This Autumn semester has been a very interesting one for game development students in Turku, Finland. To start with there's a new university course called “Game Industry Guest Lecture Series”, where we've had the privilege to hear from different people involved in the game industry in Finland.
The course is part of a joint project between two universities, university of Turku and Turku university of applied sciences, called Game Tech & Arts Lab. The project is funded by Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation for the purpose of organizing game industry specific education and facilities in the ICT building in Turku, where the IT-focused university departments are located.
This Autumn semester has been the first one where the benefits of the project have really started to show concretely. Here's just a couple of the highlights:
Two new university courses: “Game Industry Guest Lecture Series” that I already mentioned and “Introduction to Game Development Tools”, where the students are familiarized with different game development tools (mainly 3D focused) and the process of making games.
The game development enthusiast in the Turku area now have their own lab room in the ICT building where they can develop games using the latest hardware.
The lab gave a natural birth place for a game development club called LOAD where the students gather together every Friday to create, show, and talk about games and the industry.
The lab has now a game museum room with over a dozen of old computers from Vic-20 to Amigas and hundreds of games for many different platforms. Jokingly there's been talk about this becoming a place where old gamers can come for a pilgrimage.
In the future the Game Tech & Arts Lab board is also considering organizing an XNA game development course and inviting industry experts to hold game development workshops.
Next I shall go into more depth in the “Game Industry Guest Lecture Series” course itself.
Game Industry Guest Lecture Series -course
In this course we, the students, were given the assignment of writing a summary of any two lectures that we felt had the most impact on us.
For the first one I chose Joonas Laakso's “roles and careers in the game industry” lecture because to me that provided the clearest picture on what it takes to get into the game industry.
For the second one I chose Teemu Haila's “game projects, life and everything” lecture simply because I felt it was closest to actual game development. It gave me a real sense of how it is to do games in the Score game club, including both the good and the bad.
During the whole semester this course had a very high attendance. In a lecture room designed for 150 people we had on many occasion over 200 people in the audience. Here's a photograph that will give you an idea about how it was there.
Roles and careers in the game industry
Joonas Laakso, producer at Bugbear Entertainment, gave a lecture in the ICT building titled “roles and careers in the game industry” where he explained what people with different titles do in the game industry and how one can go about getting into the industry. The thing that resonated with me most in his lecture was his personal story of how he ended up in the game industry so I shall start with that.
Laakso has been in the game industry since April 2008, but before that he had a career in digital advertising and marketing with titles such as a project manager and a new media coordinator. During that time he already had aspirations of getting involved in the game industry but he was not really sure what he could do. Laakso had played lots of games as a youngster, built some of his own with tools like Game Maker and even learned a bit of programming to get more acquainted with the more traditional game development. As seems to be the case more often than not, he did not manage to actually complete any of the games he started.
Laakso applied for a job in Bugbear but his application was rejected, twice. They said he didn't have enough of concrete game related things to show. He did not despair however, rather on the contrary, he decided to improve his skills by getting even more involved with games. Laakso started his own blog, started writing game reviews for magazines, and also got involved in a real game development team. When Laakso applied for the third time for a position in Bugbear he did get in and was congratulated by being so actively involved with many game related things since the last application. They even went as far as to say: “you could not have spent your time any better”.
According to Laakso, the way you get in the industry is with three things: social network, portfolio, and an interview. From the employer's point of view you're evaluated on five different things:
First you have to have experience in making games, without this you're not likely to be taken seriously. Doing your own small projects is also taken into account.
Second, you need to be passionate about games, no one wants to hire a person who does not care about games or thinks of them only in terms of a job.
Third is about your energy. This is the intuition people make of you. Are you a doer or do you need step-by-step instructions on what to do?
Fourth you're judged by your portfolio, on what you have done earlier.
Lastly the company is taking into consideration what they themselves actually need in terms of what sort of specialities you have. If they find a match, you're hired.
In addition to those points Laakso highlighted the need for people to have actual gaming experience. This is also more or less a requirement since it is very challenging to have a common vocabulary in games if you don't know what people are talking around you.
Having listened to Laakso's lecture I must say that although the things he mentioned were kind of straightforward it did make sense to me in a deeper level. Because game development is highly demanding and creative you should look to hire people who are up to the challenge. Having the technical skills and experience might not be enough. Being passionate about games is likely to help when the going gets tough.
The second part of Laakso's talk was about the actual roles in the game industry. I found that part also very informative and interesting. There was something for everyone as he went through all the different disciplines. I especially liked his clear explanation on the different roles the artists have as I previously did not have a consistent notion about them. They will of course become more concrete to me as I get more game projects under my belt.
Some other things that I found interesting in the lecture was the mention of Bugbear using Scrum as their management process, which later turned out to be a rather common denominator for all game companies featured in the course, and the notion of the vertical slice in game development.
