Second Year Review

Last official post of second year! :D 

My main goal is to be a part of a good team in a successful games company, I didn't initially know what I wanted to be when I first joined this course, but through a process of elimination, I have come up with the idea that I would like to go into making 3D environments and props for games.

When I was in college I decided I wanted to do the 3D side of games, which spurred me on to do a foundation course and then join university.

It's always been my dream to have my work out there, in the past few years it got refined into: I wanted my work to be in a successful game and when people play it I can say, “Yea, I made that chair!” or “I made those trees over there in the distance!” and have my name in the credits of a game … It's kind of a sad dream I have always had since I was younger, like a claim to fame sort of thing, I never wanted to be a singer or an actress or anything else small children dream of becoming, I always had the idea that I would make something that would be famous. 
 

That is my dream and my life goal and what I hope coming to university will help me achieve.

I am honestly terrified of my own future, I keep thinking that I am not ready to be successful because I feel that I rank quite averagely in my year. I remember that my first year of university didn't go very quickly at all, but second year has flown by! I feel that I'm not ready to be in third year, I was quite scared at the start of this year because I thought that the first years would come to me for help and I wouldn't be able to answer them. But it seems the first years that I've seen are at the same level as me anyway, as they've been taught UDK quite early on.. a little bit of an unfair advantage, but I guess they are paying more. Anyway, although second year has flown out of the window, I don't think I realised how much I learnt in this year. I absolutely loved the group project, I was with a bunch of guys that were completely different to me, but we all got on really well. I think that we were the only group that didn't actually have any major problems, so I think that counts for something! I learnt quite a lot of new things in UDK and I was so proud of our level. :)

I'm really hoping that after I have done the projects I have set myself over summer, and once I get back to uni for third year, I will feel like I am on track. Currently I feel like I'm behind although I've done all the work, I'm scared and I'm not ready. But I'm going to work really hard to get where I need to be.

 

.....yes.

Changing Lives or Building Careers

Universities are constantly trying to improve their courses based on how the industry changes, but as the industry changes so rapidly, how can the universities keep up? The answer is, they can't, but they can offer students the basic knowledge needed to get into the industry, the rest is up to the students. 

I think that university students on a game related course would have a better idea of what the industry is looking for because they are given a time frame for each project, like in the industry. People trying to teach themselves the skills needed would only concentrate on one aspect, like 3D characters for example, so they wouldn’t have a knowledge of any of the other aspects that the game companies would be looking for in a potential employee. There are some things that you may not have thought of by yourself that you could learn from an education.

Technical skills are a must for Game Art teachers, they need to keep up to date with what's happening in the games industry. Students rely on the tutors to give them guidance and get them correctly prepared for graduation, interviews and first jobs. It is up to the student to pick the right course which, in their mind, offers the same sort of standards as the industry, but it is up to themselves to create that level of standard in their work. It isn't really possible to teach someone to develop their skills and be creative, but in a way being made to feel like you're one of the smallest creatures on earth and constantly in competition with every single person on your course is a good way to force people to improve, which is kind of how I feel our course is.

Games companies should have views on what skills an artist should have, traditional skills are important for all of the jobs that we will be applying for in the industry. We need to have a basic knowledge of perspective, shape, form, colour theory and anatomy, because they will play a part in everything. Even anatomy would be useful for 3D vehicle and environment design for example because otherwise they wont fit in with the characters, like the seat is too big in the car or the doorway isn't tall enough for the player to get through.

I think that games companies will be looking for someone with all the necessary technical skills and some traditional knowledge, what they cannot be convinced about is creativity, the possible employee may have a creative portfolio but they may not work in a creative way, so their best bet would be to look for skills over everything else. Ideally they would be looking for someone that works fast, is very creative, has a good knowledge of traditional skills and with a large technical understanding.

Talent and Creativity

So this is my last push to get everything finished for Second Year! I handed in all of my Visual Design work yesterday which I was reasonably happy with, and now I have to address this blog that I have sorely neglected! I might upload some of my Visual Design and Game Production work that I am most pleased with on here once the tasks are finished..

Right so here goes.. Talent and Creativity.

Talent is a term to describe someone's skill in something, for example, some people may be described as having a “natural talent” in drawing or playing an instrument. But they weren't actually born with that ability, they didn't come out of the womb wielding a pencil or a guitar, they put the time in to learn that skill.

