On Reflection - Two years down, one to go.

As my final year of Uni comes closer, I've spent some time reflecting on not only the journey of the last couple of years, but also on what the future will bring once I graduate.  There are a few things I've learned over the last two years that might be helpful to anyone who's considering jumping into the Game Development arena as a student.

The first thing to know about game design is that it's not all about making games.  There is a lot more to it than that.  You need to look at games with a critical eye, you need to dissect them, to look closely at the mechanics, the art, the story, the interface, all the aspects of a game that come together to actually make it work (or not work as the case may be).

Be prepared to work.  I know, this sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, and it is, yet it also seems to catch people off guard.  Uni isn't like school, you don't have teachers pushing you to hand things in.  The expectation is that you know the due date and you will submit the required work on that date.  It's not fair to say that tutors and lecturers don't care, they do, and they will help you, but you need to be proactive.  Don't wait till the day before something is due to email your tutor, if you don't understand something or are having problems, get on top of them early.

The follow on from this is be organised.  This is really important, as you'll likely have three or four assessment pieces that will inevitably all fall due in the same week, if not the same day.  Prioritise, work smarter, not harder.  While the ideal is to leave yourself the same amount of time to complete all tasks, some will be quicker than others, recognise this and then put the extra time toward tasks that you aren't as confident with.  In the two years so far, I've had some late nights working on things, but at no point have I had to pull an all nighter the day before something was due to be submitted and I put that down to being organised and prioritising.

There is no doubt that no matter how organised you are, you will still have some late nights.  Sometimes it's due to things not going right, other times you are so engrossed in what you are doing you lose track of time (hello 4am) and on some occasions your brain will be going a million miles an hour and won't let you sleep.  I found in the latter situation that it's best to just get up and write down what's buzzing around your brain (for me it was usually a story or game idea).  Once I'd gotten it down on paper, I could head back to bed and I'd be out like a light.  The main thing is to get enough sleep.  Sounds obvious but it's very easy to have late night after late night and by the end of the week be exhausted.  This will impact not only on your ability to work, but also on your ability to understand the things that you will be doing in class, and when you don't understand something that makes it so much more difficult to do what it is you are supposed to.

While there are some very specific skills used within video game design, a lot of the skills you need translate across the other genres, like tabletop, board game and even role playing game design.  One of the key skills across all of them is communication.  You need to be able to not only talk about your ideas, but you have to be able to express them in writing as well.  Design bibles are something you will make, and they will not only have all the ideas you have for a game, but also the changes you make to it along the way.  When you are working as an individual these can be in any form that works for you, but making games is rarely an individual thing, so you need to be able to communicate your ideas to everyone else that is on your team.  You need to do this effectively and efficiently so they understand what it is that is required of them.

Being able to tell a story may not be your forte, but being able to document your ideas is important as you can see.  Another area that is important (and it's one that I'm not strong at) is maths.  You will work with physics engines, you will need to be able to input the correct coordinates into your engine and having a good grounding in mathematics will make this a lot easier to deal with.  I'll be honest, coding is not something I'm good at.  I spent a lot of time with my head in Unity and I didn't enjoy it, but I stuck with it because it was necessary in order to complete my part of the project.

One of the major areas that people struggle with is group work.  While there are some classes (mostly the art classes) where you work individually, as you progress you will find that more and more you will be working in groups, sometimes a group of two or up to a group of six.  Working with people can be one of the most rewarding experiences you'll have.  When everything clicks, when everyone is on the same metaphorical page everything runs smoothly.  But when it doesn't, it can be really frustrating and this can cause friction within the group.  Personal communication skills here are really important and can take a situation from bad to good if handled well.  Of course, if handled badly things can go from bad to worse just as easily.  One of the other major traps of group work is placing your expectations of yourself onto everyone else.  If someone is struggling to get things done, rather than attack them for not meeting your expectations, find out why they are struggling, and then find a way to help if possible.

Be prepared to do things you don't think matter or you aren't interested in.  You will have subjects that you don't care about, don't think matter or hold no interest for you, regardless of how you feel about them, these will inevitably be core subjects that you have to pass in order to graduate.  For me, it was drawing.  I didn't like doing it, I wasn't good at it and I found it really hard to take what I saw and transfer that to a page using a pencil.  These classes were in first year where you get a taste of everything, and while I'm unlikely to ever be an artist in that style, the things I learned were invaluable in understanding how things fit together overall, with all the different areas of game design coming together into a cohesive whole.

Expose yourself to new ideas and points of view.  You can do this by playing games outside your normal field.  For example, if you are a fan of puzzle games, play a shooter, if you like shooters, play an rpg, if you like rpg's play a horror game.  Put yourself out there to experience the variety of games on offer, and not just video games.  Play some board games, you'll be surprised not only at the variety out there covering almost every genre, but also how the mechanics within a board game may translate into a digital environment.  And it's not just games either, read books, comics, watch movies, TV shows, anime, as all of these things can provide you with a seed that you can plant and cultivate until it germinates into an idea.

Be prepared to explore these ideas as well.  They may go no where, but in the process of exploring them you will come to understand what about them works and what doesn't, and this can then lead to something new.  I can't count the times that I've been watching something that has sparked an idea that I've jotted down and then gone on to explore later, some to a greater extent than others, but all have been useful to me.

