What I Learned - 22

This post is covering 2 weeks - moving to Madison, WI to start work with Epic (no, not Epic Games) takes a toll!

As we move into the new year, What I Learned may change or even go away.  Don't worry - if it gets replaced, it will be with updates on my monthly game projects that'll start on January 1st!

With that, read on and enjoy.

What I Learned - 12/15 to 12/28

1. Suggesting that a job applicant play the games of the company they are applying to  is pretty smart to help drive up user numbers.
1. KIXEYE Submission Confrimation Email
2. 
2. A writer is, has to be, the most flexible person on a development team.
1. Jason Blair; Game Writing: 11 Things I've Learned
3. (Reminder:) Making things RIGHT NOW is the best way to learn and show skills needed in creating games, with or without a college degree.
1. Brian Albert; How Not to Become a Game Developer, Game Informer #247 pg. 27
2. 
4. Being nationally accredited (like the infamous Westwood College), rather than being regionally accredited, offers very few other schools that credits may be transfered to.
1. Brian Albert; How Not to Become a Game Developer, Game Informer #247 pg. 27

What I Learned - 21

Apologies for making this late!  However, there's some big news at the bottom of the article...

What I Learned - 12/8 to 12/14

1. Getting an interviewer to agree that a question applies to a position is an effective technique.
1. Success Patterns LLC; Word-for-Word Job Interview Answers to Use to Get Hired
2. No valid reason exists to not use version control when programming.
1. Edward Guiness; Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success, pg. 358
2. 
3. Hard-coding numbers without an explanation is, well, just wrong.
1. Edward Guiness; Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success, pg. 367
4. Hash tables are a saving grace for many programming projects with elements of uncertainty.
1. Edward Guiness; Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success
5. Games cost 30 times more to make now than they did during the Playstation era.
1. J. F. Sargent, Dave Williams; 5 Reasons the Video Game Industry is About to Crash
6. Making a game just about destroying a city with great graphics and physics would be kinda cool.
1. J. F. Sargent, Dave Williams; 5 Reasons the Video Game Industry is About to Crash
2. Who hasn't destroyed a SIM City or blown something up for the heck of it?
7. Hashtables are great in programming, but Dictionaries are even better!
1. Sam Allen; C# Dictionary

Moving to Wisconsin!  There's been an absolutely fantastic offer that, well, would be foolish to refuse.  It's at Epic, the nation's top electronic health records company with one of the best employee bases of any organization.  There's no telling what will come in the next few weeks, but please stay tuned!

What I Learned - 20

This last week saw me wrapping-up the final phase of an interview.  Being flown to the company headquarters, I was able to exercise my software development skills, team collaboration ability, and problem solving prowess.  Engineering programs for this awesome company is looking good!

Then my application failed to meet the minimum qualifications for an entry-level, black-box QA position, likely to be given a bare-bones hourly salary.  My best guess is that it's location, location, and location.  What do you think?



What I Learned - 12/1 to 12/7

1. It has now been seen that mobile developers are paying more to aquire users than those users are spending in-game.
1. Dean Takahashi; Developers, Brace for a Bloodbath: The Cost of Getting a New Mobile Gamer Exceeds Revenue that User Generates
2. .Net and similar off-shoot programming structures are forcing-out a lot of entry-level developers due to the high overhead needed to be learned by the dev before they may even be considered competent in it.
1. Justin James; How Entry Level Developers are being Squeezed Out of the Job Field, and What They can do about it
3. A suggested show of competence with Java and .Net frameworks can be done in a project(s) using: C#, ASP .NET, XAML-based systems, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, different frameworks, SQL, and LINQ.
1. Justin James; How Entry Level Developers are being Squeezed Out of the Job Field, and What They can do about It
4. The Flood in the video game series Halo was designed with how soldiers carry their weapons; right handed people have exposed left flanks!  (A Flood's host has a huge bulge on their left side where they were attacked.)
1. Titan Books; Halo: The Art of Building Worlds, pg 99
2. 
5. If a game maker ever feels down about making games, watching an inspiring documentary will light the spark again.
1. Realization after watching the movie Us and the Game Industry

What I Learned - 19

Not much for this week - after studying Programming Interviews Exposed, I've learned much more about software development, but not as much about making games.

Let me take this time to ask a question: Do you care for any game analysis that is done via a Let's Play or similar recorded play-through?  For me, it's a lot easier to have a game running in the background while I continue to work than to stop and dedicate numerous hours to new entertainment.

Just a thought.

What I Learned - 11/24 to 11/30

1. Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job is the best, most thorough educational text on not just developer interviews, but also the foundation of computer science ever come across.
1. John Mongan, Eric Giguere, Noah Kindler; Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job
2. 

