I thought about leaving the games industry, especially since I've been having a terrible time getting a permanent position. I spoke with a recruiter from NextGen Talent that gave me some advice and I hope, some job leads. I know most games people look down upon recruiters. I was approached by a shady woman who gave me no last name, no company she represented. No call back number, no email address either. I guess she got my info off Monster and who knows what. Sheesh, I'd better make sure this person isn't about to go stealing my identity or something...
I had an interview for a QA position outside of games. It pays nicely in the corporate software world. Supposedly, there is less nonsense that typically
Although there is a bit more money in it, software outside of games is still marred by the troubles I somehow thought games seemed to have the corner on:
-Horrible hours.I would have looked at some 60-70 hour weeks. Company seemed to have no interest in doing anything differently as far as releases went. Do your annual release with some minor updates.
-Documentation? Durrr...I really don't understand..Spend a bit of time to do that and you'll make things easier down the line.
-Ease of use of tools. When you sell a service to produce something digital or whatnot, why not care about ease of use? When some of my level design tools just had interface bugs and issues that made making maps highly inefficient, I brought the issue up. Having a shoddy tool can hurt your bottom line. Am I nuts for wanting to take the time to make a good, solid tool set?
Stability was one thing this company did have above game jobs. Back to looking for game design positions.
To Do: Brush up resume, register for Game Developers Conference and so forth.
I was recently contracted to play through a game. I am under an NDA so no, I won't divulge any identifiable details about the game in question whatsoever.
I wanted to get through the game as quickly as possible. I wasn't there for the game itself, I had ulterior motives. The game did feature leveling up your character. I found myself running through levels, not fighting too terribly often then occasionally getting into trouble when going up against the boss. I'd go back to older areas where enemies were easier to kill to grind and build up my persona.
Then, I started to wonder. Why am I doing this? Why am I avoiding encounters that would give me a chance at much needed experience during the actual levels, only to begrudgingly grind elsewhere? In the case of this particular game, it doesn't abide by standard RPG rules of letting you enjoy your level ups as soon as you get them. You only enjoyed the fruits of your labor after successfully completing an area. So of course I go back to easy areas, unless I do something really foolish, I'm absolutely positive I will win and gain the ability to power up my character.
I realize, though, this is by far not the only game I've avoided encounters like mad. I'm an RPG enthusiast, Unless I've got some insatiable urge to utterly dominate the ins and outs of a certain game, I have a tendency to go through under-leveled. This is true for games whose combat I've enjoyed. If a player hates the game, then
What is with under-leveling and why should it matter? Under-leveling is a balance issue. A very important balance issue, especially for RPGs. Chances are, if a gamer goes to an encounter and gets horribly beaten down multiple times, their reaction may not be to go level up and try again but to curse the programmers for making a game too hard. Yes, I know, it's not the programmers fault, but I've seen a lot of rants and vitriol directed at programmers.
Towards the end of the game I was playing-as well as some other RPGs- I've hit a lot of "forced encounters." Sub-bosses/Mini-bosses you have to beat in order to keep going through the final dungeon. These can be particularly devastating for the under-leveling gamer. I never finished Final Fantasy IX off my own personal save file because of this. I didn't run away from any enounters, but I didn't do a lot of the "extra curricular leveling" activities. I did a few side quests that were readily accessible to me but I didn't seek out certain high powered items that would have both leveled my characters on top of giving me a special move with astonishing power. Power that usually breaks the balance, but you spent all that time chasing the item instead of leveling up so it's essentially the same result. Only, with brighter, bigger fireworks.
Well...I'm still not sure why I do the whole under leveling thing...I'll have to give it a bit more contemplation.
I met this gal in the craziest of circumstances and now we've both got careers as designers.
Cheers to you, I look forward to reading insightful and funny things on your blog!
I do love my friends who can buy just about every new game as it comes out. They're rockin' people, have fuzzy cats and the most amazing gaming rig ever. Complete with +10 Couch of Comfinesses.
At their place, I was able to try some games I'd been curious about as a designer as well as games that piqued my crazy gaming intrigue.
-Zack and Wiki(Wii)
This looked like it made very good use of the Wii Remote and had interesting puzzles to solve.
In concept, anyways. Said friend of mine I visited has been a programmer on a Wii game. There's a lot of perception about what the Wii Remote is capable of doing that his experience suggests otherwise.
We went through the first area most of the first area, without even stopping to look anything up on GameFaqs, as tempting as it got at times. Wiki the flying monkey has some neat abilities that make for interesting situations. He can turn enemies into items!