The vertical slice in essence is the result of pre-production, where the game is prototyped to flesh out the core game mechanics and gameplay. The idea is to eg. create one small part of a finished game in a very short period of time. The point of this is to test different ideas before actually committing to something more time-consuming. A similar approach was used by Valve when they developed Half-Life 2. In a 2005 Game Developer Magazine article they mentioned using placeholder assets in level creation. Only after the fun aspect of the level was discovered, the artist and designers would get busy in fleshing out the details. This turned out to be a huge time saver for them in the end. In the project course on game development during Spring 2010 we're looking to employ this very same technique, so that students can get a sense of completion before the course is over and also to have the projects advance more smoothly.
At the end of the lecture I asked Laakso who they have as the product owner in Bugbear and he responded by saying that they try to give the publisher that role, but in some cases it can also be the producer's job. In my opinion games are different from other types of software because of the creative emphasis, so giving the leading position to someone outside your company might not be the best thing for the end product. After all, your company is the one that is living and breathing the making of games, so you should know best, right?
Game projects, life and everything
Teemu Haila gave a talk about a Finnish game development club called Score. Haila is not only a founder of Score, but he's also involved in IGDA Finland as a coordinator, in Demola as a project coordinator, in Neogames as an associate, in Nordic Game Program as a member of the advisory board, and in Microsoft as a student partner. To put it short he has many different things going on in the game development front. Currently Haila is involved in game development as a designer / programmer but he says that he's likely to end up in the production side of the game industry at some point in the future.
I view Haila's lecture as the most important one of the bunch in the lecture series because it was the most directed to what I personally needed to learn about. Haila started off by giving a detailed history lecture on what Score had gone through in the past.
After the game development club was founded on June 2007 the first big game that went into development was called Project Frayed. It was to become a horror game set in the school with very ambitious goals. However, the project was more or less a failure due to many different reasons. Two main things that Haila highlighted were that the team was too big, which lead to the problem of not being able to divide the workload properly, and the game was being written for over a period of one year with a huge design document that slowed the development to a crawl.
Earlier this year in Turku we had a similar project called Monstrum Maris Balticum (sic) where we had a team of over 10 coders and 20 artist working on what was to become a mmorpg set in the medieval Baltic Sea area. Although the project can be seen on some level as a failure, I see it more as a huge lesson in game development / project management. Without that experience the people involved would not have an idea what it is like to work on a large project with multiple people and what the problems are like.
During Christmas of 2007 Score got a Game Lab room in their school which Haila jokingly mentioned as being the “perfect gaming hell”. This is when things started to pick up in Tampere as the game development enthusiasts had now a place to hang out and do what they loved, create, talk about, and play games.
The most important things that Haila was discussing during his lecture were about game development and project management. He explained that the best way to create a game is not to try to put every single feature you want into a game and write some documentation around that. Instead you should play around with many different ideas at once, in parallel and try them out. His point was that you don't know what makes a fun game before you try it. Therefore the process they use in Score looks a bit like version control system tree structure where only the good ideas are left in and the bad ones are weeded out.
In a fascinating experiment the member of Score decided to do a project called 5D where 5 people developed 5 Xbox360 games with XNA in 5 weeks, whilst working 5 days per week and 5 hours per day. The most interesting thing about the experiment to me was that they used less than 10 minutes on the actual game ideas, and after that they started to work on the game. This was out of necessity because they felt they had to be fast in the development process. Afterwards they could then refine the ideas and change their approach as they saw fit. The result of that experiment was 4 finished games and a lot of experience in making games. The one game that was not finished was due to the developers starting to work on a better game engine to build the game on top of, which clearly was too time consuming.
After having talked during the lecture for two hours straight Haila was gracious enough to visit our budding new game development club here in Turku called LOAD (the club is located in the Game Lab room of the Game Tech & Arts Lab -project). Teemu showed two game projects there to us, one called Villa Penguila and another one whose name I can't remember and will refer to as unnamed.
The unnamed one was more like an interactive demo than a game, which featured stylized silhouette projections of objects and wind that made the objects move in various different ways. The first impression to me was that this is a very polished production. Teemu ran the demo a couple of times and showed how the wind intensity can be controlled by the “player”, and how it affects the objects on screen. To me it looked quite impressive. However, when Teemu showed the source code itself I was surprised. It was nothing but a collection of procedural code glued together very inelegantly with huge variable names that didn't make any sense to anyone else than the author. Before we could comment Teemu admitted that it is definitely bad code but that it does what it sets out to do.
That was a moment of realization for me. During the summer I had worked for almost 3 months to produce high quality code for a game engine I was making with my friend Miika. After that time we were nowhere near to start the actual game creation on top of our game engine. Now here was this code that rendered things on screen that looked impressive to me but that was ugly deep within. To the player or anyone other than the programmer it does not matter what the code is like, it's enough that it does what is required of it. Of course there are things to say about re-usability, but if you're developing a demo you might as well develop something specific if you can do it fast.
The other game Teemu showed us in the club was Villa Penguila. It was also quite impressive to me. During the lecture Teemu explained that there's difference between creating a game and creating a game product. The product is many more times complete than just the game and can take an a lot of time to get right. In Villa Penguila you could see the polish pretty much everywhere. The intro looked good, the menu text was stylish, and the game itself had nice sounds and simple but adequate visual effects.
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