Wish me luck this week!  As you may have guessed, there's a company flying me out to interview for a dev position.  It'll be fun.

GDC Next - The Evolution of e-Sports as a Sport, Entertainment and International Pastime

The Evolution of e-Sports as a Sport, Entertainment and International Pastime
By Marcus Graham (djWheat), Dustin Beck (Riot Games), Kevin Lin (Twitch), Jason Ng (Garena Premiere League), Jack Etienne (Cloud 9)
Thursday



MG: There has been a 60% e-sports growth rate in the last 3 years.  How has e-Sports evolved for you in the last 12 months?
DB: People can put their careers into this profession.  There is a new stability and regularity present.
KL: We had to build tools for pros and casual people view streams on Twitch.  You wouldn't see growth if devs didn't support teams.
JN: Imaging the worst internet you've ever experienced.  Times that by at least 2.  That is what it is like in many places in South East Asia.  GPL has had to put infrastructure in to give more internet to players.  Already, users are running out of bandwidth just to play League of Legends, not to mention streaming!
JE: Visibility now gives the freedom of teams to select who gets to sponsor a team.  1.5 years ago, League of Legends would have to be explained to possible financial persons; not so anymore!

MG: How does Twitch fit into the ecosystem?
KL: Twitch is a 1-stop shop for distributing and viewing great content.  We want to make this a true international pastime.  People are starting to view Twitch as much as regular TV.
MG: How about gaming teams?
JE: The personality of players determines the avenue the team will represent.
MG: Now where do tournaments fit today?
JN: Prepare to spend a lot of money when starting a league.  In South East Asia, you have to even pay teams at the start.  There's also a shortage of shoutcast talent.  Finally, getting gamers to understand that this is a job for competitors is hard.
MG: Publishers?
DB: We wanted to create a symbolic league to the game.  The game was designed as a sport; LoL is a success where there are paths of aspiration to higher tiers of competition (the League of Legends ranked system).

MG: What's missing from e-sports?  What can we do to support growth?
KL: Sponsors!  It also relies on audience participation with the groups financing competition.  Does the audience ever affect the outcome of games?  This is a future game dev question.
JE: Not a lot of educational material to get newbs up to speed is out there.  They have to figure out what-the-heck is going on quickly by themselves.
DB: There's no central location to get an overall rundown of what has happened in a game.  Espn.com and SportsTV are good examples of what is out there for non-digital games.



Audience Q and A:

What are the demographics of players and viewers?
DB: The age is concentrated in the 18-28 range, with 80-85% being male viewers and 70% being college educated.
KL: 18-35, with most being male.  The percentages by continent vary, but none are above 35% of the total viewership on Twitch.  Otherwise, we are, by nature, reaching a technically savvy audience.

Have you thought of reaching out on the educational level for instructing potential players earlier?
KL: We've given college scholarships for players.
MG: (To the panel.) Do you feel this is something we don't need to rush into?
DB: Video games are still stigmatized in the public eye.
JE: The reflexes needed for competing in e-sports are around the 17-22 year-old range.  You may need to postpone educational plans if you are going to be playing.
JN: Vietnam is super hostile to games in general, so getting into school is difficult.  (Vietnam had banned all video games, lifting the ban only just a few years ago.)

How will console and mobile be as major as PC gaming?
JN: Access to consoles is harder in some Asian countries.  Gamers aren't necessarily picky of their platform, so long as they can get their entertainment.
KL: If it was just a question of access, mobile should be huge; it isn't, at least not yet.  How do you make it fun to watch?
MG: There's a natural segregation on consoles.  It's a a huge problem keeping consoles from reaching PCs.



What is your opinion on including fighting games?  What do you think of athletic players playing e-sports?
DB: I don't get why there is a clash.  There's a lot of room for other games in e-sports.  As for the second question, I have a lot of respect for them.

MG: How long until e-sports players have a huge following as traditional sports?
JE: We are pretty close.  It continues to grow!
DB: Our players can interact while playing and streaming already!
KL: It has to be an authentic passion to play that brings people to the game.
JN: When a team won EPA, they were as big as any icon in Asia.

How did you come to define League of Legends as a sport?  What are the advantages/disadvantages of making a competitive game?
DB: Sport and competition are the foundation of the team (at Riot Games).
JN: A competitive game makes more sense since you can't make content fast enough!  Don't sell power, so players can then become the content.

How would e-sports on TV affect the scene?
KL: We want to be unrestricted with our contact.  Can e-sports make the TV transition?  Yes.  Does it need dev and design thoughts?  100%.  How do you monetize on a television?
JN: TV is low definition.  Fighting for a shared screen is another problem (other people in a home wanting to watch TV).
DB: Regional preference.  It's already easy to go online.  Again, a lot of fighting over the airwaves would result.

