Final Presentation Guests

Final Presentations were on May 8th. Over 35 guests joined us to hear about the three projects this semester.

Heidegger

Bravura

iAchieve

The class is basically formed of three parts: independent study, industry professions’ keynotes and company visits.

For the independent study, which was the first try on this semester, worked out really well on stimulating students to consider job seeking early and under guidelines. So the path we took to get here was: we were asked to choose a topic related to career at the beginning of this semester, and students not only learning by themselves, choose whatever material they need, but blog posting their milestones twice a week. In addition, a topic introduction, a midterm and a final presentation are also providing a platform for others to know about your topic, as well as learning from you. Independent study, at early stages, played the role of motivating us to keep improving ourselves, while later on the knowledge we kept accumulated pave our way to handle interviews and talk professionally. And the presentations really equipped us hands on experience of best-selling ourselves, express our opinion clearly, and then to impress those listeners.

And the keynotes that industry professions gave exposed us to work of other disciplines, and some really practical and useful skills. Some talks were also great elaborating about entrepreneurship and refreshing our mind of making games was not just for fun, but also a business. Moreover, they were very good opportunities for networking, while networking were seen as the most important approach of finding a job in this industry. Some very interesting topics included: Producer’s workshop by Shriley Saldamarco, Stage Manner by Anthony Daniels, WebGL by Tony Parisi, Interaction Design by Josh Seaver, Data Analysis in Game by Ben Medler, Networking Skill by Susan Timko, Common Problems of new artists by Hoyt Ng, to name a few.

Company visits were of the most exciting part of this class. This semester, we went to Kabam and Double Fine, these trips were proven to be the most efficient way to know a company and its culture. If employees are happy with what they are doing, company’s scope and asking them questions. Additionally, to already be “on-site” there, networking and job application would be way much easier. Because it would be just reasonable to say, I am really impressed by your company, because we visited.

To sum up, the course designer and teacher-Jiyoung Lee works really hard to bridge the gap between our ETC program and the industry. And we did benefit a lot from this class. Good luck to everyone who takes this class! Have fun!

During his presentation, he went through the design process, explained the different sections of the SimCity design, and showed how he broke each section down into one or several (if needed) one-page design documents. He explained his process for creating the isometric images and text and laying them out on the page to best communicate the design of a specific part of SimCity. He shared tales of the various methods he used to make the designs visible and accessible to the others on the SimCity team. He printed the documents out on small or large paper and stuck them up around the office, and updated them as needed. He even made magnets out of images of the buildings, so that the team could move them around on a whiteboard.

In the end, Stone found that it was difficult to maintain the pace of producing the meticulously-created documents, that they were difficult to organize, and that the one-page design doc format is not suited for use by all members of the team. However, this goal of pursuing one-page design documents was ultimately worth it, because it really helped him to thoroughly understand the design.

Stone said that a designer needs the ability to communicate well, especially through writing, and needs to be able to document what you talk to your team about. He recommended that a designer go from the top down. The designer should first make a big picture document, then drill down.

Stone’s talk was great for gaining insight into design, learning best practices for effective communication, and learning about the process of designing SimCity.

On Friday, April 19th, 2013, ETC students in Silicon Valley campus went on a sailing adventure in the San Francisco Bay! Filled with excitement and curiosity, we headed to San Francisco downtown and gathered at Pier 40 to wait for the departure. We were lucky enough to have Captain Kirk to take us to a wonderful sailing tour around the San Francisco Bay, which is considered one of the best sailing venues in North America.

With the beautiful sunshine along with the breeze, we enjoyed a sailing cruise with stunning views of famous San Francisco landmarks, AT&T Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, The Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the splendid scenery of the San Francisco bay . We also saw the famous and adorable sea lions laying on the dock at Pier 39, where it was a lot of fun to see them making loud noises and sunbathing around. We had a small party on the yacht and enjoyed the scenery. During the cruise, we sometimes saw the sea lions floating and lifting their heads above the surface around the yacht.  While passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, we yelled as loud as possible to make ourselves echo. “Yah!” everyone shouted with excitement.

Captain Kirk also taught us how to sail by giving us hands-on lesson. He let us hold the helm to feel the boat and gave us sailing instructions. We had an excellent chance to become the helmsman and steer the boat! We had a wonderful and relaxing time for our 4-hour cruise in San Francisco Bay. We are glad to have Captain Kirk to bring us on a sailing adventure!

Nik spoke to us at length about his career in VFX and teaching. He told us about the importance of being a generalist as a VFX artist working in film and television, and contrasted that with how people typically specialize heavily when working in games.

Nik began in the industry as a modeler but as a generalist he got into all sorts of areas, from crowd simulations to rotoscoping. Nik gave us a taste of what it was like working in the industry. For example, he told us how challenging it was to work at a studio like ZOIC, but how much that impressed future employers and helped him stay employed (in an industry where artists move mostly from one contract position to the next).

