Blog - Yes, my name is on the internet
Monday, August 25, 2008Since this summer's adventures with EGD, it seems a few people have searched for me (thank you, webstats!)
Don't know if they were coworkers, students of mine, their parents, or some of the industry devs who work with us, but it's interesting to me nonetheless.
Although you all spelled my name wrong, a mistake which you hopefully discovered upon being lead here. ;)
Speaking of my fabulous online presence, I'm pleased to see that as of this writing, only one student postmortem has been added to the list on gamecareerguide.com after the two about games I worked on, which means my name is still being well advertised there.
Of course, what's up with that, fellow students? Get to writing some postmortems to your games and get your name out there!
Labels: EGD, postmortem, students
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:23 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
Blog - When Presentations Go Bad
Wednesday, August 6, 2008Another lesson from EGD I thought might be nice to post about is on presenting your game.
Instead of saying how this related to any moment at EGD, let me first tell you a story about the first video game I worked on with a student development team.
It was a pretty basic SHMUP called Core, built in a simple 2D game development tool.
We only had two weeks to develop it. Unfortunately, it was also one of the first (if not THE first) video game done by anyone on the team, so I don't think any of us knew how to budget our time properly for the project.
We fell quite behind. Near the end we realized how screwed we were and were trying to cut and cut just to get the thing into a presentable level by the deadline. Lots of good work got cut, but it still wasn't enough.
A few of us were still crunching to get the game done on a series of laptops during the bus ride to class on the last day.
Needless to say, the game was not finished in time for our presentation.
What followed was an awful, awful presentation where everything that could have gone wrong decided to do just that. Even glitches we weren't aware of popped up unexpectedly by the dozens, on top of the hundreds we knew of. We couldn't help but express our horror at each one that came up. My personal favorite line was "And all the music was composed by Brian here.... although this isn't the right song for this level is it?"
It was after that tragic presentation that I was taught that glitches were likely to come up when presenting any game, and what exactly one should do when bugs rear their heads at such a time. I was told not to point out the things that are wrong and instead gloss over all mistakes, glitches, etc. Since then I've learned another tactic, of talking only about problem areas when you can talk about what you did (or at least tried) to do to overcome such obstacles.
Now, back to EGD, there was one group of students that, due to fighting within their development team, had fallen quite behind. They had to scramble to get their game done, but it was already too late.
Their game was falling apart during their practice presentations.
I told them the above story, and gave them all the advice I had been given on what to do when things go wrong during a presentation.
Sadly, they didn't follow it at all, and new horrifying bugs showed up during their final presentation to the judges. The best of which was at one point they opened a door and inside the door frame was a brick wall that wasn't supposed to be there, rendering that level unbeatable.
Since they didn't take my advice at all, the judges had to console them to help derail the train-wreck that resulted. Let's hope that when they gave out the exact same advice I had given earlier, the students finally listened.
Labels: EGD, presenting
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 7:00 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Mission Accomplished
Tuesday, August 5, 2008At one point during my time teaching EGD this summer, one of my students asked to try playing some of my games. I bought some index cards and made up really quick and dirty versions of both 50 Pace Duel and Rats.
I was reminded of this moment just now, when talking to an old friend of mine who was also interested in trying out Rats.
When playing Rats with a few of my EGD students, however, I was very amused when witnessing how things went down. First of all, they really had a blast playing it, which is great to see.
But secondly, it was neat seeing how well the game worked at what it was supposed to accomplish. Rats was the result of a class project wherein we had to use the MDA framework to make a game that made players feel a particular emotion (or aesthetic, in MDA terms) and the one our team chose was paranoia. (Interestingly, most of the teams in our class inexplicably also chose paranoia...)
Man alive, were my students ever getting all wired up and making some extremely paranoid exclamations and choices. It worked all too well.
I even later remarked to them that the game was intended to make them feel paranoid and they agreed that it had indeed worked quite beautifully. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:38 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - EGD Year 2: Completed
Tuesday, July 29, 2008Sorry It's been a while since I've posted here, but I took a break after EGD ended. The last week was rather hectic and then I took a small vacation. Now I'm back, and with plenty to say about what I learned this year teaching the camp.
First of all, I didn't think I should have to say this but this year at camp proved me wrong: to any students out there who want to learn video game development, you should bone up on your basic computer skills.