How can we get younger players in earlier?
JE: We already can!  There's a place for a huge age range in games.
JN: People will get better faster.
KL: We are breaking down the stigma now!

What I Learned - 18

Not on this list, but should be: programming on the back of envelopes is very satisfying.  Thought you should know.

What I Learned - 11/17 to 11/23

1. Holy awesome game list of the last generation, Batman!
1. Kirk Hamilton; The Games that Defined the Last Generation
2. 
2. There is a lot of controversy over how a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) compares on a company totem pole to a regular Software Dev.
1. Intensive research into the SDET position.
3. The Ninety-Ninety Rule in software development is hilarious (and shockingly accurate).
1. Wikipedia; Ninety-ninety rule
4. Attention Scope will allow people to have multiple ideas in their head, but once about 13 are 
1. Nils Phil; GDC China 2013 - The Psychology of Freemium
2. Checkout this attention scope test.
5. Higher incentives can lead to poorer performance.
1. Dan Pink; Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation
6. The 10,000 hr rule to learn something is false, applying only to being highly competitive in a narrowly focused field doing only a certain few actions.
1. Josh Kaufman; The First 20 Hours - How to Learn Anything
7. 20 hours of focused practice will allow a person to acquire a skill.
1. Josh Kaufman; The First 20 Hours - How to Learn Anything
8. There are 4 steps to rapidly acquire a skill.
1. Deconstruct the skill - decide exactly what is supposed to be done.
2. Learn enough to self-correct - don't let books or other media to allow for procrastination.
3. Remove practice barriers - internet, TV, games, etc.  Willpower!
4. Practice for at least 20 hours - 
1. Josh Kaufman; The First 20 Hours - How to Learn Anything
2. 

GDC Next - Luck and Skill in Games

Luck and Skill in Games
By Skaff Elias (Three Donkeys)
Thursday

Why should we care?  There "should" be a bit of luck in every game.

Let's define some types of luck:

• Overt Randomness - This is very easy to have, and is often noticed by the player right away.
• Game Theory, physical limitations, and complexity can hide other forms of luck.

Are there games with no luck?  Some would say Chess, but even that game of skill still has randomness.

• Luck hinges on the game and the player.

Another game of "pure skill" that still has elements of luck:

• Compute the digit of pi in 30 seconds! (There is randomness in how many digits are computed.)

Now consider this game:

• Compute the xth digit of pi.  (This is skill based.)

Now let's define skill:

• It is the ability to do something well when compared to something else having a similar ability.
• How do we measure this?  Well, a max win percentage, a percentage of wins compared to another tier of ability, or Elo are all good measurements.
• Higher numbers are better for determining if a game is skill based!

New game, Rando Chess:

• Roll a die at the end of a regular Chess game.  On a 1, the loser of that game actually is the winner.
• In this example, the amount of luck goes up, but the skill required remains the same.

From Rando Chess, and similar games like it, players may reject the addition of luck as it moderates their reward (5 wins and a loss with luck vs. 6 wins based on skill).

Why we need luck:

In a situation with no luck, it is only a measurement being taken.  ("Who's taller?")

In other situations, some people love unexpected outcomes (i.e. slots).

The best case dealing with a player and an element of luck in a game of skill: they blame defeat on luck, but success on skill.

• This only works for new players.  Once "deep knowledge" is gained, delusions of wins/loses disappear.

The number of people that can play goes up when a game has elements of luck.  Now, some of those elements may only be accessed by high/low levels of skill (i.e. accessing a bonus level).

In conclusion, know your audience.  What is the key value proposition (what should the player get from the game)?  How is the game going to gain revenue?  Does the revenue model require replays?  Does PR/Marketing match the skill/luck interaction in-game?

---

Checkout the last post, On Demand Compute Power for Games!

What I Learned - 17

Late again, but full of valuable info!

