Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Decay is on ModDB! / Some Thoughts About IGDA

So, Decay is on ModDB now. You can check out it's page at the following link:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/decay1/

I feel guilty for not posting anything all semester. It hasn't been for naught though! We've finished a sweet level in Unity, with a video of it ready to be uploaded. The reason it's not in this post is because it's still sitting on the hard drive at the lab which is locked right now.

In other news, myself and a lot of class mates went to the IGDA Montreal meeting tonight. The speaker was none other than the Producer for one of my professors Patrick Fortier. Patrick was the creative director on the recently released Wet, and that's what the talk was about.

As far as the actual talk goes, I'm not sure how much I got out of it. In our class with Patrick we've already done some fairly thorough post-mortem talks on what he believes went wrong with the game and what went right. As his producer mentioned in his talk, the character and the setting have been reviewed very well. It'll be interesting to see where A2M decides to take their first Triple A franchise from these roots. I can only imagine that it must be daunting as a company to be wading through such shark infested triple-a waters when you are used to designing family games.

Afterwards, our conversation shifted from the talk to another topic: Students. We are literally part of the first wave of students coming out of any college for Game Design. Many game development degrees from small technical schools are jokes compared to the program me and my piers are involved in, but of course nobody knows that. And beyond the problem of only a few people being knowledgeable on our actual program, no one knows how to talk to us or what to tell us and vice versa.

When we finally manage to make contact with an industry professional, we tend to hear things like "Have a good portfolio" and "Try to talk to a lot of people". These are certainly helpful nuggets of advice, but it always seems to come along with a strange air of "Well, I need to say SOMETHING to these kids." Professionals have no idea what students know, what they don't know, what their experience levels are, etc. They were never game design students, after all.

I'm going to gather my thoughts on this and write a full article for my blog on Gamasutra. The short version of it is this: Hey! We know a lot about game design and we don't think the way that you do. We're poor college students! We're cheap resources with good ideas! Try and be a little friendlier.

1 comment:

L. Dwight said...

I agree that it's really awkward how industry professionals interact with students today. At the same time, I think a part of it is justified. Alot of kids are using the fact that they have "game degrees" as a crutch. It seems to make them think they don't have to go through all the work alot of people in the industry had to in order to prove themselves. It's a kind of awkward student ego that I think the industry is wary of.

That's why it's definitely important to keep building cool things in our free time, and to use THAT to start conversations with these people, not just the fact that we are students.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the drive to make something like Decay, which is gonna really set those people back.