Blog - Giving a Lecture, perhaps?

Monday, September 1, 2008

Earlier this year I caught up with one of my high school teachers, one who spearheaded the launch of a filmmaker's club there that I was happy to join as one of the founding members.

She had wanted me to come back and talk to the club every now and then when I was back home from my life at college as a film student. Help give them guidance and advice and that sort of thing.

Although, as you know by reading this blog, I didn't stay on that path and eventually went into game development instead.
We determined at our last meeting, however, that my path through game development student life would no doubt be even more appealing to high school students.

So it isn't totally official yet, but I may give a lecture at my old high school about working towards a career in game development.

So, in case that does go through and I'm able to give the lecture, I'd like to ask for any of you who do read this blog: any suggestions for things I should mention?
I should be able to talk my head off about the topic, but any of your suggestions might be interesting to hear. You might suggest something I hadn’t thought of or a different angle.

So, what advice do you have for high school students who may have an interest in a career in game development?





Also, to anyone this may apply to, this blog has been added to facebook's blog networks application.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:23 AM  1 Comments Links to this post



Blog - When Presentations Go Bad

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Another 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.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 7:00 PM  1 Comments Links to this post