What I Learned - 11/10 to 11/16

1. In the game industry, age is huge; the older you are, the easier it is for managers to think that an employee can't pull the epidemic "crunch" (41+ hrs/wk) of the industry.
1. Trusted associate not willing to reveal either their name or age.
2. Again, don't disclose your age!  Anywhere!  Ever!
1. Jon Jones; LinkedIn for People Who Hate LinkedIn
3. Link your published, written, industry-relevant material on LinkedIn.  It shows you take time to contribute insight into what you like.
1. Jon Jones; LinkedIn for People Who Hate LinkedIn
4. Personal LinkedIn updates can be disabled! Settings -> Profile -> Turn on/off
1. Jon Jones; LinkedIn for People Who Hate LinkedIn
5. Visualizing an encounter where all parties actually come away happy is a great gauge for confronting another; if you can't see it, then a meeting shouldn't happen.
1. Kathy Caprino; 5 Critical Steps to Fearless Confrontation
6. Goals can be "S.M.A.R.T." (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely).
1. Kathy Caprino; 5 Critical Steps to Fearless Confrontation
7. I am not good at League of Legends.  I must work on getting better.
1. Personal admission after seeing a 1:1 win-loss ratio
2. 
8. Mike Capps, a head of Epic Games, once said that the company would not accept employees willing to work less than 60 hours in a week.
1. Ian Williams; 'You Can Sleep Here All Night': Video Games and Labor
9. The word "passion" is very cliche in the game industry while also being used to excuse some poor labor practices on the part of game companies.
1. Ian Williams; 'You Can Sleep Here All Night': Video Games and Labor
10. Degrees concerned with game creation, especially those from for-profit universities, are worth nothing.
1. Ian Williams; 'You Can Sleep Here All Night': Video Games and Labor
11. Playing (and enjoying) games affects the brain.  The changes there could possibly act as therapy to a number of brain disorders.
1. Melanie Pinola; Study Shows Playing Video Games Really Can Make Your Brain Bigger
2. 
12. There are a number of quick, efficient security steps to protecting an online, social presence.
1. Jess Fee; You Aren't Using These 10 Simple Security Settings
13. Websites are best if layered in a broad fashion, not a deep one.
1. Jon Jones; Your Portfolio Repels Jobs
14. Luck is a defining factor for the success of an Indie title in such an oversaturated game market.
1. Jeff Vogel; Marketing, Dumb Luck, and the Popping of the Indie Bubble
15. "If your game can't succeed based on word-of-mouth marketing, unless you get real lucky, you need to adjust your budget, your quality, or both."
1. Jeff Vogel; Marketing, Dumb Luck, and the Popping of the Indie Bubble
16. The IGDA has a "fiduciary" policy for its board members, therefore causing things such as "pointing out bad studios to work for" is replaced by "highlight[ing] some good studios to work for".
1. Darius Kazemi; Some Thoughts on the IGDA (Or: Why I Quit)
2. Fiduciary - Involving trust in a relationship between a trustee and beneficiary.
17. The IGDA tends to waste the energy of more niave members when that energy should be spent on organizing labor in the game industry.
1. Darius Kazemi; Some Thoughts on the IGDA (Or: Why I Quit)
2. 
18. There have been bad feelings in and out of IGDA for years.
1. Adam; Leaving the IDGA(2) - What Happened?

GDC Next - On Demand Compute Power For Games

On Demand Compute Power for Games
By John Bruno (Microsoft)
Tuesday



What could you do with near unlimited Cloud computing?
Bigger worlds, huge multiplayer, etc?

There are some challenges with that:
Server costs can be prohibitive and client resources are finite.

So why would you Cloud compute?
It would enhance the game experience and monetization opportunities.  Creating differentiation with the Cloud drives a new kind of engagement.

Here are some scenarios that are present on platforms:  Shared online worlds, dedicated servers, compute task offloading, games as a service (tune/balance, dynamic game modes, etc.).
ex: Titanfall has dedicated servers, cloud-based AI, and more goodies.



XBLC Services focuses on packaging, discovery, and management.  Using the Cloud, predictive pooling determines load needs of any system.  Therefore, you keep play busy, not delivering "server busy" messages.

Some audience questions:

Q: Will I experience clock drift?
A: The worst case scenario would be a little bit, if at all.

Q: Is there enough bandwidth to support this system?
A: Oh yes!

Q: Can the host OS or other neighbors steal my games or financial information?
A: Nope!

Contact bruno@xbox.com for any additional inquiries.

Personal note on the presentation: Don't put words at the bottom of a slide.  Heads sitting in an audience get in the way!

---

Checkout another GDC Next article: Luck and Skill in Games.

What I Learned - 16 ( Way Late )

OK - this is really late.  However, this update shows-off a plethora of new content (soon to be followed by all I learned at GDC Next).  Read, enjoy, learn something new!

