Getting a job in the games design industry.

Getting a job in the games design industry.

I have been in email correspondence with many ex games design students. Their are a large number of students who are unable to get a job in this industry this is a scary statistic.

I have been scratching my head about how a excellent games design student gets into the games design industry itself?

How do developers recognise new talent?

Do they look at qualifications?

There seems to be no one answer.




Yes qualifications are important, but contacts are more important.

Experience is also very important.

However here comes the catch 22. How do you get experience if you need experience in order to get a job?

I hear this time after time from previous students I have taught.

So how do you get experience when you need experience in order to get the job?


Volunteering is one answer, many student don't like this path as their is no money in the short term. However if a student really is talented then a prospective employer will see this and that student will get a job in time. Its a risk and how do you get bills paid whilst you do this? Well for those students who will be 'signing on' and getting universal credit (as its now called) volunteering is recognised and comes of the the mandatory 5 hours a day a job seeker needs to do in order to get money from the government. So how do you get into volunteering? Well you do some research about games development companies in your area and then you try to link up with them, Email and written mail, Remember people are getting very disconnected from emails these days. Most people just delete unwanted emails and treat them as spam. So write to them! A personal connection may work better!

Develop some games and get them out their. Is for me a better answer. Develop a game and publish it independently. Not cheap and you need money to get it out their.

Steam Greenlight is a good option its $100 initial cost and you can even charge for people to have your game. However who actually uses greenlight? I am a steam user and I have rarely used it. What image does greenlight have? I still think that as a first step it's a good idea.

Google Play : $25 one of fee + up $99 a year afterwards per app (game in our case). However issue here are there is massive fragmentation in the android market.



Apple App store : $99 for Apple Developer Program to get publish any number of apps for one year. However Apple have to approve it first! From the articles I have read Apple tend to reject apps if they find the slightest error.


See this article about comparing them both,

Here is an excellent article by the guardian newspaper on this subject as well

To Flap or not to Flap?

Flappy birds is a 2D Physics side scrolling game. Its a basic concept of keeping a bird flying through a series of obstacles that get increasingly harder and harder. The point is to keep the bird in the air as long as possible with crashing. Score is related to time. Its a perfect mobile gaming product, where most people want to play a simple 'coffee time' games on their smartphone. For such a basic game concept its sales which has been as high as $50,000 per day on app store alone. 

This game has since been removed from the app store, the reasons be the intense media attention the Vietnamese artist and programmer Dong Nguyen was getting. Also possible because the addiction it was causing in certain people. 

However it has many critics...

The app was criticized by the Huffington Post, which described it as an "insanely irritating, difficult and frustrating game which combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement". 

IGN gave the game a mediocre score of 5.4 out of 10, quipping that the game is as addictive as it was shallow.

walking

Animated character walking

10 questions ...

10 Questions

So what did you think of the assignments?

How would you rate the assignments in terms of difficulty?  Look at them both, and just tell me which ones were easy, which ones were harder.  Or were they both easy or both hard? if so, can you give me an example of a subject you’ve learnt? 

For 3 in one gaming you did 2 games .. (so answer two out of the following three questions)

In the Space invader game, name one thing you learned during its development.  
In the maze game name one thing you learned during this assignment.
In the card game name one thing you learned during this assignment.

Right, here’s a slightly off the wall one:  did you learn any maths during this experience?  These assignments?

Do you think you gained any maths when you did any puzzles for the maze game? 

How do you rate your maths?  Give us a scale, are you good?  
What GCSE grade have you got etc?

How hard did you find the maths during these assignments?

Do you think your opinion’s towards maths has changed?

Pls Answer these 10 questions with as much detail as you can and pls put your name.

Making a Barrel by Rob

Robs Intro to Maya

Making a Barrel

Video One

Video Two

Video Three

The BAD use of Gamification

 
I was recently forwarded this YouTube video and it shows how the Chinese government along with Tencent  (yes they own Riot Gaming and are major shareholders in Epic and Blizzard) have created what is currently an opt-in social media system but will be COMPULSORY in 2020. At first I thought this was a hoax. However it is not, its real.

"Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility," Li Yingyun, Sesame's technology director told Caixin, a Chinese magazine, in February.

This person would have less points than a productive person with a job and would be scored accordingly. What does these points mean? Well all that is conjecture at the moment. However the picture painted by 'extra credits' YouTube paints a bleak picture indeed. A picture of social peer pressure been used to manipulate the masses to the tune of a Government model.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34592186

Is the BBC's view of it, which is less subjective.