He had a lot of advice for those of us who were graduating concerning how to find jobs. He told us to get creative in our job search, made good suggestions about how to manage our time, and pointed out a lot of good job searching tools that we might not all have been familiar with. His perspective on the industry was invaluable, and it was nice to have a speaker that was so responsive to questions and honest about his own journey. Unfortunately Nik was unable to show us any specifics of his work with the new film Elysium as all that work is under NDA until after August 9^th. But, we did see the trailer and it looks really fantastic.

It was a pleasure to have Nik come and share his knowledge and experience with us.

At first, Hoyt let us wrote down what were the current problems we thought at game and animation industry. We wrote mostly about efficiency and time management. But he said, first, communication, second, commutation, third, still commutation. Then, he let us wrote down “what could I contribute to the company”. Our answers varied from getting work done to providing diversity, but no one wrote creativity. Hoyt said creativity was really important. And the problem often lies in how creativity and communication works together. Creativity is not just what we usually thought; problem solving is also a kind of creativity for engineers.

Then, Hoyt asked us to draw an apple within five minutes. We all enjoyed the process and everyone’s apple looked different. After that, we were required to draw a banana within one minute. And last, drew a pineapple within 10 seconds. That was not fun to draw in such a short amount of time and our pineapples were exactly same looking. But we all learnt time pressure sacrifices creativity through this practice. He used a smart way to teach us things without explaining.

Misunderstanding is another common communicating problem he said. But people naturally assume that others think exactly the same way as they do, so they explain their thoughts simply and unclearly. For instance, Hoyt tapped “Happy Birthday” song twice but no one knew which song he was tapping, because he just tapped the tempo without the pitch. He didn’t explain the song well. Hoyt thought the song was easy and famous, so that we could recognize it as soon as he tapped. But that was not true.

Another interesting thing he let us do was to draw as many rounded objects as we could in one minute. Before we started drawing, he gave us three rounded objects as examples. But only a few of us drew the three objects he told us. Someone said it was kind of cheating, and someone said it was not creative. But Hoyt said we misunderstood the intent. Because the main point of this task was to draw as many objects as we could but nothing to do with creativity. Therefore, don’t understand the intent is also a common communicating problem. He also said creativity does not mean totally original. And then, he drew three charts to illustrate different kinds of working process as shown below. Artists tend to be the second chart and programmers more like the third chart.

Last, Hoyt briefly talked about presentation skills. Presentation is important, because it helps us getting supports and trusts for our ideas. According to the research, visual part affects 55% of the presentation, vocal affects 38% and verbal only affects 7%. Therefore, presentation is not about what we say, but what we see. Then, he pointed out ten presentation skills.

1)    Pausing (3 seconds)

2)    Breathe

3)    Non-words (en, mm…)

4)    Movement (intention moves)

5)    Eye-contact (build connection, receive feedbacks from audiences)

6)    Gestures (big, above shoulder)

7)    Posture

8)    Intonation (vocal variety)

9)    Facial expression

10)  Emotional honesty (really believe what you say)

JP has spent 15 years in the games industry working at such esteemed studios like Irrational Games, 2K Marin, and now Double Fine. While his main role is as a designer, he is also a self-taught programmer and has experience coming from an art background graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

In his conversation with all the ETC SV students, he talked about how he got into the games industry after graduation starting off at Human Head Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. Starting off there he worked his way to Boston where he was a designer on Bioshock at Irrational Games. He then had the opportunity to come to the Bay area and help start up 2K Marin and create Bioshock 2. His most recent project was working with Ron Gilbert and Double Fine on The Cave and participating in Double Fine’s semi-annual game jam, Amnesia Fortnight where he headed up the project Spacebase DF-9.

While talking about his work experience, JP also elaborated on his current focus in games and design and how that’s shifted throughout his career. Double Fine as a studio has shifted towards smaller productions with an emphasis on being new and unique. JP shared his thoughts on the future of triple-A games development, the emergence of a viable independent route for game developers, and creating games and tools to encourage more diversity in game development.

Thanks to JP and Double Fine for the awesome opportunity to visit their studios and learn a lot about games and development.

On Monday, March 26th, we have Susan Timko, the Director of our Career Services, came from Pittsburgh, to give us a talk about networking.

Susan Timko recently joined the ETC after working at both Heinz College and the Career and Profession Development Center, CMU for the for the past eight years. At the ETC, Susan assists the students with all facets of their career needs including career and professional development. Another facet of her role is to develop and maintain positive relationships with employers who are seeking the skills and knowledge that the ETC students provide. In addition to working with the Pittsburgh based students, she also provides career services to the Global ETC students.

In her talk, Susan told us networking is to build some prefesstional relationships. We not only need to build those relationships, but also need to maintain them.

She told us that people like to give advice, recognition, and be helpful.

She also showed us the five steps of effective networking:
1. Prepare and Keep records.
2. Define your network.
3. Decide what you want from each other.
4. Make contact.
5. Follow-up.

Also, the body language is important.