What I Learned - 10/27 to 11/9

1. Saying that something is "released" instead of "finished" is a great way to counter any issues that arise post a game's launch.
1. Bungie Podcast 10/25/13
2. The order of receiving benefits / let-downs is very important.  Examples: a good thing followed by a "less" good thing will decrease happiness; a very bad thing followed by a not-as-bad thing will increase happiness.
1. NPR story about Halloween and happiness after receiving candy
3. Just because something has mechanics, points, levels, challenges, etc. doesn't mean that a game is present.
1. Nils Pihl; What are Rewards?  Decoding the Game Ep.2
4. A person playing a finite game, where some quantifiable measurement is present, will take more risks than a player in an infinite game, where they wish to keep going.
1. ex: Tetris players going for a high score vs. those wanting to last the longest.
2. Nils Pihl; What are Rewards?  Decoding the Game Ep.2
5. Tokens (finite points) displayed ingame will generate very different playstyles than if a timer (infinite points) is shown.
1. Nils Pihl; What are Rewards?  Decoding the Game Ep.2
6. "A point is only rewarding when it is a token of a currency that the player values."
1. Nils Pihl; What are Rewards?  Decoding the Game Ep.2
7. All editable settings in Windows 7, 8, and maybe more are available if this code is entered as the name of a folder: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
1. NOTE: I have not tried this!
2. Imgur
3. 
8. "Necessity is a poor motivator", therefore, to force a player out of their way for something because they 'have too' is a lacking design.
1. Nils Pihl; What is Play?  Decoding the Game Ep. 2
9. Giving instrumental (something valued because it leads to something else that holds value; ex: money) compensation for work (done because it is necessary) can lead to worse results than doing something otherwise voluntarily.
1. Nils Pihl; What is Play?  Decoding the Game Ep. 2
10. Intrinsic motivators (unnecessary things done because they are valuable in their doing / experiencing) come in three types: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
1. Nils Pihl; What is Play?  Decoding the Game Ep. 2
11. Approximately 188 games arrive in the iOS app market every day, compared to the 254 total games released in 5 years for the Sega Saturn.
1. Seth Sivak; State of the Industry: Four Frightening Facts
2.  
12. The top 20 best-selling games of 2012 weren't new IPs :(
1. Seth Sivak; State of the Industry: Four Frightening Facts
13. Just because hardware will run at a higher-than-average setting, doesn't mean it should.
1. Dave Baggett; My Hardest Bug Ever
14. Use sound cues to remove UI visuals.
1. Michel Henein; 6 Ways 3D Audio Can Expand Gaming Experiences

What I Learned - 15

What I Learned - 10/20 to 10/26

1. The designer that knows how to code is someone who provides what a user requires while also implementing aesthetics appropriate to the function of the requirement.
1. Garry Tan; The Value of the Designer Who Code
2. Facebook uses coders that know how to design on its design team (+1 billion users are on Facebook).
1. Garry Tan; The Value of the Designer Who Codes
3. "Gamer" is becoming an unwelcome and exclusionary slur for people who play video games.
1. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw; Don't Use the Word "Gamer"
4. "If you are a jerk, but your work is amazing, people aren't going to hire you because you are so hard to work with."
1. Anthony Eftekhari; Interview with the Masters Featuring Anthony Eftekhari
5. $10 is a horrific hourly rate for anyone in an urban area not wanting to live in poverty.
1. Discussing new jobs with friends at a Halloween party

Just a heads-up: This coming week will likely be pretty slim in new posts.  Getting ready for GDC Next / ADC in November is going to own my schedule for a while!

My First Downloaded App: Clobbr

--- '+' for positive perceptions of the game; '-' for negative aspects with a suggestion to fix it; '?' for neutral questions left unanswered by the game. ---

• + Different puzzle pieces alter approaches in going around, over, or even through obstacles.
• + Every new area escalates what was once a simple solution in the last area into a completely new challenge.
• + New in-game items encourage experimentation early-on and throughout play.
• + The game is just pleasant to look at, with each item and figure being easily recognizable.
• + Music intensifies as time runs down.
• + Even if time runs out, the puzzle will run its course (sometimes lucky guesses happen).
• + A single game lasts about 30 seconds, perfect for filling blank spots in the day.
• + Brilliant catch phrase: "Contains precious, adorable mild violence."
• - The animation of a puzzle being solved is slow enough to allow the user to start thinking of doing something 
• A Fix:  Increase the run-time of the puzzle-solving animation by increments of .25 seconds until the player can jump straight from one scene to another.
• - There is only one music track for the in-game interactive portion of the game.
• A Fix: If time is short, warp and alter the current soundtrack into a few more pieces.  Otherwise, give more time to new music development.
• - The game lacks a high-score board, thereby leaving the work of a player to only be seen by themselves and removing a competitive component of the game.
• A Fix: Include a global ranking system to keep users coming back to better / protect their score as seen by other players.
• - The bad-guy cat gets all the abuse.  (I like cats!)
• A Fix: I'm sure PETA would have one.
• ? Where are the purchasable themes?  The style of this game cries-out for monetized aesthetic downloads.

Clobbr is a really sweet game.  Simply executed while maintaining a complex design, the entertainment in the cute game is accessible anywhere.  Have a minute?  Play a round.  Have two?  Wrap-up an area.  Have more?  They can easily be lost going through the plethora of puzzles (100 in all), trying to unlock more or perfect their own score.

Give Clobbr a chance from the Google Play Store and check it out online; you'll fill much spare time if you do so.  Considering it is the first game from a small group of people, they've gone beyond most new apps out there!