Seriously. I'll just leave that statement as that.
Secondly, my comments after last year's camp sessions continued to ring true. Most notably, the fact that teaching at the camp has provides priceless experience in allowing me to witness many small game projects get made.
We instructors referred to ourselves as the publishers. The teams had to pitch their game to us, and only proceed when their pitch was green-lit. From there we'd have regular meetings with the developers to ensure their project was on schedule and looking good. We'd play builds and critique them, guiding their design, production, art, etc.
It is in that role that I have now overseen the development of over 20 games.
Not AAA titles or anything that will ever see the light of day on store shelves, but games nonetheless.
The fact that these student games were made in such an insanely tight time-frame helped focus my observations on game development to such crystal clarity.
The EGD game projects are entirely built in just over a week. One week is easy to break down into where time was spent: initial development vs iterations vs polish vs QA bug-hunting vs time the developers wasted playing games, etc.
As I'm overseeing many of these game projects all at once, over the course of a couple months, it is as though the camp itself is allowing me to quickly run iterations on the act of game development itself.
Definite patterns arise among games that succeeded and games that failed.
Even if the individual games are not something I could put on my resume, they may have done more for my own education as a student of game development than my own games have.
So once again, I'd like to state that teaching at EGD was an amazing and valuable experience.
For those interested, I'd like to warn that the instructor positions got filled very early this year, and I know quite a few people who got turned down. If you can get it, though, it's a great deal. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:32 PM 2 Comments Links to this post
Blog - The Return of Fluffy
Monday, July 14, 2008We just started our last and final session of EGD this year, and gave them both of our basic non-digital design exercises earlier this morning.
I happened to snap a photo this time of the "Fluffy: Destroyer of Worlds" image.
Again, we draw the following on the chalkboard and ask our students to pitch a hypothetical game based on this image:
A couple of the ideas it generated actually seemed pretty fun or had some interesting mechanics I think I might try playing around with in Flash/actionscript.
I have, after all, been meaning to try to make some simple flash games this summer to add at least something digital to my game design portfolio.
Also, because it's a topic that interests me, I couldn't help but notice how the classic "box of crap" design exercise encourages play with affordances (again for you non-academics reading the list, affordances are qualities/properties of a object/material that are instantly understood: i.e. glass = transparent and breakable.)
I made the mistake of giving each of my students (among other random bits with which to make a game) a rubber band and a six sided die.
Predictably, nearly every group used the die for its original function as a random number generator. I was glad to see at least a few exceptions there which surprised me. However, every single group used the rubber band in some way to involve projectiles in their game design (sometimes using the die as the projectile...)
I suppose I should have seen that coming, given the nature (affordances, if you will) of a rubber band. Especially those rubber bands placed in the hands of rowdy high school students.
Oh well.
Labels: affordances, EGD, teaching
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - "There IS no ahead-of-schedule!"
Thursday, July 10, 2008A few days back some of my students claimed to be ahead of schedule because they had completed already by the day before all their milestones we had set for the day.
One of my fellow instructors pointed out to him "In game development, there is no ahead-of-schedule. Go and finish it, or polish the hell out of it if it's content complete."
In any case, it is surprising how well the students are doing this session. There is one exception: a team with multiple producers and leads who fought and argued constantly (they apparently each had their own, different, design documents they had made...) was one we were concerned would not finish. Apparently it's 'nearly complete' according to their team, although I can't imagine it has any kind of polish on it at all as was pretty rough (to put it kindly) when we last saw a build just two days ago.
But other than that, the teams barely had to crunch on their provided "crunch-night" last night. Even with the fact that most of the instructors weren't around (It fell on the same evening as the Boston Postmortem).
One team was (and this is unprecedented) content complete several days ago, and they have just been tweaking and polishing for a while now. That team contained several of those students I mentioned in my last entry: every opportunity for free time available to them, they still worked on their game anyway, rather than LAN gaming with the rest of the kids. Their game was already better by day 2 than the final product of any 1-week session of camp yet.
Even more average teams, however, are surprisingly close. Before crunch officially started, one team only had a few things to add (loading screens, eliminating critical bugs from one of their weapons...) A third team only had a problem with one cutscene not loading correctly. We usually have at least one team working until 5am on crunch night, but last night we packed up and had left by 2am.
