Shane Smit: Being a Programmer in the Video Game Industry

Shane Smit has been in the game industry for 12 years now. He has released multiple games on multiple platforms including consoles and mobile. In his career, he has had worked for many companies:  RED Interactive Agency, Avalanche Software, and Smart Bomb Interactive to name a few.  After his talk I feel I like have a better idea what it is like to be a programmer in the video game industry.

Being a programmer in the video game industry is not going to be me programming the fun parts in a game, but more of me programming tools for others to use. The main job of game programmers is going to be creating tools for the artist and designers to use.  These tools should be created to enable the artist and designers; making their jobs simpler. Artist have the responsibility to make the game look pretty, designers are responsible for making the game fun, and programmers are responsible for performance, security, and making all sure all the pieces fit.  When an artist or a designer ask for something we the programmers will be there to help them be successful.

The satisfaction in being a programmer in this industry will comes in helping others create awesome games and also in constantly learning new things.  While in school it is important that I learn how to learn because that will be a large part of working in the industry. Game programmers are responsible to be leaders in technology. It is going to be very helping learning multiple languages because they will all be used at one point or another.  

Victor Chelaru : A simpler game making process

                Have you ever played a game of Telephone? You know that game where one person comes up with a phrase. Then that person say the phrase to another person and then that person says what they heard to the next person; and so on, until the last person say the phrase out loud. The phrase the last person says if usually very different to what the first person came out with. A bunch of information is lost in each transition from one person to another.  Victor Chelaru argues that this is very similar to the game making process.

                When making a game, information travels down from execs to the audience.  And the same way information gets lost in a game of Telephone, information will get lost on its way down. Many people are required to make a game, allowing for information to get lost more often.

               

                But what if we try to eliminate the middle man? Get rid of the programmers so the artists and designers would not need a programmer to be able to make a game. To do this we would need to empower the artists and designers with tool that get rid of the programmer. That is what Victor Chelaru is trying to do with FlatRedBall tool.

Aaron Walker Presentation: Working Hard

                Aaron Walker has been in the gaming industry for thirteen years. He has worked on games for the N64, PS2, GC, Xbox, Wii, X360, and PS3. Most of his career has been spent working on sport and kids friendly games. And I think the most important thing to take away from his experience is to work hard.

                This may seem like something obvious but, I think working hard is extremely important if I want to make a career out of making games.  Walker mainly got into the industry and stayed in the industry because he was willing to work hard. He knew nothing about making games when he first started but had the passion to learn. He tried to always do what he was told to show the people above him that he was willing to work hard. And in the end it is worth it.  Also it is important to learn what one’s personal niche is, so they could provide something ones in the team cannot or do not want to. For Walker, his niche became working on UI.

                Another reason it is important to work hard is because of crunch. Crunch can be soul crushing and crunch is something most games go through in development. Crunch will require workers to work around sixty hour weeks. During these times, it is important to figure out what makes crunch worth it.

Rich Reagan: Insight Into Social Games

                I would like to start off by thanking Rich Reagan for taking time to present his presentation to my class.

                Social games are not a fad and have changed the way people experience games. As a “hardcore” gamer who want to get into the video game industry, it is important for me to get used to that fact. This is important because it is important to be able to make games for everyone, not just me.

                Change in the gaming space is not a new phenomenon. Similar changes also happened to the music industry. Music went from the radio to records to cassettes/CDs to digital. Throughout those changes music still came out and was successful, but the way people wanted to experience music has changed. Content was and will always be king. The same goes for video games; video games are now mainly available portably through digital means. For example, the Ios store has more games available then all the games that have been released on console.

                A road-map to creating an engaging and successful game is: customer engagement, simple choice, potential & existing users, add value, and learn & evaluate.  In simple choice, do not make the game too hard. The player has not yet paid any money to they are not deeply invested yet. But constantly reward the play to keep them engaged. Every once in so often give the player a hard stop. The player could only continue through in-app purchases, waiting, or friend gate. The friend gate will allow the player to invite potential and existing players to also come play the game. Through playing the game the player must learn how the game structure works. This way the player could properly evaluate their purchase.

                At the end of the day what I am really after is a great business upon a great game!

Particles, Particles Everywhere

   One of my tasks in the past week was to add particles when a player finds a piece of gold. The final result can be found here: Bomb Diggity. My team decided that adding these particle effects is important; showing the player that they received gold and making them feel good about it at the same time.

   To achieve the particle effects that I got I used three different tools. I used Starling Particle Systems which can be downloaded here: Particle System. The tool I used to make my own particle effects was this particle editor. There you could export a .pex file which Starling utilizes. To achieve the particles moving from one spot to another I used the Tweenlite library. Now let's get to the code!


   First thing I did was embedding the particle effect.

[Embed(source="../media/particles/GoldRevealParticle.pex", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]

public static var GoldRevealParticle:Class;

   
   With the particle now embedded, I am able to use the particle in the program. I have made a method that initializes the particle effect and adds the particle to the screen when the method is called.

private function goldReveal(xPosition:int, yPosition:int):void

{

goldRevealParticle = new PDParticleSystem(XML(new                                AssetsParticles.GoldRevealParticle()), Texture.fromBitmap(new AssetsParticles.ParticleTexture()));

Starling.juggler.add(goldRevealParticle);

goldRevealParticle.x = xPosition;

goldRevealParticle.y = yPosition;

goldRevealParticle.scaleX = 0.09;

goldRevealParticle.scaleY = 0.09;

goldRevealParticle.start(0.5);

addChild(goldRevealParticle);

}

   After the particle is initialized, I use Starling's juggler in order to animate the particle when the particle is added on screen.  Then I position the particle with the parameters passed through, which would be the location of the gold. Next thing I do is scale the scale the particle to be the size of the gold. After this, I start the particle and give it half second duration on screen. At the end of the method I add the particle to the screen when the method is called.


   Now that I have shown an example on how to spawn a particle. I am going to show how move a particle from one place to another. This is where TweenLite is used.

goldTrail(map[row][column].positionX, map[row][column].positionY);

TweenLite.to(goldTrailParticle, 2.5,{x:goldMoveX , y:goldMoveY , delay:1});

 
   The first thing I did was call the method that spawns the particle I am going to move. This method is very similar to the example I used above. Then using TweenLite, I use the 'to' call which moves an object from point 'a' to point 'b'. The parameters that are being pass are the object that is going to be moved. Second, how long it takes to get to point 'b'.  And third, you passing where location 'b' is. Doing all this will move the starting location of the particle to the location where the gold counter is, showing the player that they have collected gold.