Finally, be prepared to for change.  When you first start you may have some very solid ideas as to what you want to be when you graduate, but as you go forward, you may find that this changes as you are exposed to new ideas, new skills, new concepts and you find things you enjoy that you didn't expect.  For me, I went in thinking I wanted to be able to make 3D models, I've found since that while I could do that, I much prefer either writing the story or managing the team that are putting the whole thing together.  I've embraced that discovery which has then had a significant impact on my subject selection for this, my final year.

A few thoughts on... Binary Domain

Binary Domain, developed by Devil's Domain and published by SEGA in 2012 is a game that seems to polarise people. They either love it or hate it. I found it to be an enjoyable experience, with some nicely written dialogue (I'm a sucker for banter), an interesting story that isn't to far fetched and a nice twist in the tail.

Binary Domain is an on rails third person shooter, and as such there isn't any real exploration to be done.  The story is set in the near(ish) future where Japan has closed it's borders and bipedal robots are commonplace.  You play as Sgt Marshall, a special ops soldier who is sent on a black op to Japan to track down information on "Hollow Children", essentially robots that can pass as human beings which of course has been outlawed by Geneva.

The narrative is very linear but the pace of the delivery keeps things moving forward at a decent clip, so you don't feel the desire to go off the path too often. I have seen a number of complaints that this is a buggy and substandard port of a console title, the graphics are on par with what you'd expect for an almost 4 year old game, but I didn't encounter any glitches or frame rate drops at all.  I also didn't have any issues with my controller (Xbox360), which worked fine first time out and didn't give me any trouble throughout my ten hour play time.  The only thing I found frustrating was that the interactions didn't remap to the buttons to the 360 controller scheme, this meant that at times I was guessing which button to press to select a conversation response.

The game also makes use of voice commands, so you can tell your squad to hold, charge, fire, etc, verbally rather than having to select the command using the controller.  This seemed to work pretty well overall but I ended up leaving my squad mates to their own devices most of the time and let them comment on my skills (both positive and negative) when in combat.  This commenting I found to be one of the more interesting aspects of the game.  You don't have a lot of direct conversation with the NPC's outside of cut scenes, but as you progress through the game the supporting cast do give you some exposition and provide some nice banter between themselves.  I think my personal favourite is Cain, a CN-7 model Combat robot, who talks with a French accent.

The story wraps up neatly, but there is enough left that should a sequel ever be developed it could be quite interesting.  There is an online mode (both co-op and player vs player) but the online matches are pretty dead unless you know people who you can play with.

Overall I enjoyed Binary Domain and would recommend it to people who enjoy rail shooters, games with a light Sci-Fi feel or banter between the main character and their supporting cast.

The Final Fantasy Mystery

I'm the first to admit that I don't understand the fervent adoration that is shown for the Final Fantasy series of video games.  I didn't play them growing up and my last encounter with them was back when I was working in a video games store when Final Fantasy X came out.

Just before Christmas, I purchased the surprise gift box that Square Enix put out.  There wasn't a list of what was in it - hence it being a surprise, but for $9.00 it seemed like a bargain.  Turns out that it was, with only one game that I already had when it came time to open it up.

One of the games included was Final Fantasy XIII, and so, over the break I've been giving it a run, and I still don't understand the fervent adoration these games get, but let me at least explain my view of this.

The graphics are wonderful, of this there is no doubt.  The character models look stunning and the environments are simply amazing.  Visually, this game is stunning to look at.  And I wonder if that is where it gets let down.  The visual feast you are presented with doesn't have any real substance to it.  Now this may be the same with all JRPG's, but I've found the whole thing to be linear, completely linear, with no scope to go off and explore, no emergent narrative.  For the most part, I feel as though I'm watching a movie that I occasionally have to press a button during in order to keep it playing, but it's a movie that I missed the first 10 minutes of and so it doesn't quite make sense.

I think the reason it feels like a movie, is largely due to the number of cut scenes.  Almost every bit of exposition is done through a cut scene rather than by stopping and conversing with the other characters.  Now, that's not the say that these cut scenes are not well done, if anything it's the opposite.  The animations are smooth, the dialogue is decent and the development of the characters and their back story's is not too bad overall.  But step out of these bits and into navigating the world and everything isn't so rosy.

While the animations are still pretty smooth, the controls feel "janky".  It's the only way I can describe it.  Moving the character around the world isn't the kind of experience that the visuals and animations suggest that it should be, instead it's unresponsive, inaccurate and a let down in comparison to what is presented to the player visually.  Finally, I want to say a quick word about the combat.  Like previous iterations of the Final Fantasy saga, it's turn based, in this case you control one character and others perform pre-set actions based on your choices.  The combat actually works pretty well I feel, which is at odds with the player controlled movement.  The only real frustration I've had with it so far is that due to the other RPG's I usually play, I want to move around, to flank, dodge, etc.  That's not possible, but the more fights I have, the less I miss that.

In the final analysis, Final Fantasy XIII is a beautiful looking movie, spoiled by player interaction.  Whether it would work as an actual film if you spliced all the cut scenes together (ah la Injustice), I don't know, I suspect that the amount of work required to make it comprehensible and flowing would create other issues.  Regardless, I'll keep plodding along through it between The Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Rise of the Tomb Raider.