What do you think?

Reply to my post with your thoughts..

Excellent blogs by Mark Alexander (gamemaker forums)

For all the Game Developers read these excellent posts I found on GameMaker forums by Mark Alexander

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The Real World Of The Indie Dev Business

Posted by Mark Alexander on 21 August 2015

While I admit that making games for a living with GameMaker:Studio is a fun and interesting way to spend your time, there is unfortunately a large amount of paperwork and legal stuff that has to be done too otherwise you'll face problems later on down the line - like not getting paid! This doesn't get talked about much, so, in this article I'm just going to touch on some of the things that you really should have done if you want to be a "proper" dev and not get into trouble when you finally poke your head out from behind the monitor.

Note that as a UK citizen this advice is written from a UK perspective, but I'll try to keep things as general as possible and I'm pretty sure that you'll have to do the same stuff no matter what country you live in... although some things may be easier/harder depending on your location!

Read more on  : http://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/132

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How To Monetise Your GameMaker Game

Posted by Mark Alexander on 28 August 2015

We all know that GameMaker:Studio permits just about anyone to make games and then port them to multiple platforms and that thanks to tools like this there has been a boom in indie gaming. Small studios and hobbyists are now able to get their games out to the world in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago, and there are more opportunities than ever to make a bit of money from your projects.

However, to a new developer or someone just breaking into publishing for the first time, making money from your work can seem a bit of a daunting task, and it can be difficult to know where to start. In this article we are going to briefly explore some of the options available to you and hopefully give you a starting point for the monetisation of your work.

Read more on  : http://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/133

High score on 2048

I just scored 31492 on 2048! Check this out http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digiplex.game .

Week 18 : Best Game Review

Best Game of all time?

For me defining the best game I have ever played is a hard judgement. I have Played lots of games and I have lots of games that are favourites. I like strategy games and Hearts of Iron 3 is a favourite of mine in that arena (played over 800 hours on steam to prove it).

Its complex game full of historical facts and shows the full world and the affect of WW2 had on the various countries involved. You can play it from a political point of view and even use espionage. However where this game really shines is large full scale warfare. You can re create (and I have) the D-Day landings, or even Dunkirk (and I have done that too). 


The graphic are from a top down perspective with you controlling units of division (or smaller) size units of men.

 I also like real time stratergy (RTS) games that Blizzard make like Warcraft and Starcraft.

Star Craft : Brood War.

What can I say about this game? We had a saying with my games night mates when setting up a P.C.

Install OS (operating system), get drivers working (sound, latest graphic drivers etc), install anti virus then install 'BroodWar'. It was like that for me for a while after I purchased my latest PC I did that, all my 'PC gamer' mates did it. We had a LAN party at my house with 16 guys playing 8 v 8 StarCrafting for a 2 days. 

I included this YouTube clip not because it shows any game play but because it plays the original musical score, which is what got me hooked from the start!

However StarCraft is not my favourite game of all time and yes I have not talked about the game, well go and do some research and find out yourself why South Koreans go crazy over this game.

I also like first person shooters (FPS) like Call or Duty, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D (original not 2014 remix with pretty graphics), Half Life (omg what a good game) and most recently "Remember Me" with its innovative memory hacking elements.

My Favourite Game is Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Wikipedia says this about it "Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a cyberpunk-themed first-person action role-playing video game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix,^[1] which also produced the game's CGI sequences. Originally released in August 2011 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360."

PC Gamer UK gave the game a score of 94 and the Editor's Choice, describing it as a game that "puts almost everything else in the genre to shame."

Official Xbox Magazine UK gave the game a 10/10

Well that's great but why do I like it?

Game-play: Its a standard FPS feeling game using standard WASD keys. You move around and can engage with the world around you. However with 'Jensen' you tend to walk around with your gun holstered (unless in combat). You can engage in conversations or just listen in as you walk by. Often just 'listening in' helps a lot and sets the atmosphere and tone of the game. You can also 'sneak', which for me was the whole point. The Duex Ex system rewards those who use their brains. and find ways round the guard or the security cameras or security laser sensors. You get rewarded for been patient and thinking around the problem rather than letting your gun speak to you. There are places where obviously you have to engage in combat BUT they are in the minority. Many FPS games its about getting from A to B and killing everyone that gets in the way. Duex Ex is not that and for me is much more realistic and true to life. You get rewarded for talking and using enhanced social engineering cyber modifications to socially engineer people. Just like a salesman tries to do when they are trying to sell you a car these days (thank God they don't have a CASIE (Computer Assisted Social Interaction Enhancer) mod!). You can hack terminals, go invisible, punch through walls, jump safely from any height etc with these augmentations).