I believe that everyone can do anything, providing they put the time in to learn how to do it. It's like on the Sims, if they haven't read up on cooking, your Sim will burn the toast and set fire to the whole house, but if you did the research first then there are no fires and they can create many new dishes!

Creativity is a broad term explaining someone's ability to have unique ideas, sometimes a random idea that makes hardly any sense or a well thought out idea that will be of use. I think I good example of creativity is shown on something like Dragon's Den for example, you have a panel of rich business people judging the public's business and product ideas.. Some are so stupidly ridiculous that they get sent away with no funding, others seem quite boring but will be useful so might get funding, and others seem so comically absurd and amazing that they also get funding because they're funny and might actually work.

Again, creativity isn't something that you're born with, it is influenced by your personal experiences, environments that you have grown up and your interests. Some people seem to have more of a knack for coming up with interesting ideas, but I think anyone can be creative in their own way.

So creative! XD

I think that both creativity and skill play a big part in the games industry, most of the roles in the team creating the game should have both. Initially the Concept Artists will need the creativity to come up with the ideas of how things should look and the skill to present their ideas to the Game Artists and Level Designers, who will then have the creativity and skill to develop the initial ideas into a working game. I don't think there would be a lot of creativity needed for the coding side of games, but definitely the skill would play a massive part in it.

I used to be able to write in HTML and very basic CSS, but game coding looks like it has a lot of maths in it, I'm not great at Maths (saying that, I lack the skill because my Secondary School teacher was pretty boring so I couldn't be as bothered as I was with Art and ICT) so I understand that there is a great amount of skill needed for coding, but I would imagine there isn't much flexibility with ideas.

Book Review: Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion

It's quite unusual for me to read a book, I only read Mortal Engines because of the course and before that I hadn't read a book in about 10 years (not even exaggerating!) My sister recommended this book to me a few weeks ago and when I went to visit her this weekend, I managed to read the whole thing on the 3½ hour journeys between her house in Aberystwyth and my parents house in Stourbridge. So on the front cover it has a teenage couple, the guy is a zombie and the girl isn’t, it looks like really cheesy teen romance trash, especially as it has the caption “who says romance is dead?” by the side of this image. I wasn't very hopeful that this would be a good read, but I was pleasantly surprised – I guess “don't judge a book by it's cover” is very relevant here! (lol)

This offered an alternate view of zombies, normally I dislike zombie things, the films scare me and I cannot stand the games – it's all too real, but this book was comforting and ended up with the zombies actually curing their curses very slowly.

There is an element of romance in the story, but it's not overpoweringly soppy which is good, because I generally hate romantic things. Me and my boyfriend of 5 years don't celebrate Valentines day for example except maybe to take the piss, it's pointless, this is the card I gave him this year:

but I digress. I don't want to put too many spoilers in this review, but I found it very interesting reading through the zombies' point of view. It offered an explanation on why zombies only feed off living humans, and not each other or animals, once they turn into zombies they lose all recollection on who they are. They don't even know their own names, they are just lost and only have primal instincts, they also get visions of the person they are eating's life, so they feel more alive when they are eating as they feel human again for a few seconds. Something I always wondered about zombies is if they were humans that went back to primal instincts, like animals, why weren’t they trying to mate with everything as well? The book also explains this, they are primarily dead so they don't have a proper blood flow, but they do still have urges, resulting in them just standing there naked and staring at each other, as they don't know what to do and even if they did, nothing would happen!

This book has been made into a film apparently, which may explain the characters on the front cover of the book, as no where in the book does it say that the main zombie guy is wearing a hoodie and jeans, he's meant to be in a fitted shirt and tie which is why he cannot guess what he was before he turned into a zombie. I don't think that the film would be as good as the book, I can imagine that the directors would have played more on the teen aspect aiming at the kind of people that enjoy Twilight (I can gladly say I have never read or watched anything to do with Twilight, hearing about the sparkling put me off!)

So all in all, I would recommend this book, it's an easy read and good for people that enjoy post-apocalyptic things, zombies, and interesting stuff, it does have very descriptive violent scenes in places so it's not for the squeamish though!

From generalist to specialist

Generalists are adaptable and can take on more than one job, so are suitable for smaller companies as they don't have to employ as many people. Specialists are very good at one singular thing so are better for bigger companies who have more money to spend on quality. I think that as Game Art students, we should be focussing on being BOTH.

