On Thursday, February 23rd, Kaleb Aylsworth, an Environment Artist at EA Visceral spoke to our group. He has worked as an Environment Artist for the past four years at several companies. His shipped titles include Dead Space 2, The Darkness 2, and Bioshock 2.

After earning an undergraduate degree in Illustration, Kaleb discovered that he wanted to work in games, so he attended a graduate program at Seneca College in Game Development. During that time he worked tirelessly on his portfolio, all the while taking night shifts as a security guard.

Kaleb began his talk by explaining the responsibilities of Environment Artists. They have a variety of tasks around designing the layout, modelling, texturing, and sometimes lighting the environments of a game. In the current generation pipeline, environment artists even have specializations for a particular part of the pipeline. Much of what environment artists do is tell the story of the game and of the world through their art. And, Kaleb says, just by the nature of the work, Environment Artists interface with the other disciplines more than any other artist on a project and only get to spend 2-3 hours a day actually producing artwork.

Kaleb then broke down the environment pipeline for us:

Phase A: Art Block
- spacial layout is complete
- design needs are met
- rendering budget needs are considered
- and a rough culling pass is done.

Phase B: Modeling
- geometry is finalized
- UVs are completed
- final culling pass is done
- collision volumes are placed
- texturing is done

Phase C: Slice of Life
- this is the environmental storytelling phase
- posters, blood stains, and objects are added to give the space a history

Phase D: Lighting
- lighting and effects are added to create the final look

In the days since his talk, Kaleb has been extremely helpful and friendly toward our group. He has given us advice about our work. He’s also invited and encouraged us to attend networking events both at EA and elsewhere.

On Thursday, February 17^th, the guest speaker for our elective class was Eugene Lee, who is CEO of Socialtext. Eugene has worked in many companies as vice president and he has a lot of experience leading teams of more than a thousand of people. Eugene introduces himself as an accomplished pianist and a passionate chamber musician. When he was very young he learned piano and performed as a conductor in many music groups.  In November 11^th, 2011, he presented at TEDx about leadership lessons from musical ensembles. He talked about how conductors lead an orchestra and how we can apply the conductor’s leadership tips in the real world.

Here are some amazing leadership tips he shared with us:

• The conductor sees the big picture. He sees all the scores from all instruments and creates an interpretation and leads the orchestra. In the real world the leader sets a vision, lays out a roadmap, aligns resources and tasks, and creates a matrix.

• Leaders create vision by imagining and hearing the future in their head and try out different alternatives. They inspire their team members.

• Leaders communicate with their team about the vision by using stories, images, and analysis to help team members understand.

• Instead of telling a vision, sell your vision. It is much more powerful.

• The conductor gives real time feedback while the orchestra is performing together. During performances he encourages, reminding, coaxing and sometimes gently correcting. In the real world it is also important that you tell your team members about how they are doing.

• Power of the cue. While the orchestra is performing together, the conductor gives eye contact to the players that can energize them. The cue is also public so the conductor guides audiences to a player who is about to start their part and try to bring all audience’s attention to him. It helps the team to connect more and creates cohesion.  In the real world signals by the leader not only help the next team to prepare but also gives everybody else’s attention to a group of people that need support.

• Coaching the concept not technique. Teaching technique makes the team depend on the leader.

• Finally help all the team members breath together by watching and listening each other.

On February 13, we had Anthony Daniels as our guest speaker for our elective class. Anthony Daniels is well known for his role as the droid C-3PO in the Star Wars movies and he is the only actor who worked on all six movies. He is a visiting scholar at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. You can learn more about Anthony Daniels from his website http://anthonydaniels.com/.

One thing very special about his talk is that he made the audience speak up and participate. It was a great start filled with humor when he made us participate in drawing the Star Wars characters on the board. The entire session was more of an interactive discussion than a talk.

His energetic and engaging talk filled with a lot of information and insights about films was a great experience for the audience. He discussed about the various elements in a film such as drama, script, character, plot, FX, environment, conflict etc. He explained the significance of each of them by relating with the elements in the Star Wars movie. He shared with us about Hero’s Journey narrative pattern in the Star Wars story from Luke Skywalker character. He explained how releasing the Star Wars prequel trilogy after the ending trilogy gave the audience the power of knowledge and made them feel the control over the destiny of the characters.

Anthony Daniels told us the story about how George Lucas’ Star Wars script was turned down by every major Hollywood studio that he approached. It was because of Lucas’ belief in his work that he persistently tried when finally 20th Century Fox decided to go ahead with his script. Star wars ended up being the highest grossing movie ever released at that time. Anthony Daniels concluded the talk with a strong note saying that we all must believe in ourselves and in our work.

The guest speaker for our elective class on Thursday, the 2nd of February, was Mr. Bryan Neider. Having been in the industry for around 25 years, Mr. Neider currently serves as the current Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts. Mr. Neider shared his insights and valuable experience that he has gained while in the game industry and covered topics such as the opportunities and current issues, the unprecedented changes that are occurring within and what the future looks like, all pertaining to the gaming industry. Being open to questions, Mr. Neider shed broader light and helped answer many good questions that the audience had.

Here are some of the topics and corresponding notes that Mr. Neider covered are,

• Global Reach – Games have reached various parts of the world and the numbers for people who play games has been steadily increasing. People of all demographics, even if they don’t consider themselves as gamers, play games now, unlike in the past 2 decades. New business models and billing options lead to more people buying games or subscription services, etc. offered by game publishers. New areas of creativity opening up as games have spread over to tablets, smartphones, browser-based social games, etc.

• Ubiquity - Games can be played everywhere. They are available whenever wanted and wherever needed. It is important for the industry as this can be categorized as a mode of entertainment like other mainstream media and hence opens up new business opportunities.

• Relationships - People want to be connected with family and friends. This holds true even while playing games and can easily be attributed to the success of social games. It is estimated that over 50 million people globally, play social games daily. Due to this reason, it’s incumbent that games are created by accommodating this value as well, if they are to succeed.

• Academia – There are many academic programs that specially cater to the requirements of the industry by improving the skills of students that are tailored to match the industry’s expectations. This has led to a considerable improvement in art, which can be seen in the current games. The academic programs also legitimize the gaming industry and games as media. These academic programs have also solved tough tech challenges, led to more innovation, better game design and creativity.

• Trading Dollars – Other forms of entertainment such as music have added features like singles download. TV Shows and Movies have increased their revenue by making them available for smartphones. Gaming accommodates the best of both worlds, by trying to increase revenue by releasing a game for PC/Consoles and for mobile phones.

• Artificial Intelligence – The AI in games will continue to improve and will get better. There have already been big advancements in this area and AI has now grown “smart” compared to games a decade ago where the interaction with the environment would be minimal, the enemies would follow only a certain path, etc. These advancements have also led to augmented reality / location based gaming.

These are some of the topics covered by Mr. Neider in addition to some of his fun experiences he shared with us, we are truly honored to have had him as our guest speaker and for having learnt about all these issues faced by the industry, where the industry’s headed and what we as students would be required to keep in mind and focus on when we begin working in the industry.