Every mission you do gives you more XP (experience points) and experience points unlock your augmentations (as praxis points which you spend). You also can buy and find praxis packs (points) which do the same thing.



Music: The music composed by Michael McCann is an understated triumph. It is menacing when is needs to be and it can be a soothing melancholy ambiance as you enter a 'limb' clinic. A heavy trance when you go into the 'Hive' Nightclub and a throbbing sexual beat in a brothel. It sets the tone for the game, without it the game would be missing a very important element. I liked the music that much I purchased it from ITunes, though I must say listening to it outside the game isn't the same. I just end up want to play the game more when I listen to it!



Theme: Trans-humanism, at the core of DE-HR's story is the fundamental question of what it means to be human. Indeed, Jensen himself is quite literally "more machine than man", who among other things, can see through walls and is immune to toxins. But on top of that, while Jensen is superhuman by pure accident, many people in this world choose to replace their original body parts with new augmentations. Does replacing body parts with durable, reliable machinery make you inhumane, or unnatural? This question is subconsciousness asked as you play and engage with this game. We are now in a world were this is taking places before our eyes. 

To prove this I did a quick web search and found this :-

Currently being developed by DARPA researchers at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks are contact lenses that enhance normal vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus.  Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye.  These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away.  This could improve ability to use tiny portable displays while sill interacting with the surrounding environment.

DARPA Research

I myself have after a ruptured appendix have a high tech sheet implanted in my abdomen to support my internal organs!

So the question we should be asking ourselves is were do we cross the line between allowing technology in our bodies? This a question that society will soon be asking itself, because progress is happening in this area around us all the time.

Characters in the game

Adam Jensen, is the security chief at 'Sarif Industries' and is on a quest to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend 'Megan Reid' who was brutally killed in the opening section of the game. You shape his personality as the game develops, is a morally good? or a nasty piece of work? You choose that as the game develops.




Frank Pritchard is Sarif Industries IT expert, he is at odds with Adam (initially). He thinks of himself as some sort of elite hero hacker. He is with Adam on every mission, usually as a voice in his head. The witty sarcastic comments they make to each other adds to the atmosphere of the game.

Faridah Malik is your taxi driver (so to speak). She drives the futuristic helicopter you use to get from one mission location to another. She is a self confessed fly girl, fun loving and friendly. Emphasises with Adam and really comes in to her own once you get to China and do a mission for her.

David Sarif is the CEO of Sarif Industries. He comes from a hard working immigrant family. He is direct when dealing with others and unafraid to show emotion.   He is close friends with Hugh Darrow, the father of mechanical augmentation. 








Atmosphere: Duex Ex - Human Revolution shows us a near future were large corporations operate outside the control of government controls. The artwork is all encompassing starting from the detail on Jenson's jacket to the cityscapes Jenson walks in. The concept art for this game is simple put gorgeous in every way. Add to this the gripping musical theme, the cyberpunk game play and tense dialogue it ticks all the boxes of what make a good FPS.

In fact its a FPS a puzzle solving game, deals with some deep moral questions about technology and it role in our day to day life and how we engage with it.


Game Plot: Sarif Industries  sit on the cusp of a breakthrough that might fully "unlock" human potential, courtesy of a love interest from his past, Megan Reed. But before you can say "Alex Murphy," Reed is dead, and Jensen lays mortally wounded on an operating table, receiving an involuntarily hands - and legs, and lungs, and eyes - on crash course in humanity's future in the post-human era. The majority of Human Revolution involves Jensen's quest to unravel that conspiracy through missions spinning off of main city hubs all over the world. While each hub has a central plot thread carrying through Jensen's investigation, side missions populate each locale. These aren't the maligned fetch-quests of other RPGs. Each mission has several layers to it, several angles to be explored or not, several perspectives to consider, and several possible outcomes that often tie into the greater mission at hand in unexpected ways. This creates a well-realized sense of choice and consequence throughout Human Revolution.

Conclusion: Before I get into why I like it lets talk about why others don't, lets keep it simple its the boss's fights. The boss fights that were not even designed by Eidos Montreal, they were outsourced to a studio called Grip Entertainment. This the bit of the game anyone who ever plays says. The boss fight suck!