For example after doing 2 years of this course, I have decided I would like to go into 3D environments and props because that is what I enjoy the most. However I will still try and hone my skills in the other aspects of the course, such as concept art, characters and vehicles. I would like to be employable to both big and small game companies and not be too specific and picky when I have job interviews. So as well as having a reasonably good knowledge and creating above average work in concept art, characters and vehicles, I will focus mainly on the 3D environments and props that I want to get a job doing. I have a few projects that I have set myself to do over the summer, that I am quite excited about doing, so this should help with my environmental artist goal!

I went on a website called: www.animationarena.com/video-game-salary.html They had carried out a survey on this website to show the different salaries of each position in the games industry. I thought it was quite interesting so I made a table summarising the results. It's all in dollars, so the wages are probably very different here in England, but I think it paints a good picture of the importance of the different roles.

Job Type	Job Title	Average Starting Salary	Average Salary after 3 Years	Average Salary after 6 Years
Game Programmers	Programmers	$50,000	$66,000	$88,000
	Lead Programmers	$56,000	$83,000	$90,000
Game Artist	Artist	$41,500	$53,300	$66,700
	Lead Artist	$64,000	$67,000	$80,000
Game Animator	Animator	$46,700	$67,000	$75,000
	Lead Animator	$64,000	$67,000	$80,000
Game Designers	Designer	$46,000	$55,600	$70,000
	Lead Designer	$45,000	$54,000	$81,000
Game Producers	Project Lead/Producer	N/A	$62,000	$80,000
	Executive Producer	$50,000	//	$82,000
Quality Assurance	Game Tester	$32,000	//	$50,000
	Lead QA	$40,000	$50,000	$60,000
Game Audio	Sound Designer/Engineer	$50,000	$66,000	$74,000
	Musician/Composer	$55,000	$62,000	$90,000

From what I understand, I am already at a disadvantage in the games industry, and that is because I'm English, I live in England and want a job in England. Apparently us English are the most expensive to employ, so with the world as it is at the moment, the chances of me getting a job over someone in a different country is quite slim unfortunately.

I recently read up on a thing called “outsourcing” which is where a company pays people in poorer countries to do the work, because their wage would be a lot lower so it would save the company money. This idea makes me feel a bit sick actually, not only is it taking advantage of countries in poverty but also England is a dying country anyway, the government has screwed everyone over, and we're not even safe trying to get into an industry where you need a degree and a good range of skills to even be considered. It's absolutely pathetic! :(

A good example of outsourcing is the well known flop of a game Aliens: Colonial Marines which was predominantly outsourced, and contained many glitches, errors, unfinished parts and a terrible storyline. With the only gleam of hope being the online levels which weren’t outsourced.

So at the sole benefit of saving money, some companies are willing to risk unhappy customers and terrible reviews:

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/02/12/aliens-colonial-marines-360ps3-review

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-12-aliens-colonial-marines-review

http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/aliens-colonial-marines/review/

I think if the companies aren't willing to stop screwing everyone over and taking advantage of cheap labour then it would be worth either working for a smaller company or making your own company with the risk of not even having one of your games published. I'm not sure how my ultimate life dream of becoming a successful member of a games company really fits into this reality.. but I really hope it will! I'm feeling very pessimistic now :/ all I can do is focus on becoming employable by having a good range of skills and have absolute blind luck to get a job!

Interactive Technology

At first, game controllers were very simple, and only consisted of 3 or 4 buttons on a simple pad, or just a joystick, but now there's loads of buttons and analogue sticks etc. The games industry has to keep up to date with it's audiences ever changing needs and wants. Gamers constantly want the latest and most realistic gaming experience to enhance their escapism from reality. This is a little ironic, trying to make it more realistic to be able to escape reality, but that's how it is. One of the current attempts to make games more realistic is having the character move with the player through the medium of controllers (Wii / Playstation Move) and cameras (Xbox Kinect) that sense the players movement. However they haven't brought out any interesting games for this new technology in my opinion, for some reason they have focused it more on children and families, releasing more board game style arcade games which shuns out the proper gamers. I must admit, sometimes I do enjoy playing these brightly coloured mini games, but they get boring very easily.

"Future Controllers"

The consoles themselves have been changed to suite most peoples lives as well, they have been made smaller, sleeker and less noisy, some with the option of changing their colour. 

The Xbox was late starting in the games market, and the first console they released was a big heavy black bulky box with a huge X on the front. It looked very masculine and boring.

