In the theme park industry, soft opening is generally used to detect technical issues that might cause problems from having a large volume of guests when they ride the attractions. Therefore soft openings prevent attractions from operating inefficiently in grand opening.
However, at ETC-SV, soft opening is the time to show off our final work to people at EA. It usually happens two weeks before final presentations. On Nov. 28th, we set up our work in the atrium to demonstrate our projects. We shared ideas, got some feedback from the audience and mingled with them casually for three hours.
Bjorn, co-producer of Xenon team, explained that their project was about exploring the possibilities technology will provide us in 10 to 20 years and demoed the team’s short film.
Team Barreleye had some technical issues in the beginning. There was a lot of latency because there was noise in the wireless network between the TV and mobile phones. While they were fixing the problem, the team played the game trailer on TV. After about one hour, the awesome programmers finally fixed the problem, and it worked!
West Turn presented a brilliant game to the audience. “Shake” the iPod to win the game!!
This fall semester, the soft opening was a little more quiet than previous years, but we learned how to setup countermeasures and demonstrate our work. In addition, sharing our work and having fun with people is always great!
And.. Team photos! :)
Team Xenon
Team West Turn
Team Barreleye
On November 29th, veteran game designer Don Daglow gave a talk to ETC-SV students about Future of console games.
Don Daglow
He began his game career in early 70’s. As a college student, he could access to PDP-10 mainframe computer, and was able to create the very first interactive computer baseball game. At that time, computers were only for college students and researchers, because they were huge and expensive. Not many people expected that, we would have a personal computer at home and play games on it.
After he created the first baseball game, it has evolved a lot for the past three decades. Even though the core game design is almost same, the graphic have changed dramatically from 8-bit pixel to photorealistic 3D art. Additionally, one of the revolutionary changes was using multiple camera angles. Don got famous for being the creator of the first videogame to use multiple camera angles to display the action rather than a static playfield.
About the future of game console, he said it might evolve to be a big TV connected to the world through cable or set top box. We might use controllers or mobile devices to control it. However, we never know. He mentioned that technology always has been evolving twice as fast than he had imagined. We learned that we need to think in the future even though we act in present.
We had invaluable time with Don. Lastly, he said what is important is, what players feel not, what we make them do, hear, and see.I think that is the reason why we stay late at our project room and try to make a better game.
On December 6th, Sammi Kim gave us a talk about UI/UX design. She is the UX director from EA’s Sims team since 2006, and she has a lot of experience as a UI designer in a different field. She studied Fine Arts from UC Berkeley, and she started to work in Networking equipment industry, Cisco Systems at 2001. After 2 years later, she decided to study more about design and technology at Parsons and got a master degree. During the school she worked at Tommy Hilfiger as a lead web designer, and she worked at Yahoo for a year after she graduated. Also she was a brand development director at Footwear Company, dekorri, just before she came to EA. Due to a strong passion for the entertainment industry and her enthusiasm about game, she finally moved to the game industry.
Sammi gave us a clear talk about the pipeline and work flows of UI design and how to work with other people as a UI designer. She also mentioned that if you want to be a UI designer, you should be able to communicate well with game designer, producer, and programmer. UI designer should take all their opinion and balance it, and also try to add their own ideas into the game.
After the talk Sammi met with all ETC students who is interested in UI/UX design, and reminded us of several things we need to work on if we would like to be a good UI designer. From a personal perspective, UI designer is very rare around me, and I gained invaluable guidance from her.
Susan Timco
On November 9th Susan Timko visited us to give us a talk about interview skills. She recently joined the ETC faculty members as the career services director. She not only brought us basic information about job interviews but also shared a wealth of career services experience and her expertise.
She started her presentation at the very beginning of the interview process, which is preparation. First of all, she said that you should research yourself because this question is the most basic question that interviewers will ask. After studying about yourself, you should study the companies that you want to apply to as much as you can, because you can demonstrate your passion for the job by learning about the company. Asking good questions during the interview is crucial and you can bring good questions based on your research on the company.
She explained several types of interviews that you should aware of so that you can prepare for each type properly. She especially emphasized on phone interviews because when you have a phone interview; you can’t read the interviewer’s body language, such as facial expressions or gestures which is very important when you communicate with people. Therefore, she suggested that you should pay more attention to what they say and ask them to clarify if you misheard during the interview.
Finally, she mentioned that you have to end the interview with a good solid close. Not only you should tell them you enjoyed talking but also be certain that your skills are a good match for their needs. Following up with thank you note within 24 hours is important as well.
The seminar was certainly a great help for many of us who want to apply for a job or co-op and people who applied for her individual meetings must have had even richer advice from her.