What I Learned - 14

"TIL what TIL means..."

What I Learned - 10/13 to 10/19

1. 'TIL' means 'Today I Learned'.
1. Urban Dictionary
2. 80% of hires really are referrals.
1. Bill; Discussion about jobs and the state
3. Rockstar Games only ever consider potential hires if they are already in the Bay area, and those are for low-entry positions!
1. Bill; How his friend, the VP of Operations, handles recruiting
4. We picked a bad time to graduate.
1. Roy Baron; Discussion over employment opportunities in the game industry
5. Steepled fingers are an unconsious sign of confidence.
1. Vanessa Van Edwards; 3 Tricks for Improving Your Body Language in the Office

OK.  Not a whole lot this week.  However, if you didn't catch the Poster article earlier this week, be to check it out!

Designing Contest Visuals for Bungie - The Posters

Bungie is a world-leading game development studio with an awarded mantle of games.  The Halo series serves as the pinnacle of the company's accomplishments, but the design team has moved on to new ventures.  Destiny is the next title coming from these champions of entertainment, where the hope is to outdo even Halo.

Bungie has been hosting Destiny themed contests for most of this past summer.  I've tried to be a steady competitor, so I'm here to talk a little about the design considerations used in submitting.
___________________________________________________________________________________

Third challenge!  Destiny Movie Posters!  Right after winning the Your Worst Nightmare contest, another event was raised.

Way too much time was spent on these distractions.  It was hard trying to find iconic, easily manipulated, unlikely to be imitated posters for the Destiny game.  Though there were a few that were gathered to paint on, but things like Watchmen (not a movie poster, but the novel is really legit), District 9, 300, and Avatar are real winners.  (Google the titles to find my resources; all rights reserved to their respective owners.)

To take on the Watchmen, all that had to be done was to remove the old smiley-face and text on the cover and replace it with Bungie-centric design.  Pretty self-explanatory, and probably the easiest of the four pieces created (though faking thin shadows is uber-lame).

District 9 was the longest piece out of all of them.  Reasons for this came in the form of the choppers on the original poster, but for Destiny, the space needed jets and spacecraft.  If only I had studied industrial design...

Be sure to check the smaller details, like a destroyed skyline and the Vex baddie on the sign!

300.  What a testosterone-fest.  I've messed with the image for school projects before, so jumping back in to redo the setup was pretty easy.  Adding the Traveler orb in the back, gun fire, extra arms and red eyes on the baddies, and replacing the title were all rudimentary Photoshop tricks (no Space Magic here!).

Lastly, the titan-of-a-movie Avatar.  There's a race of playable characters called "Awoken" in Destiny, and they have grey skin, yellow eyes.  With an eye and nose adjustment on the original portrait, the Na'vi (blue cat people in Avatar) became somewhat human in structure.  Desaturation, color layers, and a bunch of levels-adjustments rendered the final product.

And the final result!  (Psst - recognize anything in the background?)

Really fun stuff - all of it.  Before I get too nostalgic here and return to my tablet, I best wrap this up and program some game mechanics.  Or play games (hey, that's research, too!).

If you missed the Hero or the Nightmare, please give them a read.  I'm skipping a write-up of the final challenge I participated in, but you can see it here - can you guess who's playing Destiny?

What I Learned - 13

Go to the GDC Vault; there's some really cool stuff there, and most of it is for free!

What I Learned - 10/6 to 10/12

1. When highlighting and shading, other than the primary color, matte surfaces should resemble 2 additional shadows, while shinier surfaces have 1 shadow and 1 highlight.
1. Adrien-Luc Sanders; Flash Animation 5: Creating a Complex Character of Movable Parts
2. "That which gets measured gets done."
1. Travis George quoting Mark Merrill; Letting Go: Creating Self-Managed, Self-Directed Teams
3. Let the individual members of a team do their own retrospective; they and everyone else knows what went wrong, while they get to own what went right.
1. Travis George; Letting Go: Creating Self-Managed, Self-Directed Teams
4. Scheduling early peer review that is positive and free of repercussions is a great way to check the progress on projects their creators are coy about.
1. Tom Cadwell; Designers are Human Too - Causes of Poor Design Decisions
5. "Psychology research shows a drop in creativity and attention after 15 minutes, and major deficiencies by 1 hour."  Long design meetings.  Don't do them.
1. Tom Cadwell; Designers are Human Too - Causes of Poor Design Decisions
6. "Game development is a team sport."
1. Marc Merrill; League of Legends Retrospective: One Year Later
7. A game requires a monitization strategy that "compliments" it from day one, otherwise it will be a lot of wasted effort and subject of scorn.
1. Marc Merrill; League of Legends Retrospective: One Year Later
8. [Not something learned but something that needs reiteration] "Gameplay trumps art needs."
1. Marc Merrill; League of Legends Retrospective: One Year Later
9. Service can be seen as an investment by an organization into their community and product base.
1. Marc Merrill; League of Legends Retrospective: One Year Later
10. Jealousy is a great tool that can be used for weeks and weeks, if not longer.
1. My aunt Linda; Reference to an older dog not bolting when a puppy is around
11. Numinous - Describing an experience that makes you fearful yet fascinated, awed yet attracted - the powerful, personal feeling of heing overwhelmed and inspired".
1. Martijn Schirp; There's a Word for That: 25 Expressions You Should Have in Your Vocabulary
12. The sky is as much a character in games of this millenium as anything else.
1. Dave Dunn; Pubcast Happy Hour 3: Bungie Studios Special
13. NBCI attacks = Nuclear Biological Chemical Information attacks available in the modern age of hostility and warfare.
1. Neal Stephenson; Snow Crash