Years later the Xbox 360 was released, offering a much nicer thinner design and the ability to play with the console any way up you wanted it, for some reason they only brought out white consoles at this point, possibly to stand out from the other consoles on the market. This console had a removable hard drive in it and memory card slots so that you could store as much game information as you wanted, it also gave the option to take your game saves with you and play on someone else's console. It has 2 USB ports and an Ethernet cable port for connecting to the Internet. There was a lot of problems with the original Xbox 360 though, as a lot of people experienced their console overheating and the “red ring of death”, which meant that there was something wrong with your console and it had given up with life.

A few years later the Xbox 360 Elite was released, which apparently had most of the problems fixed, it included a HDMI cable for better quality visuals, and a much larger hard drive, it was also black like the original Xbox, maybe they realised that most people prefer black as a colour as opposed to white (much easier to keep clean!).

A few more years later, Microsoft released the Xbox Slim, this was a much smaller console, it came with a glossy or matt finish option, it had a built in hard drive, and also built in wireless. It came with 5 USB ports, built in Wifi, and a port for Kinect, the overall console was a lot quieter than the previous models as well. Some people say that this was the console Microsoft wanted to initially release, if they hadn't been rushed to compete with the other console releases.

Soon enough the next generation consoles will be released, most people are excited about this, personally I am not, I am quite happy with my current Xbox and I don't want to have to spend loads of money on a new console so I think it will be quite a few years until I get a new one. Just like with Kinect, I will wait until they've brought out some good games for it first!

The Internet's response to next generation Xbox consoles.
 

Some people are calling it the Xbox 720, I sincerely hope it isn't actually called that, because that name makes no sense and is stupid. :)

Game Engine Comparisons

Stop having fun and get back to work!! D:

Using the right game engine is an important choice when creating a game, different engines offer a selection of options better suited to certain genres and types of games. I will be comparing Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and the GameByro engine.

Firstly the Unreal Engine:

http://www.unrealengine.com/

In my experience this engine is better suited to first-person action / horror games which are overall very dark. The games I have personally played that use Unreal are:

Alice Madness Returns, Army of Two, Batman Arkham City, Borderlands, Destroy All Humans!, Gears of War. A few of these are in my top 20 favourite games, and I have even done reviews on some in the past. So from my experience most of these games are set in dark environments, and offer a creepy edge to the games as (with the exception of Army of Two) there are mutated creatures and nightmarish enemies to fight against. So I would come to the conclusion that the Unreal Engine is better suited for a horror style game. A few more well-known games from that use this engine are:

Bioshock, Tom Clancy games (Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six), Mass Effect, A lot of Kinect games, and of course Unreal games (Unreal, Tournament, Championship, etc)

Here is an example of some game trailers that use the Unreal Engine:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G9EYw4Wjck
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=up21p1_vTbI
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8lngIFXRi4

Secondly CryEngine:

http://www.crytek.com/

I have never actually played any games that use the CryEngine, because they tend to be mainly army themed first-person-shooter games, which don't really interest me. But an example of some of the games that use this engine are: the Far Cry games, the Crysis games, Sniper: ghost warrior, Warface, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, MechWarrior Online, Tour Golf Online, God Slayer.

Here are some trailers of the games that use CryEngine:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6gnOVJsCsM
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJDmP2crAlk
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L9U1OGv-Ag

Judging from these trailers, games that use CryEngine are mainly first-person-shooter games based outdoors in daytime. So maybe this engine focuses more on natural lighting and movement such as trees blowing in the breeze etc.

Thirdly Gamebyro:

http://www.gamebryo.com/

A few of my favourite games use the Gamebyro engine: Bully: Scholarship Edition, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. These are third person games (with the option of first person for Fallout and Oblivion). There are a few other well-known games that use the GameByro engine such as: Epic Mickey, Ragnarok Online II: Legend of the Second, Catherine.

An example of game trailers that use the GameByro engine:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A86QGOJaQU
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi6A-JxQ7LY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-__FCLMIao

Technical Shizzlewizzle:

Engine Name	Date Created	Primarily based	Coding/Platforms	Consoles/PC
Unreal Engine	1998	North Carolina, America	C++, Microsoft DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL, Android, iOS, Adobe Flash Player 11	Windows Vista/7, Linux, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U
CryEngine	1999	Frankfurt, Germany	DirectX 9/10/11, MMO	Windows 7, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U
GameByro	1997	North Carolina, America	C++, DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL	Windows, Linux/Mac OS X, GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 2/3, Xbox/360