Trying to get into the Gaming industry
in Jobs
(Warning, this is a long post)
Hello everyone in pixel land! My name’s Hermann (currently living in the magical land of S’frica, Western Cape) and ever since I was a wee little person (I believe the correct term is “Child”) I wanted to develop games...granted, in my mind at the time, I thought it would be easy and I’d be generating Doom95 clones in no time (Yes, I played Doom when I was little and DIDN’T commit any violence. Wow!).
Unfortunately, things never really went my way. First I was told that I have to tend to reality and look for an actual career...that’s when all the “Experts” told me Civil Engineering and Architecture is where it’s at...well, seven years after that, I realised what I actually wanted to be and went for it. Since then I have gotten my Diploma and honours in 3D animation and 3D design, as well as three certificates in higher language programming! I’ve read and studied all types of gaming theory, like “Game Design, a book of lenses”, “Game Feel” and a plethora of other materials.
My greatest strengths lie in (apart from my creativity and stunning good looks) working in 3D software, such as 3DS Max and programming languages, like C#, C++ and Microsoft’s Visual basic. I have some experience using C# in Unity, JavaScript in Unity as well as some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. I didn’t do too badly in Technical drawing and Mathematics in High School either :P.
I have a deep well of creativity, theoretical insight into the Gaming industry and I am qualified in both creative and technical skill sets. My drawback? I have an accumulated work place experience of about three to four months. I also have a pretty poor internet, so I can’t always download what I need to progress my career, though I have a way around that.
I have closely followed game development in South Africa, from the platformer “Toxic Bunny”, to the stunt driving escapades of “Chase: Stunt driver”, to the amazingly realized, Isometric point and click horror adventure game “Stasis” and everything in between (“Monsters and medicine” coming to mind). Each success story giving me more hope that I might be doing that for a living too one day.
I would have to say that my favourite past time is indeed, playing PC games. Among my all time favourite titles (and don’t be sad if yours isn’t in it :P) would have to be: ‘Half Life’ series, ‘Deus Ex’, ‘Elder Scrolls Skyrim’, ‘Minecraft’, ‘Neverwinter Nights’ and ‘Mass Effect’ series. Although all games are their own brand of awesome, these tickled my possum more than others. As a game designer, I know that I need to be an entertainer and not necessarily an artist and that I should be passionate about whatever it is I am developing.
My experience in making games is mostly in Game Maker and Unity 5. My sources of gaming knowledge comes from ‘NAG’ Magazine, ‘Game.Dev’ Magazine and ‘Extra Credits’ YouTube series as well as many PDF files. Currently working on a masterpiece, a platformer called “Jumpy” about a junior web developer and part time game designer who lost his dog at the park...I know, brilliant isn’t it?
Let me know what you guys think!
Hello everyone in pixel land! My name’s Hermann (currently living in the magical land of S’frica, Western Cape) and ever since I was a wee little person (I believe the correct term is “Child”) I wanted to develop games...granted, in my mind at the time, I thought it would be easy and I’d be generating Doom95 clones in no time (Yes, I played Doom when I was little and DIDN’T commit any violence. Wow!).
Unfortunately, things never really went my way. First I was told that I have to tend to reality and look for an actual career...that’s when all the “Experts” told me Civil Engineering and Architecture is where it’s at...well, seven years after that, I realised what I actually wanted to be and went for it. Since then I have gotten my Diploma and honours in 3D animation and 3D design, as well as three certificates in higher language programming! I’ve read and studied all types of gaming theory, like “Game Design, a book of lenses”, “Game Feel” and a plethora of other materials.
My greatest strengths lie in (apart from my creativity and stunning good looks) working in 3D software, such as 3DS Max and programming languages, like C#, C++ and Microsoft’s Visual basic. I have some experience using C# in Unity, JavaScript in Unity as well as some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. I didn’t do too badly in Technical drawing and Mathematics in High School either :P.
I have a deep well of creativity, theoretical insight into the Gaming industry and I am qualified in both creative and technical skill sets. My drawback? I have an accumulated work place experience of about three to four months. I also have a pretty poor internet, so I can’t always download what I need to progress my career, though I have a way around that.
I have closely followed game development in South Africa, from the platformer “Toxic Bunny”, to the stunt driving escapades of “Chase: Stunt driver”, to the amazingly realized, Isometric point and click horror adventure game “Stasis” and everything in between (“Monsters and medicine” coming to mind). Each success story giving me more hope that I might be doing that for a living too one day.
