I climb a mountain to work everyday… really!

Hello all! It has been awhile since the last time I’ve posted, and I have an excuse. Ha! Bet you guys weren’t expecting that. Well, my excuse is that I’m now attached to Mikoishi, a local mobile game (they actually have a PC game to be released…) development company. Myself, along with 3 other fellow year 3 students of GET joined 3 weeks ago, on the 7th of July. These people are Eric, Sheng Wei, and Jing Sheng.

Anyhow, on to working life! Lets start with the mornings, which I can’t help it but mention. We climb 138 steps up a MOUNTAIN every morning to get to work. Yes, mountain. No hill would be called “MOUNT Sophia” eh? Reminds me of secondary school days when I climbed MOUNT Vernon every morning… but I digress.

The guys here don’t really treat us like interns, I think, and have assigned work that I think a proper contract worker would have taken. In these past 3 weeks, I’ve gone from putting a storyboard into game-scripts, fixing the subsequent bugs (which are VERY annoying, but nothing quite comes close to the sense of gratification when you finally PWN that darn bug once and for all xD), to now balancing the game, and ensuring that players will enjoy it, as much as I can. I can’t go further into specifics as I signed an NDA, but I guess that at least a vague idea of what work I’ve been doing is exciting enough?

Overall, its been quite interesting to get to work in a real game-development company, to get to see how things really work out in the industry. I even got to sit through a development meeting! I’ll be stopping here, as I, quite abruptly, realised I’ve been rambling. I’ll be getting a picture or two up soon, I hope.

Wish me luck in the remaining 33 weeks!

The stair, from the top of the hill. =)

Game Review Clichés

If you’ve spend any measure of time reading game reviews, or more likely there’s a workshop series you’ll need to be attempting soon as a GET student, you would have seen phrases like “”An evolution, not a revolution”, “Snap-the-controller-in-half frustration” etc.

Well, on that, those terms really mean:

“2. Snap-the-controller-in-half frustration - You won’t actually feel this level of frustration, unless you’re either A) an adult with the mind of a child who never learned to take care of expensive videogame peripherals, or B) a game reviewer prone to fits of hyperbole.

3. An evolution, not a revolution - A mildly irritating way of saying that the game in question brings a few new features, but doesn’t do anything to reinvent its genre - you know, just like 99 percent of all other games.”

Here’s the article that’s a must read if you don’t want to sound your review to sound like every other out there. It’s about all the oft repeated phrases you find, and what they really mean.

(Image from the article)

Outsourcing game development

Here’s an interesting write-up on the outsourcing of game development to the follow-up of Command and Conquer 3 released last year, Kane’s Wrath. It seems a little opinion-based but it’s nonetheless still a thoughtful read on the risks of outsourcing. A snippet here:

Now, some of the outsourcing has worked. For example, while much of the art and art direction was outsourced, the art in Kane’s Wrath is pretty good. So, while it’s not all bad, the outsourcing strategy needs to be reconsidered very carefully. There’s not enough data to go on for this point, but perhaps some aspects of game development (most likely art) lend themselves to be farmed out easily, while other parts simply do not. On the whole, though, when evaluating the results of the outsourcing strategy in Kane’s Wrath, I’d say it’s failed. Requests to EA for comments about the team involved with Kane’s Wrath and the Kane’s Wrath patch were ignored. I urge C&C fans to demand an answer to this important question.

The full article is here.

Morph: The Beast Within Pt 1

Assignment due dates are all closing on us! One of the assignment we have to do is to hand up a “Game Design Document” for a game we designed, and also pitch it to our tutor. Leslie and I has been working on this action game which we call “Morph: The Beast Within”.

The basic concept of our game is that our protagonist, Rio Beasely, has the ability to morph into animals during combat, in order to suit the situation. For example, morphing into a bear can provide power and morphing into a cheetah can provide movement speed. Sorta like “Ben 10″ or “Animorphs”.

Rio is a very cheerful chap. He looks like your normal teenager, wearing casual clothes etc. However, he has a K scar on his forehead as he is a product of human experiments conducted by Kage, the “bad guys” of the game. Although Rio is cheerful, he dislikes being known as a “half-animal”. Therefore, he wears a cap to attempt to cover that K.

Exciting, isn’t it? =D. Will update more on the game when more is finalised. Please give us some comments on our game!