Perhaps this batch is just more hard-core about game development. Maybe they were just driven to make better games than those we showed them from the students they came before them. Or maybe we've just gotten better at scaring them into actually finishing their games early so they can work on polish. ;) posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:20 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Designers vs Gamers
Tuesday, July 1, 2008Game designers find making games more enjoyable than playing them.
I'm sure that by this point this is true at least for me. Keeping up on my game playing almost seems like more work to me than my game design projects.
This dynamic of being a game designer first and a gamer second, however, is something I notice is lacking in most of my students in the EGD camp sessions I've taught.
Most of them can't wait for our lectures on how to use the tools to be over so they can have more free time to play games on the LAN with each other. In fact, a few of them are probably playing games during our lectures.
On one hand, this doesn't bother me as much as you might expect. We see our program as a great way for high school students to determine if a career in game development is right for them before they start college.
This is certainly valuable, if true, as I see a lot of people enter the game development major at SCAD who just don't make it once realizing early on that it's not what they expected. Lots of students like games, and think making them would be fun. It is, if you're into it, and don't mind how much work it is. Neither is necessarily true for most people.
So if these kids come to this camp and realize that they'd rather play games than make them, then I suppose we've done our job. The price tag for this camp is rather expensive for a camper to decide they'd rather spend it all playing LAN games, but then again the price their parents are paying is still nothing compared to the cost of finding out the same thing as a University student.
So, it shouldn't bother me. For the most part it does not. Even so, there's a part of me that finds it a little disheartening. For one thing, even if they find out they don't like it, they still are stuck making a game with other students. They all have to work on a game which gets judged by industry folks. That means that when my students put as little work as possible into their game, just so they can get back to playing, I'm pretty embarrassed and angry when it gets presented to game developers I respect and admire.
On top of that though, I just feel a little sad that the kids don't see the same magic I've found, where making games IS more fun than playing them.
So, it makes me happy when a few of them do find that magic.
This session we have one camper who spends all his free lab time just playing with the level design tool we have, once we showed him how to use it. Especially after lectures where I show them more on that tool, a few keep playing around in it, exploring the possibilities. One called me over to test out the level he'd made, using a few of the tricks and techniques I had taught.
I love that. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:17 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - So Long, Atlanta. Hello, Boston.
Friday, June 27, 2008Today we wrap up the EGD camp in Atlanta. The students presented their games to a few local developers, and thanks to making them do practice presentations earlier the student presentations went pretty well.
I'm glad I came down here and did the Atlanta camp this year. I Wish I had found Emagination earlier and did this camp for EGD last year as well. Being in GA already for SCAD means I go to occasional game development events up in Atlanta (SIEGE and GDX) and so almost all our special guest speakers/judges/etc. were people I've met before. Yay networking.
Also, getting the opportunity to alpha-test a game for Hi-Rez has been pretty awesome. :)
In any case, in a couple hours I fly up to Boston for two more sessions of the camp.
I can't wait. Boston is a great area, and many of my friends have jobs/internships in the area this summer. Plus, I miss the Boston Post Mortem gatherings.
So for those of you up in Boston, I'll probably see you sometime there!
Don't worry, Atlanta. You haven't seen the last of me. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:35 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - In the GGDA newsletter!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008Any of you who may be on the GGDA's mailing list may have seen the nice little blurb sent out today about the tour of Hi-Rez and playtesting session for their game me and my students got to do a few days ago. It's also a small blurb on their site (linked above, or try a direct link to the article.)
Neat! posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Good Day at EGD
Friday, June 20, 2008Yesterday was a good day. It was the kind of day that is the epitome of why my job with EGD is great for my career.
For one thing, I got to meet with and present a speaker who is a game design legend, one whom I had met before at SIEGE. Again, meeting with the speakers I get to present is one of the biggest perks of this job.
*The other perk is the studio tour, and this one was particularly great. I've been blessed with the opportunity to tour 4 different game development studios now (through this job or otherwise), and most are fairly standard.
But this time it was Hi-Rez studios, and A.) I was allowed to play-test the alpha version of their game. I've only ever been able to see the alpha stage of my OWN games, so seeing someone else's was particularly interesting. B.) I also signed my first ever NDA, so I can't tell you anything about the game at all. ;)
Labels: EGD
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post