Designing Contest Visuals for Bungie - The Nightmare

--- NOTE: This is a post that was lost a few months ago.  It's back, ready for your review and comment.  If you forgot the last Designing Contest Visuals post, read it here!

Bungie is a world-leading game development studio with an awarded mantle of games.  The Halo series serves as the pinnacle of the company's accomplishments, but the design team has moved on to new ventures.  Destiny is the next title coming from these champions of entertainment, where the hope is to outdo even Halo.

Bungie has been hosting Destiny themed contests for most of this past summer.  I've tried to be a steady competitor, so I'm here to talk a little about the design considerations used in submitting.
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The second Bungie Destiny challenge I submitted to was "Your Worst Nightmare."  Spoiler:  My piece got a lot of backing.

Halo CE and Halo 2 were both games that contained an element of horror that has never been emulated in Bungie's other titles (though Halo 3 came close).  Contest was asking for something nightmarish be put into one of their screenshots, so, if something terrifying was to be made with Bungie content, it's fitting to use something from the studio.  Hence, I chose the slime, the green, the meat of the Flood.

A lifetime of playing, reading, viewing the designs of, and enjoying the universe of Halo told me that tentacles and gooey are 'in' when in comes to terror.  But, since time was short, the main form of the worm-like figure I needed was constructed by lassoing parts of an enemy character from Halo 3 to give quick blocking and a free color-palette.

Having so much room to play in, the piece needed to have a flow - successful visual design will focus the eye to the primary point of interest and then guide the viewer to the rest of the picture.  Curving appendages, the point of the firearm, and the angle of the overhead beams helped utilize the whole space.

A black maw next to the harsh light-source was chosen because it is a common (and almost required) technique to put the darkest darks next to the lightest lights.  It is beneficial to add a bit of mystery into any concept, so the inner glow coming from deep inside the monster's gullet added a bit of dread.  "I should be running in the other direction, but I want to know what that comes from" is something that any viewer should be asking themselves, especially in a video game horror scene.

The smoke from the firearm indicates that rounds were just fired, while the orange-glow barrel shows it must have been shooting for awhile.  The "000" of an empty clip evokes a sense of hopelessness given that the viewer has thrown everything at the opposing beast, seemingly to no affect.

After getting feedback from fellow designers and honest friends alike, I must emphasize that a room's light-source needs to be reflected by all the objects in the room.  Adding a color filter over the entire image removed a lot of the blue from the provided photograph, hence leaving the subject matter in a similar environment.

In my honest opinion, any artificial addition to a photo ought to interact with the environment in some way.  Certain tentacles and the bottom recesses of the creature help suspend disbelief that the new subject does not belong.  Then, equipping any digital object with a grainy texture (credit to Dan LuVisi and his tutorial) gives it a photo-realistic touch that saves hours and hours of rendering.

Finally, anything that I wanted the viewer to see first was kept saturated and lighted.  A slight blur was added to the entire work but erased in areas that should show-off details.  Next, the speed-lines actively draw an observer's gaze to the creature's face and provide a roadway back to it if the eye wanders.

All-in-all, I felt I really nailed the whole work.  The lighting is there, the focus areas are appropriate, dread is evoked, and it was completed in a timely manner (approx. 8-10 hours over 2 days).  The creature design is a little boring, but when taken into a game engine and put with an already gloomy area, this fits.

If you have questions or comments on why I did or didn't do something with this piece, I'd be very happy to address them.  In the meantime, checkout the piece and read more about the design process.  As to setting up how my Bungie submission got the backing it did to come out on top, well, that's for another time in explaining how to use social media.

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In the next round, a number of movie posters get a Destiny twist of their own.

What I Learned - 12

Not a whole lot this week, but there's talk I'll be applying what I learned in a professional way soon!