Yes they do I agree, to an extent.

However to me this is not a problem. Let me explain. Deux Ex - Missing link came out soon afterwards as a DLC, this game was completely done by Eidos Montreal, so no stupid boss fights! Just pure Deux Ex as it should be. However for me something was missing in 'missing link' (no pun intended). It just did not have the same atmosphere for me. I could not connect to it as much. Its hard to describe, but I couldn't not get as attached to it as Human Revolution. I Guess what it boils down to is when you really like a game it has an intangible aspect to it, that clicks with you. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game that got under my skin and is still their to this day 3 years later! 

I play it now and what do I do in the boss fights? Well I do what everyone else does, read the forums of how to kill Barrett (hint : Barrels) and get on with it. To be honest the only boss fight that was annoying was the first one with Barrett, after that the other two are easy because you have enough fire-power from you augmentations to deal with them (hint : Typhoon)

A good article to read is this one by Jahmel Coleman.

Called Visual styles In Videogames http://jahmelcoleman.wordpress.com/games-development/200-2/

He discusses different types of visual styles in computer games.

Tutorial 1 files

Gaming Journal Example

Skyrim

Skyrim is a third or first player action roleplaying game based on the creation engine. Its an Atmospheric and gritty open ended game.

One thing I like is the graphics, which are some of the most realistic outdoor graphics I have seen in the game.

Two things I don't like is the melee combat system. It's clunky and not well developed. That why I eventually played a mage another is the 'dumbed' down character level up system. As someone who has played all the Elder Scroll games this is the most frustrating of all. I like been able to fine tune how my character develops, not just health/mana/stamina!

Genre : Action roleplaying game
Goal : Defeat the dragon demon called Alduin

Also has many sub goals where player character can join the imperial army or rebellion and change the face of the Skyrim Politics.

UFO enemy Unknown

This Excellent turn based rpg is based in a world where aliens have invaded earth and an elite organisation called XCOM is dealing with this threat. Its based on the original isomorphic XCOM game in the 90's. I guess that why I love it as its based from then!

Genre : TBS

Dan Stapleton of GameSpy wrote: "I consider the 1994 turn-based tactical masterpiece X-COM: UFO Defense to be the single best videogame ever made. Compared directly to that impossibly highs standard, Firaxis' 2012 remake, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, does remarkably well."

Remember Me

Remember me is a atmospheric 3rd Person game.

Its a game involving memory hacking via a novel memory hacking sequence.

Not very well known, but once played you never forget it. Its different from anything else and stands out from the crowd of 3rd person shooter action games. Its one to play.

The melee system is a bit clunky and some of the boss fights just do not work. However set against its obvious flaws its a games that stands out. Its one redeeming feature is the atmosphere of the game. Its a massive hook that pulls the gamer on-wards through all its flaws.

Justin Speer of GameTrailers praised the scope of the world and its story, the platforming elements and the Remix segments, though he said they were "underdeveloped and underutilized". On the downside, the story and dialogue were often lacking, the combat was problematic, some aspects of the graphics and controls annoying or comical, and progress between savepoints was wiped away if the character died. He stated "It's up to you to decide if your mind has room to hold such a curious oddity".

Silk Road closed

FBI used ‘leaky Captcha' to catch Silk Road's hidden servers

by Alastair Stevenson   08 Sep 2014        

     

    

 

The FBI used a leaky anti-abuse Captcha tool to find the infamous Silk Road servers' geographic location and arrest its founder Ross William Ulbricht.

Silk Road was a deep web black marketplace that was known to facilitate the trade of illegal substances and services, including class A drugs and hitmen. It was shut down by the FBI October 2013.

It was originally unclear how the FBI had managed to track the service's command-and-control server and author as the hidden web service leveraged the anonymising Tor network.

However, according to recently disclosed court documents, the FBI managed to track the services after spotting an IP address linked to Silk Road that was not being protected by the Tor network.

"We noticed that the headers of some of the packets reflected a certain IP address not associated with any known Tor node as the source of the packets. This IP address (the ‘Subject IP Address') was the only non-Tor source IP address reflected in the traffic we examined," read the FBI's court testimony.
"The Subject IP Address caught our attention because, if a hidden service is properly configured to work on Tor, the source IP address of traffic sent from the hidden service should appear as the IP address of a Tor node, as opposed to the true IP address of the hidden service, which Tor is designed to conceal."

