Personal Review of the second year: Where I want to go, and how I plan on getting there.

It’s the end of the year, the second year and I think it’s been a great year, I learnt a lot of new techniques in 3D modelling, I worked in a group towards a project, creating an awesome gothic level, and I developed my visual designing skills. As always there is always room for improvement in my work ethic and the way I complete tasks, but I think I did alright this year.

 I’m almost at the end of my University experience, next year I will graduate and University will be over unfortunately, I will be out there on my own trying to get job in the games industry. So now would be a great time to start preparing myself and my portfolio, It’s time to get to a professional level, and to get there I will be investing my summer in improving all of my skills, 2D and 3D.

But before I get into that I’m going to discuss a few things, First of all “What are Universities for? “

Personally I think universities are for people who want to get a head start in life, in the career they want to pursue, or if they want a nice life. Of course people can go without universities and be fine, but these days it’s pretty hard to get a job in your desired industry without a qualification or degree of some sort. Even if you've had years of experience, in let’s say computer programming, or medicine, if you have a job in the industry already and want to leave the current company and get a job in another company, it’s really difficult without a degree, even if you do have all the experience you need.  So Universities are quite important these days, almost a necessity for some jobs. It’s a gateway to employability, success and self-development.

The university environment almost forces you to develop “soft skills” that you otherwise probably wouldn't develop if you just sat at home all day and did an online course. It enables you to get a new start, a new social life and loads of opportunities for anything and everything you can think of. It takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to adapt to your environment, adapt to change.

What do I expect from my university education?

Well it’s my own responsibility to get the most out of my university education. It is independent education after all.

 I expect myself to change as a person and develop my technical and soft skills so I will be very employable by the end of my university journey, ready to start life. Apart from the technical aspects, I also want to make new friends and try different things out that I’ve never done before and really find out what kind of person I am.

Now about what I was previously talking about, Learning how to become a professional in my craft.

The past 2 years, I don’t really feel like I have developed enough knowledge or skills to really succeed in the industry and attract a job offer yet. So therefore I am dedicating my 4 month summer holiday to entirely doing intensive work and really tightening up my loose skills.

I will be attempting to create a mini-FMP, I stated what this was in my previous blog entry on documentation, So it’ll be concepting an entire game universe from scratch and then building every part of the level I need to so I can have a playable level at the end of the 4 months, or if it takes longer after Christmas. I’ll be creating vehicles, characters, weapons, props and a whole environment.

 It’s like Feng Zhu’s advanced diploma but including 3D as well:

http://fengzhudesign.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/advanced-diploma-students.html

It’s a huge project and something that will really challenge me but,

I think if I really try my hardest on this I will really boost my chances to get a job when I start searching for one, or maybe they might want to hire me by looking at my portfolio.  I want to become an advanced user of a Game engine, preferably CryEngine 3. I also want to become really good at visual design, I want to make up for my lack of ability and willpower for the past year and become an expert in 2D and 3D by building up an awesome portfolio.

So I will see how that goes and probably create a new blog for that whole project. 

Life Changing or Career Building?

“Is there a choice between teaching specific technical skills or developing learning attributes and “soft skills”? “

I don’t quite understand why you would want a choice, technical skills will give you the essential skills that you will definitely need in your job, while with soft skills you can easily pick them up as you go, they support your technical and hard skills, so I don’t see why people would want to learn soft skills specifically in the games industry, in my opinion they are useful but can only get you so far.

Of course you can’t just get there with technical skills and no soft skills, it wouldn’t work as you would probably be a robot or at least sound like one but they are developed automatically without any need to actually study them in my opinion

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/soft-skills

“It's often said that hard skills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get (and keep) the job.” Exactly my thoughts.

'Why spend three years teaching folk what we already know?'

Warren Spector, GDC 2006

I think this a very ignorant statement, why spend 3 years teaching folk? Because they need to learn for 3 years to actually get to the stage of knowledge that the professionals are at, then they have the knowledge to start being creative and create things that people haven’t discovered yet, the more fresh minds there are the better. Sure they can do all the research online and find out themselves through hours of searching for answers online for free, but it would take away a lot of life experience, these soft skills that are developed through social interaction, and even if they do have enough soft skills they wouldn’t really have any of the industry connections or anyone to turn to for help.

