at all, and that’s welcomed by Volition Game Designer Jamson Durall.

“Personally I think this would be a fantastic change for our business and even though the consumers would be up in arms about it at first they will grow to understand why and that it won’t kill them,” he wrote on AltDevBlogADay.

“The used games market is significantly impacting the revenue we receive. I think what most consumers don’t realize is that every time they buy a used game, there is ZERO money making it back to the Game Developers. All of those profits are going directly to the re-seller and making it more and more difficult for us to continue making higher quality products.”

 “People often don’t understand the cost that goes into creating these huge experiences that we put on the shelves for only $60. They also don’t seem to realize how much they are hurting us when they buy a used game and how pirating a copy is just plain stealing.” Durall continued, before adding that if something isn’t done to combat the sales of second hand games the games industry “is going to fall apart”.

Train2Game students can read Durall’s AltDevBlogADay post in full here.

His name may be familiar to Train2Game students, as he spoke to us in a massive interview about Red Faction: Armageddon last year. Durall also revealed some excellent advice about how to get into the games industry.

But what are your thoughts on his views on second hand games? Do you understand his concerns as future game developers? Or do you believe that the industry just needs to adapt to second hand sales?

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

[Source: AltDevBlogADay]

Train2Game news: Lionhead provide advice to artists on getting ahead in the industry

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Fable IIITrain2Game Art & Animation students should definitely read the latest article in Develop Online’s ‘New Year, New Job’ feature, as Lionhead Head of Art Paul McLaughlin gives tips on how to be a great artist in a game development studio.

His advice for artists is as follows, and it could be especially useful to Train2Game students who are currently on Train2Game industry experience placements.

• Turn up for work and be nice to people.
• Make your boss’s life easier, not harder.
• Take a deep interest in whatever you’re working on. Do your damnedest to understand the art/game direction.
• Find out what you’re good at that is useful to the team and try to excel in that area.
• Keep your skills honed. No matter how senior you are, you still need to show ‘potential’.
• Work with the production team. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver, and if you’re struggling then flag it early.
• Don’t let your ego get in the way of doing what’s required.

It’s excellent advice for Train2Game Artists, who along with all other Train2Game students should keep an eye on Develop Online’s jobs feature for more excellent advice from industry professionals.

For more great advice from Lionhead, Train2Game students should check out this Train2Game Blog post in which Peter Molyneux offers guidance about getting into the games industry. He also reveals that many Lionhead staff started their careers as QA Testers.

What are your thoughts on the advice from Lionhead?

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

[Source: Develop Online]

Train2Game interview: Bioware co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka & Dr. Greg Zeschuk

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Train2Game attended the recent Bioware Lecture at BAFTA, presented by the studio founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk. Their catalogue includes the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises, and their Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is released next month.

While at BAFTA’s central London HQ, the Train2Game blog sat down with Dr. Muzyka and Dr. Zeschuk, both of whom were practicing doctors when they founded Bioware. They discussed the subject of their talk, the history of Bioware, and how they found the transition from working in medicine to working in game development. They also provided advice for those looking to get a job in the games industry.

Read the interview here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game Scribd page. Leave your comments here, or on the Train2Game forum.

We’re here at BAFTA for the Bioware Lecture, what is your talk about?

Dr. Ray Muzyka: We’re talking about games as art and we’re trying to illustrate that with some examples from Bioware, EA and other games within the industry and we’re also talking about the definition of art and games are maybe a different kind of art.  Innovative and progressive and fresh and maybe more powerful than other sorts of art. We’re going to touch on that and hopefully it’ll be interesting and provocative.

So where do you stand on the games as art debate?

Dr. Greg Zeschuk: Well it’s definitely a yes for us! What we do is we try and make the case using a definition form Tolstoy’s book ‘What is Art?’ and expand that and show how it applies to video games, looking at some examples and talking about how actually it’s a simple definition. If you convey emotion it’s art basically. So that’s really what we’re talking about, and there’s also some talk about what we do with that at Bioware, like what things do we focus on in that regard as well.

Tell us a bit about how Bioware came to be, how was the studio founded?

Dr. Greg Zeschuk: It’s funny, we’ve probably been doing this nearly 20 years. We were officially incorporated 16 years ago in 1995, but we were actually working on things a good few years before that. Ray and I met in medical school, we both loved video games. The third partner was also a doctor then but left very early in Bioware’s history and went back to medicine… of all things!

We actually practiced as doctors for a brief time back in the 90s, then transitioned into focusing just on games. Over time that’s what happened and Bioware grew and grew and grew to what it is today when it’s one of those things where you could never imagine where it would end up, like being here talking at the British Academy of Television and Arts.

Dr. Ray Muzyka: [Laughs] It’s pretty cool.

Dr. Greg Zeschuk: It’s not something you would’ve expected when we started! So it’s been an interesting and pretty remarkable journey. It’s built a lot on our core values, and the focus on humility and integrity and making sure that we always make great stuff our fans like and our people like making it. So it’s a happy eco-system that we like to drive.

How did you find the transition from medicine into game development?

Dr. Ray Muzyka: It was surprisingly easy, we didn’t stop medicine, we transitioned out of it. I did emergency medicine, I did locums basically, which are temporary replacement positions in small towns. It was exciting and exhilarating, then I went back to work at Bioware for the rest of the week. So you did that for a couple of evenings and then you did video games the rest of the time. Gradually the video games became more and more prevalent and I went back to school and got an MBA then stopped medicine at that time because I didn’t have any time. Greg you were similar weren’t you?

Dr. Greg Zeschuk: Yeah I worked one year less than Ray in medicine. I think it was making Bioware successful and making great games was just too exciting.

Dr. Ray Muzyka: There are principles that are relevant between medicine and games. The idea of having a collaborative team, working with nurses and physios and other doctors, ensuring you’re delivering high quality service experience to your consumer, the patient. There’s a lot of analogues there [between medicine and game development], especially now with the online connected experience. There’s also value in humility in medicine that really translates well to running a business or developing a game, like always trying to make sure you’re not taking anything for granted.

So if you see a bug, don’t assume it’s already known. You enter it and you fix it and try to do your best every step of the way. And if you follow those basic principles – lifelong learning is another one from medicine that’s relevant to business or gaming – never assuming you know what you need to know when entering a new market, new business model, new platform. But spending the time to play the content itself on the new platforms, listening to your fans feedback actively, it all links in some indirect hard to describe way that makes sense somehow!

And finally, what advice would you give to those looking to get into the games industry?

Dr. Greg Zeschuk: I think education is now a key part of it. One of the most important things you need to get into the games business is actually figure out what it is you want to do, whether it’s art, or design or programming and take the courses to do that. So get the training, but also do it yourself. Have fun, have a passion for it and practice outside of the formal training, and if you do those two things you’ll be in a tremendous position.

Thanks both of you for your time.

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum. For more information, go to www.train2game.com

BAFTA’s public events and online resources bring you closer to the creative talent behind your favourite games, films, and TV shows. Find out more at www.bafta.org/newsletter,www.facebook.com/bafta or twitter.com/baftagames