I would have to say that my favourite past time is indeed, playing PC games. Among my all time favourite titles (and don’t be sad if yours isn’t in it :P) would have to be: ‘Half Life’ series, ‘Deus Ex’, ‘Elder Scrolls Skyrim’, ‘Minecraft’, ‘Neverwinter Nights’ and ‘Mass Effect’ series. Although all games are their own brand of awesome, these tickled my possum more than others. As a game designer, I know that I need to be an entertainer and not necessarily an artist and that I should be passionate about whatever it is I am developing.
My experience in making games is mostly in Game Maker and Unity 5. My sources of gaming knowledge comes from ‘NAG’ Magazine, ‘Game.Dev’ Magazine and ‘Extra Credits’ YouTube series as well as many PDF files. Currently working on a masterpiece, a platformer called “Jumpy” about a junior web developer and part time game designer who lost his dog at the park...I know, brilliant isn’t it?
Let me know what you guys think!
Comments
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Also, have you heard about Technical Art?
As for my ideal position in this glorious enterprise we off-handedly call the gaming "industry", I was planning to have a brought background so I can fit in anywhere. BUT, to answer your question, I would love to be a 3D modeler, 3D animator or Level Designer.
I LOVE creating stuff (giving life to moving objects, creating objects and characters that only existed in my mind and designing levels to be as entertaining as possible for the player). I do not know all the official positions (I did once though), so I would say I want to be a 3D artist or level designer.
Edit: Level Designer if I HAD to choose between the two, though I have more experience in 3D modeling and animating.
These links are kind of old, and the role has evolved quite a lot in the past few years, but they're still pretty relevant:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130074/the_codeart_divide_how_technical_.php
http://tech-artists.org/ (It's a forum, but you can check out the kind of work and Q&A that people have there)
http://gim.acanaday.com/?p=33
To summarise, in general technical artists are artists who can script. In practice, that means a whole lot of different things. Some technical artists specialise in rigging, some write tools to increase art team efficiency, some prototype shaders, some trouble-shoot performance issues and visual artifacts, some do vfx. Sometimes they help improve communication between art and programming teams.
It's arguably an easier way to get hired (if you're pretty good at it) because of how few artists enjoy programming and how few programmers have artistic skill. (It's the niche I created for myself in the local game industry, and has benefited me quite well.)
If you actually just want to create art-specifically, then I'd recommend doing a whole lot more art. Check out some of the portfolios of artists who're working in the game industry and compare your work to theirs, trying to get it to that quality or better (not to do the same work as them necessarily, but when you do the kind of work that's in their speciality to do it of that kind of quality), preferably with real-time samples. (Some examples: Me, Jarred, Filip, Dawid, Dorianne, Ali, Pierro.)
[edit] I don't think there are any pure level designer positions locally. I imagine you'd have to add value somehow, either by being level designer+artist, or level design+programmer, and to show solid examples of that (whether it's in terms of creating the right mood, which means you'd be looking at being skilled at lighting and colours, or communicating information or creating challenges with level elements). Your portfolio thread's got some nice models, but if you want to be doing level design, you should probably make more work that shows that skill. (And your lighting there doesn't look good yet.)
take you 5 min to get back into things
I'm currently looking for a job (job hunting takes up a bit of time), so it might take me a while to get my work up to that standard and produce some examples, but I'll keep at it. I'm currently teaching myself Unity, so maybe I could create a demo 3D level, showing off my texturing, lighting, shading (materials), animation, level design and a bit of programming, all in one? Might be a tad ambitious, but could be worth doing.
And thanks subjectZero, I'll be sure to check that out :).
If you do do all of those things, make sure that you do them well, especially your lighting. Sticking a light in the scene isn't lighting. It doesn't show that you know what good light looks like. Similarly, making the entire scene very moody (which I've also received in a demo) also doesn't help, because then I can't actually see the models/textures that I'm actually trying to evaluate. So, yeah, if you're going to be showing something (lighting, animation, whatever), definitely don't do it in a way that makes your models look worse. (That should go without saying, but then I wouldn't have received the game demos that I received...) It helps to put up shots of your wireframes, vert/tri counts, and UVs/texture sheets too.
With regard to tech art, I just thought I'd bring it up because of how it's helped me quite a lot to sell my skills as a tech artist. If you're not really passionate about that kind of thing, then rather focus on the art/level design that you enjoy; the fact that you're able to do any programming at all is nice regardless, but if it's not something you really want to do, it shouldn't be that prominent in your portfolio or your future employer's going to expect you to do it. :P