What I Learned - 9/29 to 10/5

• Paper prototypes are useful, if for nothing else, for showing programmers what the game may be doing (either correctly or as a bug) without having to recreate the issue.
• Jonathan Minnamon; Comment made when showing off the Cow Tippa! game
• Whenever something is "optional" to fill-out or attend when it comes to a company and getting hired by them, always follow through with action.
• Anditto Heristyo; "So you wanna work for Nintendo?" - A guide to Nintendo's recruitment system
• Nintendo has some of the hardest (if not the hardest) tests for application of any video game company.
• Anditto Heristyo; "So you wanna work for Nintendo?" - A guide to Nintendo's recruitment system
• Players despise having control taken away from them in gaming.
• Personal realization when brainstorming new champion powers for the League of Legends game

Cow Tippa! Board Plans

Do you know how awesome white boards are for planning games? And how paper prototypes bridge the gap between designers, programmers, and artists? Well, let me show you some cool stuff on the game, Cow Tippa!

At this point, [Pending] - the team - only had "agriculture" as the theme we were to use.  One of the first ideas was to 'farm' enemy units like a player does in classic MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) fashion.

From MOBAs, we came across the thought that Creeps (farmed units in MOBAs) would be another player's crops, where if you could destroy enough agriculture, you'd come out on top in selling your crops.

In this picture, you can see that we started playing with the mechanic of tipping cows...

Running with the bovine line, [Pending] figured that a bunch of cows would be better than just one.  With a never-ending line of cattle, the game would never end, but more points would drive the player to new high scores!

One thing hit right off the bat was whether to do a top-down or side-view of the moving animals.  Because of my concern over a quick schedule, the argument of how long many different layers in a side-view would take to code and test was made, and a top-down view was secured.

Paper mother-lovin' prototyping.  This is the first one I constructed to get a feel of how a gauge like those in golf-sims would impact an experience.  Moving the cow pieces while handling the gauge allows another player to tap on the table to represent clicking.  What we felt at the end of the experiment was that the mechanic was just OK.

Coming into Saturday, I just couldn't support the gauge idea.  Having gained the element "volcano" (our game needed something to do with a volcano), I proposed a simple context of tipping cows into a volcano.  Easy!  However, making 2D objects (we decided to use 2D Toolkit with Unity) go in a believable circle was not so easy...

During the process of making a 2D circle path in Unity, I had drawn a possible UI setup of the game, with our angry volcano god in the corner with the volcano in the center.  I gave him a hat and a stern demeanor.  This was done completely by accident, but became a feature in the final game.

After about 2-3 hours of trying to get circular pathing to work (and with a personal apprehension that it would be too intensive for our time constraints), you can see the single bridge design on the far left of the board.

Here we see a few notes on benchmarks we wanted to meet with a diagram of what objects needed to do in code.

Those big, blue rectangles in the middle represent what could be done with the game on a mobile screen.  Some ideas were used about putting a farmer tipping the cows on a platform in the middle of the bridge, but it was soon scrapped for being out of context.

Saturday's work in progress.  It is apparent that cows can hang in space; didn't everyone know that?

To show how the player was doing, one of our programmers suggested getting the volcano god angry.  To fill what he had in mind, I put up a few changes of face for our deity.

Screen time!  If you are already ahead in mechanics and design, menus can become important (though, they do little for a game).  There are a few layouts present in what could be done, with in-game screens, instructions, starting frames, and credits all present.

To do a background for each screen, I needed a set dimension in which to work in as the UI visual designer.  Heads-up: Cow Tippa! is 960 by 600 pixels.

Say hello to Feature Creep, the hat-wearing, suit-owning, tentacle-legged... thing.

And Shuckle.

Did I mention that donkeys made it into the game?  Whenever a donkey is knocked into the volcano, the god, for a split second, looks like this meme.

Just more of the same.  We were changing things on the fly, both visually and in code.

I really am all about the prototyping.  Not sure when this was completed, this design was during the early hours of Saturday, where the power gauge was still on the table for consideration.

One more!  Here is the best rendition of what the final in-game screen looks like.  Before creating any UI items, I ran it by the entire [Pending] team to see what they thought of our game's layout.  Though the "Cow Points" are now called "Score" and a bit smaller onscreen, and that the title is missing, this is what a player sees in the game.

And, in the wise (summarized) words of Jonathan, our project manager, paper prototypes are good as, if for nothing else, examples to show designers, programmers, artists, and waiting-in-line players what the game actually does.

Or doesn't do, in the case where the cows were drifting off the bridge, which could be shown to the programmers without having to recreate the issue!

I hope this was helpful in getting some insight as to what went on in team [Pending] making the action-packed game, Cow Tippa!  The team is working on improving the game a little more, so this article will be updated with new builds in the future.