The FBI reportedly tracked the IP address to an insecure Captcha used by Silk Road, which in turn led them to one of the hidden service's servers, which was located in Iceland.

"When I typed the Subject IP Address into an ordinary (non-Tor) web browser, a part of the Silk Road login screen (the Captcha prompt) appeared," read the testimony.

"This indicated that the Subject IP Address was the IP address of the SR [Silk Road] Server, and that it was ‘leaking' from the SR Server because the computer code underlying the login interface was not properly configured at the time to work on Tor."

The revelation follows widespread reports that law enforcement and hackers are trying to find ways to track Tor users.

The Tor Project issued a security advisory warning it had detected evidence that hackers were hitting the network with cyber attacks that could de-anonymise hidden services running on it in July.

Adult Women Play More Than Teenage Boys, Study Says

IBTIMES- 21 AUGUST 2014 21:49 GMT

http://www.appy-geek.com/Web/ArticleWeb.aspx?regionid=4&articleid=27719770&m=d

The ESA, or the Entertainment Software Association, just recently released the data from a new study about who plays video games, what kind of games are getting played, and who these gamers are playing with. The results of the study may be surprising for those who haven't been paying attention to gaming trends over the past few years, or do not think of the entire spectrum of games when thinking of "gaming." All of the findings from the study can be read on the ESA website.

The first major find is that adult females represent more of the collective gaming community than teenage males by a large margin. The study claims that 59% of all Americans play video games in some form or another, and of that 59% of the entire population, 36% of them are women over the age of 18. All women, regardless of age, make up a total of 48% of the game playing population. By comparison, only 17% of game players are males aged 18 or younger. This statistic may come as a surprise to those who think "video gamers" consist entirely of Mountain Dew-fueled teens playing Call of Duty late into the night. What has caused this swing in demographics? It is almost entirely thanks to the mobile games market, with games like Candy Crush Saga, QuizUp, and Temple Run having all proven to be wildly successful on the mobile market.

Another interesting statistic related to this is the incredible rate at which mobile games are shifting demographics. In 2010, only 40% of the entire gaming population was women. While 8% may not seem like that big of an increase, it's only been four years, with the dominance of smart phones only really setting in in the past two years or so. One of the more interesting statistics highlighted is that women over 50 who play games has increased a whopping 32% from 2012 to 2013 alone. That's a fairly staggering increase, and the trend is likely to continue with more and more games being developed for the smart phone and tablet markets.

But it isn't just mobile games that are causing such a major demographics shift. Women are also avid PC and Wii players as well, according to the study. Rachel Franklin, and Executive Producer at game publisher Electronic Arts, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that roughly half of people who play the popular PC gaming franchise The Sims are women, and that number will likely grow with the upcoming release of The Sims 4 later this year. Other games that have resonated well with women include the Nintendo 3DS titles Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Tomodachi Life, both sim-style games.

Other interesting statistics from the 20-page document show that gamers are also a social bunch. 62% of all gamers report that they play games with others either online or in-person. 77% of gamers also say that they tend to play with others for at least one hour every week. The study also included that over half of American households have a video game console, and of those houses that do have a console, the average number is 2 consoles per house. To compile these statistics, the Entertainment Software Association interviewed 2,200 households in America.

Do these findings surprise you? Do you think the trend will continue over the next few years, ultimately resulting in more women gamers than male gamers? Let us know in the comments below.

Why your brain just can't handle video games

Video games are fun, but they can also be extremely frustrating. You can fall to your deaths at the stupidest times if you don't hit the jump button just right or if you accidentally hit the wrong button altogether. You can also die from a bullet you really should have seen -- or even be completely oblivious to who is about to kill you until they've already fired the fatal rounds.

When these events happen, us gamers often think the problem isn't something we did or didn't do. The game itself must have lagged or glitched. Maybe the person who killed us is cheating somehow. But in reality, the problem is most likely sitting between our ears.

This video from host and writer Anthony Carboni explains the many ways our brains just completely suck at video games. From the 80 millisecond delay between the time we see something on screen and our brain processes that information, to how our brain uses sensory gating to filter out things that your brain deems unimportant, our brains are hardwired in such a way that we sometimes struggle during periods of intense focus, like when gaming. So the next time you want to curse the game, controller, or other players when you die in a video game, just remember that the problem is probably your brain.

Article taken from : http://a.mynews.ly/!QD.BpvUl