You really do have to think about a lot of aspects of what goes on in the game world to solve puzzles, and the game makes you think outside of boxes it has you thinking inside in the first place. This isn't completely a brain game, as there are portions when reflexes really do matter. You have an extremely short amount of time to react in a few situations which will no doubt, anger players.
This game also loves to throw brutal, wretched curve balls at you that you have absolutely no way of anticipating. After getting one of these sucker punches to the gut when almost beating the first boss, Zack and Wiki's quest ended forever.
Wii Remote Use:
The game tells you how you should hold and move the remote. Even then, it's so insanely sensitive that you could hold the remote perfectly still when the game says STOP and it twitches anyway. There is a horrific bell ringing mini game that is immensely finicky about timing but doesn't account for any sort of delay and...ugh.
Pushing the remote forward and turning it as if it was a key in my hand was a nice touch on multiple occasions, I needed to turn the remote more than my arm was realistically capable of turning. I just roll it along the table whenever I need to open a key now.
The remote's censors are very crude. I think the engineering team of Zack and WIki understood this, hence the game SHOWS you how they want you to hold the remote. Even then, this is just...nonsense.
-Mass Effect(360)
This was the game I was interested as a gamer. Oh Bioware, you have made up for the sin that was Jade Empire. What a brilliantly crafted world and they build it, your character's story and other NPCs' personalities in so many angles it amazes.
The controls are a bit complex in a sense that every single button does something different. Once I got the buttons down, it wasn't so hard to get into. Having played RE4 and a number of other 3rd person shooters plus Phantasy Star Online, a shooting oriented sci-fi RPG with good cover integration was easy to catch onto.
The dialog so far has all been well worth paying attention to, something I've rarely done in other RPGs.
This game makes me happy!
-Super Mario Galaxy(Wii)
Which way is up? Seriously! This game is a 2D platformer on a Mobius strip! The control is responsive and doesn't feel sensitive to stupid levels like Zack and Wiki did. It helps that Super Mario Galaxy doesn't try to do as much with the Wii Remote either. Furthermore, if you are supposed to do something a little unusual, the game doesn't tell you that by killing you in some out of the blue event Deux Ex Machina-ing your doom.
You've got to roam around and talk to these Luma critters and this Rosalinde gal. Um, this is not Mass Effect. I just need to know where to go next to jump around, collect star bits and spin attack stuff. I know what the story of Mario is: go rescue Princess Peach. Super Mario 3 did a fine job of letting me hop from world to world with a minimum of text to eye-roll over.
I wanted to be better about posting here, but I haven't. For this I apologize.
The Job Hunt Stats:
Applications Sent = 23
Attempts at Using Network to get somewhere = 6
Interviews Held = 1 Phone Interview, 2 in-Person(outside industry position.) 1 recruiter called, didn't identify the recruiting agency she works with or provide me her last name.
Offers Received for a full time position = 0
Playing Games:
Went to a friend's house. This friend buys games like crazy, has a drop dead gorgeous HDTV, surround sound system and oh so comfy couch. Plus a cat that likes to rub up against my feet.
Played
-PAIN for PS3
-Assassin's Creed for 360.
-Folk Lore for PS3(different visit)
-Phoenix Wright 3(one of the few indulgences I allowed myself.)
Games I really want to get:
-Zack and Wiki for Wii.
-Super Mario Galaxy for Wii.
-Mass Effect for 360.
On my personal game dev front:
-Still begging and pleading for an engineer I trust to help with a prototype for the last month.
-Still drawing on paper to just get better at it since I'll most likely be doing all the artwork for it.
-Stopped trying to get the prototype.
-Going back to just generating and writing down ideas again.
-Watching the feces hit the fan over the Gamespot firing debacle.
It's bound to be all over the internet now, the ancient Rome themed MMORPG, Gods and Heroes has been canceled.
A lot of work went into this game, and to hear news of its cancellation is a huge disappointment for all of those involved. Studio Head Chris McKibbin posted the reasons up on the official GnH website here.
During my time testing Gods and Heroes, the differences between it and WoW were lost on me. Differences beyond cosmetics ones, that is. Run around as an RPG archetype from the earliest of pencil & paper games. Kill stuff. Watch numbers go up so you can go on to killing bigger, badder things. Those bigger, badder things also better be shinier. More particles. More light bloom. More rares to slave to.
For the love of online gaming. Really. There's got to be more to MMOs than just trying to knock off WoW. There's a lot of stuff that WoW does correctly. There are a lot of people on WoW. There are of course, a lot of people not on WoW.
