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 - Hello from EGD!
Thursday, June 12, 2008Despite being on computers all day, I've been so busy trying to get myself back in shape with some of the tools I'll help teach that I haven't been posting around here much like I said I would. My employers keeps me pretty busy I suppose.
In any case, I've been here in Atlanta all this week, in training for another great summer of my job teaching some basic game development to high school students.
The EGD team seems great this year and the students come very very soon (the 14th!), so i'm excited.
It's always especially awesome when you have students who really get into it and make things like asset lists entirely on their own, or form a team and get started early, just so they can make a better game.
I hope to see some more students like that this year, and some even better games from them. It can only make me look even better. ;)
Labels: teaching
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Summer Camp: Next Best Thing to an Internship
Saturday, February 16, 2008Brenda wrote on her blog recently an entry on her thoughts on resume writing.
In one section she wrote this:
Have no relevant experience? Spend your summers trying to get some. One possibility is to work at summer camps. Seriously. Many of these camps offer game design/art/programming programs for the kids. If you can’t get an internship, it’s certainly a step up from Clerk.
It just so happens that that has been my experience. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the origin of that paragraph, given as I certainly have mentioned to her often the benefits of my gig with Emagination's game design camp.
So, for everyone else's benefit, here's why working at a Summer Camp for game development (or related field) is a great opportunity for students looking to get into the game industry:
- First of all, it's something you can put under "Relevant Work Experience." An actual job, in a related area.
- Secondly, I've occasionally enjoyed reaping the benefits of having a title that's not just "student". Of course, if you're looking for a job, this isn't immediately helpful. If you're actively hunting for a job it is likely better to make what title you're hoping for more apparent. But in my case, I'm not. I've still got at least another year of school left.
What it is good for, however, is networking in the long term, or in other words establishing connections with people well before you may need a job from them. In this sense, using my title of "Game Development Instructor" is sometimes useful. It can provide some interesting and more memorable conversations than your average student, and I can ask questions on behalf of the company I work for. Although developers are often looking out for new employees, they also are often looking out for new clients and partnerships and so I can provide a slightly different dynamic when speaking as an employee. Asking questions on behalf of my company increases my value as an employee, which looks good to, well, everyone. It strengthens my reputation with Emagination, which will be good for using them as a reference in the future! - Nothing helps solidify what you have learned in your own education than having to teach it to someone else!
- I got to see a lot of little game projects get put together over the course of my job.
When you're working on a team, you only get to see how things happened on your project.
As an instructor, I got to watch over a handful of teams, and watch how everything fell into place, or fell apart. Team dynamics in action. Many of the students were working on their first ever game, and it's interesting to see them make the same mistakes I did. For the returning students, you get to see them advance. In short, although you're not directly making any of the games, you get to see quite a few games get made, and that's somewhat valuable in itself. - And the biggie, at least for me:
This may not apply to all camps, but at least for the one I worked at, it was an amazing networking opportunity for future careers, as industry people were brought in as guest lecturers for our students, and one developer even allows us to bring our students on a tour through their studio. Sure, this is a great opportunity for the kids, yes, but for the instructors it's just as valuable. Even if the work didn't involve actually developing a title, I've still technically worked with some very impressive people. And, every year I return is repeat contact, and I'll become more familiar to them.
I stumbled into my summer camp gig quite randomly, while desperately looking for (and failing to find) an internship for last summer. In retrospect, I can see that I was probably not even ready for an internship then, and it's no wonder why I couldn't find an internship opportunity.
Finding Emagination really was, however, the next best thing. I am certainly glad I did it. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:04 PM 3 Comments Links to this post