Here are some tips:
1. Shake hands firmly and 2-3 times.
2. Make your name badge on the right lapel area, so that people can see it when hand-shaking.
3. Mention a mutual friend.
4. Businesscard exchanged at the end of conversation.

Her talk is so helpful and we wish she can visit us again soon!

Videos of the presentations are below:

Heidegger

iAchieve

Bravura

Thesis

Thursday of last week, Ben Medler, from the Office of the Chief Creative Officer at Electronic Arts, came to talk to us about game analytics. If there is an expert in the field, it’s Ben. Not only was it the subject of his thesis, it really is a true passion for him. He was supposed to talk for forty minutes, he talked for over an hour and a half, and he could have gone on for much longer. Ben’s understanding of analytics and metrics differs from most people in that he thinks that, even though most people tend to think of data as dry and boring, they are wrong. Data is fun, we just don’t know how to keep ourselves from hiding the fun, thus the name of his thesis and his talk at GDC: Play With Data: The Many Faces of Online Game Data.

Ben originally wanted to give us a preview of his GDC talk, but after having read all of our questions, he preferred to present us with a few preliminaries first. His GDC talk is aimed at people who are already familiar with analytics. Based on our questions, he thought it would be a good idea to give us a bit of context about what he meant by “game data.”

Context

He started by defining analytics as the activity of “finding trends and outliers in data sets.” Our questions showed that by “analytics” we were thinking of telemetry, the way some games send information back to servers about some of the players’ actions. But analytics are much, much broader than that. The data used in analytics can come from more or less anywhere. Ben’s objective in the matter is to try and expose to fun in analytics.  Already, data is sometimes made “sexy”; it’s presented is visually beautiful ways. But Ben thinks we can go much further: he thinks data can be playful, and that creativity and imagination should involved in it.

Ben gave many examples of player-made systems where data is gathered to help current players play better, like “World of Starcraft”, Terraria map viewers or a page that tracks the length of the girl in Noby Noby Boy. He covered the issues involved in that practice, such as technical issues, cultural issues and legal issues. He also showed some analytics reports systems made by companies, for example, Battlefield’s battle logs. For the Noby Noby Boy example, Ben showed how the shape of the curve was indicative of how the game designer changed the rules of the game among the course of the game’s life.

In response to our question, “does any company present data well?”, he, again gave many detailed examples, including CCP’s API for EVE Online, how Valve shares data for DOTA 2, and examples from Bungie, Ubi Soft and Electronic Arts.

He then moved on to our question: what motivates players to be interested in data. He talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But he prefers Steven Reiss’s theory of the 16 basic motivations, as more accurate and helpful in his work.

Ben then went on to show examples of very unconventional gameplay data, for example, Evan Roth’s ink finger swipes of all 300 levels of Angry Birds, or photos of he and his friends playing Johann Sebastian Joust, where the trail of lights gives indications of how the actual gameplay went.

Ben then got more technical. He presented us with eight categories of play analytics, such as content databases, like user-made wikis, user-generated content, like in Little Big Planet‘s user-created levels, maps, leaderboards, tournament results, and actual raw statistics.

OCCO

He talked about what he was working on right now: he’s working on a team that’s trying to make a system where games could be played fully be streaming and by using a mobile device as the controller. For example, all of the processing could be done by a remote computer, the local display device would constantly stream down the video output, and the input could come from a touchscreen cell phone or tablet. He’s trying to adapt existing games to that system: the challenges are not the same for all games. Some games, like Peggle, adapt fairly easily to that system. Others, like Dead Space 2 or Mirror’s Edge are much harder, because they require a controller with many buttons. Some games prove to be naturally well-suited for that system, like Tiger Wood’s PGA Tour.

Design

He answered our questions about the relationship between analytics and game design: analytics, he said, are not useful to make games, but they are an extremely important tool for tweaking them. The fact of the matter is, he says, people lie (especially on forums). Analytics allow us to link what they say to what they do. It allows designers to target problems like the way people usually stick to a single mindset and playstyle and diminish the likelihood of a game having a dominant strategy. It helps designers compensate for the was social perception can overpower data.

Data as testimony

Ben finished with a story about his time working as an intern on Star Wars: The Old Republic. The game keeps a lot of data about what players do, but doesn’t present it to them. And this is key to Ben’s major project: games create a narrative and the data we can collect from them is a meaningful narrative about who we are through what we did. MMOs, with the way they constantly keep us in touch with other real-life people, don’t only create narratives and testimonies about ourselves, but about our relationships with others.

As we were very much overtime, by that point, there were only very few questions. Carl asked what the data in Ben’s Star Wars account was to him, if it was a scrapbooks of his journey. Star asked if there were often were contradictions between what people remember doing it games and what analytics show us. Ben said there was all the time. And Star also asked Ben if he was afraid of Google, like he (Star) was. Ben said he actually was afraid of Google as well, but games do not have the same ethical concerns as Google’s data collection because games are outside of real lif.