 I know that can be argued by the fact that if they do enough research and talk to people in the industry on forums or ask online they can still obtain the same level of knowledge as someone who goes to university, and it helps in the games industry that you don’t even need a degree, all you need is a great portfolio but the person doing the research would still be asking for help and want some kind of tutorial from industry experts to get to a professional level, therefore it is important to “teach folk about what we already know.”

We can’t know in advance what skills we will need in future that’s impossible, but we can prepare for the future by increasing our knowledge of what we already know and then when the time comes to create/solve new problems we will have a large database of knowledge and experience at our disposal. So I think it’s important that we keep meeting the current demand for specific technical skills so that we can use those skills to be creative and create new ideas and solutions to existing problems or future problems.

“Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers.

Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background.

They can’t both be right can they? How can education meet these opposing views and yet provide a valid and fulfilling experience to students?”

This is a really tough question to answer, because they ARE both right in my opinion, in the games industry all you really need, especially as an artist, is a great portfolio regardless of having a degree or not, you just have to showcase your ability, it may be different for programmers but there must be a way for them to showcase their abilities at the interview tests or through a code they programmed for a game mod.

University education isn’t meant to literally pamper their students like they do with high school or sixth form college education, most of the research and work has to be done by the student alone, they are just pushed in the right direction and kept on track.

In my opinion it isn’t really up to the educator to get a job for the student, it’s the student’s job to become good enough while in education to grab the attention of the employer. The university experience is more like life experience and soft skill experience in my opinion. You still have to do a lot of the research and study online, like someone not in education would. It’s your own responsibility, not Education or University.

Maybe the universities just have to increase their standards and workloads/ expectations for these students. Think about it, if the average is really high, there is a great chance of all of these students getting jobs. It’s a bit like Feng Zhu’s school almost all of their graduates have jobs at the end since they are so dedicated and brutally trained.

Creativity, the talent myth and craft

Talent and Creativity is a great topic to discuss, personally I think talent can only take you so far in life you mostly have to grind and work hard to achieve anything worthwhile, and by talent I mean how good you are at something without working hard towards it, you may just be naturally gifted at playing tennis or drawing. Sure it’s a great starting point but there’s a long way to go from there.

Creativity on the other hand is a bit different, I think creativity is the ability to do something unique, something out of the box that no one has thought of before or heard of. I think it is harder to be creative than anything else these days because a lot of idea’s have been exhausted, but then I’m not really thinking outside of the box am I? So is there a whole load of more stuff I can think of to do or create? I’m sure there is. It’s just getting there that’s the difficult part.

I don’t think all artists are born with special talent or anything like that, most of them are just very poor/average when they start of, it takes them years of practice and dedication for them to get like that. Of course this applies to everyone. So I don’t think talent is interchangeable with skill for this reason.

There’s a great video about Will Smith, and the secrets to his success on YouTube, it’s just clips of him in interviews, but he does a great job of explaining that success and creativity isn’t just magic, it takes years of hard work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5nVqeVhgQE

There is also a cool documentary on neuroscience. That explains that you can train your brain to change and literally master anything you want to. It’s called neuroplasticity. In the video they use an example of a boy who absolutely hated doing maths and was really bad at it, but with time and effort, he changed and became a very famous mathematician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o

On to the topic of creativity, our whole civilisation was created by creativity by individuals who thought outside of the box. It’s what lead to video gaming of course. But how do you become creative?

Albert Einstein

It’s a hard question, personally I think sometimes it just comes to you on the spur of the moment, other times you really have to take a step back from everything and sit down and think, just like Albert Einstein. It usually depends on what you are trying to do, or look for, or solve etc.

In the games industry, I don’t think there are set people that are just creative themselves, like the concept artists or producers, I think there is a chance for everyone to become creative, from the programmers, artists, all the way to the people who manage the financial side of the company.

 It just depends on what they do, if try something new and creative for example, if someone learns how to create a better code or learns how to programme everything on the game faster or if the producer/developer comes up with an idea that’s totally new and different to anything that’s been done before then that is being creative.

Minecraft is a great example of how a game has manifested creativity, no one has ever seen such a simple idea implemented so well so far in the industry, and because of its adaptability with mods and add-ons as well as its dynamic world it’s become incredibly successful.