Lessons in GTA IV

The GTA IV Education review has been posted into the Game Reviews by Students & Staff last week here. But here’s an alternative take on the lessons GTA IV can impart, courtesy of Strategy Informer. One excerpt below:

1. Family Comes First

From the moment hero Niko Bellic steps off the boat, he backs up and protects his cousin Roman at every opportunity. Roman has a place for Niko to live and a job ready upon his arrival. Even just as cousins, their relationship holds beyond their huge differences (Niko being a badass and Roman the opposite). Friends can come and go, but family is forever.

Taken with a huge dose of humor of course. The rest of the article is here. Enjoy.

Quality or Quantity

 

I recently wrote this quote on the whiteboard with some modification done it express my current dilemma and disappointment i faced.

Preparation is never a gurantee for victory;

But without Preparation, its a gurantee for an organisation’s failure;

But perhaps the question to ask is the quality & zeal of the Organisation’s leaders to succeed?

It seems that the Organisation is falling into a state of decadence, in which the leaders have become more irresponsible; failing to appear when needed much less not even giving a call or email to explain their absence; procrastination in their job in which i am also guilty of.

I thought that it was just my stereotypical thoughts at the a spur of anger that i felt some of them were undeserving of their status. Some of them did not even put in the necessary effort during that 3 days for something. Worse still was the Organisation’s reliance on friendship for position-ship. I had the equivalent or even superior CV for the 2 posts i wanted than the candidates but i was not even given the chance but relegated and supposedly be satisfied with this miserable and what an associate commented as “high-sounding post”.

A recent overlook at the state showed me that i may soon have to throw in the towel and be contented by doing my job in the various events coming while looking at it crumble one block at a time. I feel sorry for my higher-up as other than a handful of the other responsible leaders, the remaining bulk seem contented with the mediocre attitude they are giving.  Seriously i feel that sometimes what Emperor Palpatine did in Star Wars, to wrestle authority from severely bureacratic Old Republic into a fully autocratic Empire under his one vision seem more appropriate to many real-life situations. Why talk which i feel at times unnecessary with the person you are talking to un-open to your views or oblivious to the current plight we are in to carry out the necessary decorations for an event. Sometimes i feel at times that the current number of leaders are un-necessary or too large to function effectively, maybe it should have only been halved to bond into a tighly-knitted group of leaders focused on success. The human nature is just to precarious within all of us

Can someone tell me what to do when your heart is half-way between the boundary that says  Support or Abandonment?

Game Career Guide 2008

Game Developer Magazine, the long-running USA based games industry magazine has just published its annual career guide. Packed with information on how to join the industry, what positions pay what money and which university courses are available, its a very interesting read.

And best of all, its a free download! Be warned, the pdf version is approx. 30mb.

http://www.gdmag.com/archive/gdcg08.htm

Michael Garry

Writing game reviews

There’s a short course/workshop on writing game reviews that’s already taken by some of the current senior GET students. For the GET students in the second year now, this course will be coming along soon enough. Do bookmark the link below till then—it provides pretty useful information on how to go about writing those reviews.

How to write a critical game review

RRODs

The typical GET student will be all too familiar with the Red Ring of Death, or the RROD, even if he doesn’t own an XBox360 personally. How’s that? Well, the XBox360 in the game club is very red and dead from exactly this fault.

So here’s a bit of news about the RROD, as reported by Mirror.co.uk on how much it’s cost Microsoft to repair these RRODs.

Computer giants Microsoft are facing a £500million repair bill after their Xbox Elite consoles were hit by the notorious “red ring of death”.

Ouch!

Headshots

One of the most telling indications of how skillful a progamer is the number of headshot kills he dishes out per minute in competitive gaming.

A headshot kill is pretty standard fare in FPSes today, and as damage modeling goes, it’s almost certainly fatal unless you’re facing off a higher-level mob or an NPC wearing head armor. Gamesrader has just put together a fun (sort-of) video tribute to the years in which headshot-kill mechanisms have been included in FPSes. Link is right here.

Be warned though; this video has lots of graphic violence. So do exercise some discretion and good old common sense, and don’t mimic these actions in game like those luckless fellows from Hyde Park below in the earlier blog entry.

(Picture from Game Pressure’s game guide to Crysis)