Monster Hunter 3 is slated to hit the Nintendo Wii instead of the PS3. Interesting choice. What made the last Monster Hunter so outrageously popular on PSP in Japan is being able to play with your buddies. So has Nintendo finally got that whole Online Gaming thing together so you can easily get with your crew and roll or will we still have to deal with that per-console and per-game online friend code rubbish? Either way, by being on the Wii, Monster Hunter 3 might be something new to the world of online gaming. Or, as Zero Punctuation notes, probably not. And I agree with him this round.
Anyway. My main worry concerning Gods and Heroes is my friends who worked on it. I was quite close to the artist teams during my tenure at Perpetual. When you're looking for work, it's so much nicer to have shipped titles so you don't need to worry about violating Non Disclosure Agreements to prove your skills.
Best wishes, friends.
I'm still looking for a job. It seems like companies are taking forever to respond. The more I want to hear back, the emptier my email in-box is.
Echochrome looks insanely cool.
A really well done N64 game, Sin and Punishment by Treasure is finally hitting the states via Wii Virtual Console. I suppose when I succumb to the Wii camp, this will be mine.
I've been playing Eternal Sonata as well. No, it's not innovative and cause people to interface differently. But holy moly is it one damn well crafted experience aurally, visually and gameplay-ally. Innovation can be cool and all.Being really quirky can be REALLY cool. But for the love of all buttons to be pushed, bust out some polish. Thanks.
My job was in a current state of semi-limbo. I'd been sent off on an unpaid vacation. I was wrong to think I was safe from the layoff monster because I had skills that a paying project needed but nope.
Well, a week after my forced vacation started, I got the call. There's not enough money to go around so a lot of people just got laid off, including myself. Time to start looking for a new job. I spent almost 1 and a half years at the company, which is the longest history of being in one place in my career so far.
Feelings are mixed on this. I really loved the company when I started but then something changed.
Where to go from here? I don't know if I could ever work for any casual game developers local to me. One of my former company's clients is hiring. They were difficult to work with and I doubt my sanity could survive that sort of thing on a day in day out.
We'll see.
I guess "using your imagination" has become one of my quests in game design. Game Career Guide - of all sites - has an article on the very subject.
My choice excerpts:
“All early computer game objects were just blocks of color. If you look at them very closely, you usually can't tell what they are supposed to represent. But when we pull back, our eyes fill in the gaps and complete lines that might not be there, and we see a known object. This phenomenon is known as continuity. We use continuity, combined with our imagination, to turn little blips of color into something meaningful.”
In 1993, Myst was released for the Apple Macintosh. Myst brought a visual side to story-driven games that had not been seen before. The artistic technique used was to focus on single screen images. The player did not have complete free motion in the world, which allowed the designers to set up their composition exactly the way they intended it to be viewed. Some argue that because there was no free motion, the game lacked what it needed to be fun, but you would be hard-pressed to find many people who found the visual side of Myst to blame.
With the exception of a few drastic cases, the lead character is in no danger of being cut from the project. The player's relationship to this character is imperative, and a few simple artistic design considerations can make or break that relationship. These same considerations can be applied not only to characters, but also to vehicles, levels, and even worlds. By considering the science of visual perception early you can create emotion immediately.
1. NEVER work on any of your ideas on your work computer.
3. NEVER invent or create an IP while working for someone else, you can
take down notes, but store them in a safe place until you can work on
them.
2. NEVER bring any of your design docs or any of your assets to work.
3. DO NOT TALK about your idea to people at work, even at the pub over beers...
4. When excepting a new job, ALWAYS declare ANY and ALL of your own IPs
to your new employer. Sometimes they will have proper paperwork for you
to fill out, or you can just give them a printed document. Remember,
you want your employer to sign off on this and give you a copy. If you
do this with every employer, the chances are ZERO that one of them will
claim ownership down the line (if you never worked on it at work).
Because you will have several CEOs signed statements that you own your
IPs, and this should hold up in court (but will never get that far).
BTW, in the off chance your employer doesn't give you a signed copy, claiming to have "lost it" or "never received it", then there is NO CONTRACT. Thus giving you clear ownership of your IPs.
I have ALL of my listed IP paperwork that has been signed off by studio heads and CEOs going back a long time now.
If you do it 100% on your own, California Labor Code 2870 protects you in California.
"(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of the state and unenforceable."
I've got to go buy my own copy of PagePlus. And have faith in my ability to come up with more, superior ideas.