Minecraft

Even Blizzard Entertainments introduction to Battlenet is a great example of creativity, back in the day there was a long process if you wanted to connect through the internet to play with anyone else. Blizzard introduced a service called Battlenet that automatically built a connection between you and a different player from across the world with the click of a button, which incredibly boosted their status and sales, it revolutionised internet gaming and player vs player.

It’s everyone’s job to be creative in my opinion, or else there wouldn’t be any significant progress if the same people are always trying to be creative. There needs to be fresh minds and new approaches to being creative, because that’s what it’s all about.

“In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Among other things, you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives.”

http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/creativity/define.htm

Being creative as an artist is I think the same as being creative as a programmer or a musician you just need to think of ideas outside of the box. Obviously you should train hard and practice your craft and learn from other successful professional artists, all the while trying to develop your own style and sense of creativeness.

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Creative

An Introduction to the Games Industry – From generalist to specialist?

The gaming industry has changed massively over the past years, the industry has expanded and become something much bigger, especially with the growth of the internet, it is now competing with the Film and TV industries, even becoming something bigger than them. 

Graph showing the increase in sales of video games since 1905-2008

At first people didn’t think that games would become this big and that their audiences were only teenagers or kids and that it would grow out of popularity. They would soon learn how wrong they were. It has become a modern day culture and it’s still expanding and developing, more and more people are becoming used to the idea of games being popular and that can only be good for the games industry.

In the early days there only used to be just a few people working on a game, and they all had general skills in 3D modelling, concepting, coding, animation and whatever else. There wasn’t really any need for a specialist coder or artist, if your 3d modeller could do all 3 tasks for the same pay.  It was cheap and that was important as there wasn’t any big budgets for games back in the old days as they weren’t as popular as they are now. 

Electronic Arts Studio in Redwood Shores

It was pretty hard to train for these jobs too, they were broad and finding the software to start learning how to code or create 3d models wasn’t easy either. I remember one of my lecturer’s saying how he had to meet someone in a back alley for a copy of some software he wanted so he can start learning these skills. It is a lot easier nowadays as the internet has given us a lot more access and freedom to finding tutorials and these programs.

Riot Games Office in Europe

In the industry nowadays a lot of work is now outsourced to very specialist companies or free-lancers. The amount of people who work on a single game has also vastly increased, almost the same as a big budget film especially if it’s a big AAA title, since there are a lot more tasks and jobs to do in creating a game.   

There is more demand for specialist coders and programmers since the work is a lot harder and requires a lot more knowledge about how the job is done, the same applies for everyone else, companies like to outsource material since its cheaper than paying a salary to someone in-house.

Why pay a whole year salary for a job that only takes a couple of weeks to accomplish?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry

There is a game industry value chain which is interesting. Its made up of 6 connected and distinctive layers 

First is the paying and investing for the development of new titles by large companies or rich investors.

Second is the production of the art and talent layer, it includes developers, designers and artists to start planning and concepting the game.

Third is the actual game production with the 3D models, engine work and programming/coding that goes into the game.

Fourth is the Distribution and Publishing part of the chain which involves generating audiences and marketing catalogues of games for retail and online distribution.

Fifth is the Hardware layer which is basically the part where the game is accessed through either consoles or online media.

Last is the actual users and players, playing the game.

With the rising costs of video games, there are some drawbacks, since this is still a business, the main aim is to create as much revenue as possible, and that means taking risks on what games should be produced. 

The games industry is known to be unstable and a lot of companies have gone bankrupt or bust simply because they didn’t create enough sales. A lot of jobs are lost due to this, and this is why a lot of big companies are not willing to take risks with new ideas and titles, they would rather invest in something safe which they will know bring them revenue no matter what. One example of this is THQ, a seemingly great games company that recently went bust, because their games didn't sell, and their last ditch effort to save the company, Darksiders 2, didn't do as well as it was supposed to and in the end they had to sell their company off to regain something back.

 It’s why we see so many CoD games over the past years, its cause they know people will buy it, just people it has the franchise name on it. This is really sad as there are awesome new pitches and ideas for video games that could really break new grounds if they took a risk, but with that much money it’s not a surprise they would rather invest in something safe and not different or new. 

But there is hope, a lot of new indie companies are taking the lead with creating new idea’s, and although they don’t have a big budget, if they have a great idea, they can now opt in to get their idea crowd sourced on websites like KickStarter. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/